Nine Tenths of the Law

June Phillips, a schoolgirl, is collected from school by her father and does not go home. Her mother, Mary, who is divorced from Dennis Phillips, asks Eddie to get her daughter back. A court has placed the child with her mother, so this is a custody order and a missing person at once, and the two do not stay the same question for long.

Eddie puts a description of the girl out on his broadcast over the objection of Radio West's legal adviser, Alan Bridgeman. The landlady of the flat where Dennis and June are staying hears it and telephones the station, and Eddie arrives to find father and daughter already gone in a blue Citroën 2CV. An old friend of Dennis's mentions a girlfriend, Joanna Lomas, who works in a library. Before Eddie can reach her he is chased through a wood and confronted by Tom, Mary's father, an overbearing security guard who tells him the two of them will work together to find the girl. Eddie gets away. Posing as a representative of a literary organisation, he asks Joanna whether she knows where Dennis is; she denies knowing him and denies lending him her car, telling him the 2CV has been stolen. Erica checks the police records and finds the car was reported missing only after Eddie's visit to the library, which is the episode's neatest piece of quiet evidence.

Eddie follows Joanna and finds Dennis and June hiding in an abandoned hut, where June hits him over the head with a flowerpot and the two of them take his car. Dennis has struck a deal with the captain of a freight ship to take them aboard when he sails. A listener, drawn by the offer of three long-playing records as a reward, telephones to say where the car has been left, by the docks. Eddie finds Dennis and June aboard the ship, and what he finds there changes what the case is: Mary Phillips is an alcoholic, and June would rather stay with her father.

The ship cannot sail before Tom arrives. He takes the girl off the vessel and back to her mother, with whom the courts have placed her. Don Satchley congratulates Eddie on another case solved and offers him a drink. Eddie declines it.

That refusal is the point of the hour and the series' clearest statement of its own limits. Eddie takes the mother's money, establishes that the father was the better parent, and then watches the courts' decision enforced by a man who frightens him. The title is the proverb about possession, and the subject is the difference between legal custody and care. It is also the only Series 1 story in which the client is in the wrong. Harry H. Corbett plays Tom in one of his last television appearances, a departure from the comedy he was known for, and BFI Screenonline calls it a powerful performance in an uncharacteristically dark and threatening role. Geraldine James plays the mother so that the script makes her situation clear before it makes her sympathetic. The middle relies on coincidence, the flowerpot and the 2CV reported stolen and the listener who happens to have seen the car all arriving conveniently, and Joanna's part is smaller than the setup implies. It drew 19.0 million viewers as the audience settled after ITV returned.