Brown Bread

A customer dies in the gentlemen's lavatory at Pie in the Sky during service. Crabbe's first response is concern for the restaurant's reputation and, before anything else, a question about whether the dead man had paid his bill, which is the episode's own joke about the priorities of a restaurateur. By the time the emergency services arrive, the body has gone. Someone has moved a corpse out of a busy restaurant, and who did it and why opens the case.

Crabbe traces the dead man's car and finds a large sum of paper money in the boot. The money is forged, which brings in the Crime Squad in the shape of DI Stuart Ripley and DS Lorna Purvis. They have an existing interest in the dead man and his car and do not want Crabbe in the way; they tell him the family is a known forgery outfit and that he is out of his depth.

The dead man's son then turns up at the restaurant, followed by the two detectives. Crabbe and Cambridge work the family from the restaurant end while the Crime Squad works it from the investigation end, and the two converge on the same conclusion from different directions. The family's business is counterfeit currency and the death was not what it first appeared.

The deception is a family arrangement around forged money, and the corpse was removed to break the link between the death and the counterfeiting operation. The sources describe the disappearance and the location of the car but do not state who moved the body or how, and this article stops where they stop. The Crime Squad's assumption that Crabbe was out of his depth is disproved: the restaurant's account of who came and went during the evening turns out to be the evidence the squad missed, and the episode closes on the professionals having been taught a lesson in detection by a chef with a reservation book. The restaurant reopens on schedule.

The title announces itself in its first scene: brown bread is rhyming slang for dead, and it is also what a restaurant serves. This is the season's tidiest two-strand episode, because the police case and the restaurant problem are the same event seen from two sides and meet in the middle of the episode when the detectives arrive at the restaurant doors.

It is the clearest demonstration of the series' central joke, that a man running a restaurant is a better detective than the men running the investigation, and it is the episode most often held up as the model of what the show could do with its own premise. Malcolm Sinclair's Fisher is absent, the restaurant is the crime scene, and the format carries it.