An Uncertain Circle

Marion Cutler, a social worker, asks Eddie to look into the disappearance of one of her clients. Nick Forrest has not long been out of prison and has vanished in breach of his parole. He had been working at the coast, living in a hut by the beach and taking aerial photographs for a business he was trying to start. Eddie finds the hut and its owner, Steve, who says he has never heard of the man.

That night Eddie returns for a fragment of photograph he noticed pinned up, is knocked unconscious and the hut is set alight. He jumps through a window with his clothes burning and gets into the sea, suffering minor burns, and spends the rest of the episode in borrowed clothing. He traces the house in the aerial photograph to its owner, Benny Sheldon, who says the missing man telephoned trying to sell him the picture. Suspicious of the account, Eddie looks at the other exposures on the roll. They look like nothing at all, just photographs of empty coastline, until an intruder gets into Radio West and steals them. Duplicates having been made from the negatives, he arranges them side by side in Erica's flat and builds a panorama of a stretch of the English coast.

The detection is the best thing in the episode. Erica identifies a man Eddie saw arriving at Sheldon's house, accompanied by Steve and the woman working with him, as a known European heroin smuggler. Using the photographs to mark an area on a map, the circle of the title, Eddie hires a light aircraft and flies over the coast looking for something hidden inside it, and spots Sheldon's men working below. He stows away on Sheldon's boat when the girl, Jojo, takes it out, and finds her looking after the missing man, her lover, who is suffering from the bends after diving for Sheldon. Sheldon arrives, there is a chase, and Steve and Jojo turn out to be plain-clothes detectives. The gang has been working for the South African criminal Jan Poestma. The episode ends on air, with Eddie beginning his weekly broadcast and telling the story of the week with the names changed.

The setting took the series out of Bristol into the coastal and maritime locations the production had available, and the climax was shot on a disused sea fort in the Bristol Channel. It is the purest adventure the show made: an aircraft, a fort and a dive, and the least interested in character. The fan guide's assessment that this is less character-driven than usual is fair, and it comes with a cost, because the four episodes around it had established Eddie's domestic life and this one has almost none. What it does add is physical cost. In four episodes he has been rammed off the road, knocked out and set on fire, and the series' habit of putting him in situations he is not equipped for is set. The reveal that the two apparent heavies are police officers is delivered in the last minutes, which makes the middle misleading rather than puzzling. It drew 23.2 million viewers, the joint highest of the whole run.