Hard Cheese

A prowler is working Middleton at night, taking women's underwear from washing lines and making obscene phone calls. The calls go to women connected with restaurants, and one of them is made to Margaret Crabbe at Pie in the Sky. The complaint reaches Assistant Chief Constable Fisher because one of the earlier victims is the wife of a senior officer, and Fisher passes the case to Crabbe as a nuisance he wants closed quietly.

Crabbe's attention settles on Hugh Downing, the young cheesemonger who supplies the restaurant. Downing is handsome, attentive to the women he deals with and apparently above suspicion because he is a man Crabbe likes. He lives as a celibate, and the cheese trade supplies the episode's title and its early red herring. Crabbe is reluctant to believe it of a man who keeps such a good cellar of Stilton, and the suspicion embarrasses both of them.

The investigation into Downing turns up a different secret rather than the crime. His private life is not what Crabbe assumed, and the presumption that made him attractive as a suspect collapses. Downing is innocent of the prowling, and the fact that he was celibate had nothing to do with the case.

The prowler is caught by Margaret rather than by the police. He returns to the restaurant's orbit and she deals with him herself, and the arrest follows her intervention rather than any surveillance. Crabbe's error is one of prejudice in the literal sense: he built a theory from a man's manner rather than from evidence, and the person who actually stopped the man was his wife, working on her own account. The restaurant ends the episode intact.

The episode opened the second run and re-established the format after a gap of eight months, and it is the opener in which the least changes. The BBC billing for the transmission reads that Crabbe is concerned it might be the cheese merchant who supplies his restaurant, which is the whole engine of the story in one line.

It is also the episode that adds Nicola to the standing cast as the restaurant's new waitress, alongside Gary Palmer's arrival later in the run, and it is the cleanest example of the show's settled shape: one police case, one restaurant problem, Fisher as the source of both. Its comedy is at its lightest, its threat level the lowest in the season, and its argument is a modest one — that a detective's instinct about a man's character can be right while his reasoning from it is entirely wrong.