The Link-Up

A homeless drunk is found drowned in the river. His widow, Betty Craig, is living in a hostel for battered women run by Molly Tasker, and she asks Eddie to establish how her husband came to be wearing an expensive jacket and a gold medallion with his initials on it when he had no money and no standing. Molly takes her campaign for the hostel to Radio West, complaining that the station ignores domestic violence, and puts her case on the air.

The search begins with the pawnbroker, who says an actor bought the jacket for an audition for a commercial. Eddie goes to the audition waiting room, works along the row of actors checking each jacket in turn, finds the right one and takes the tailor's name from the label inside. As he leaves, the director of the commercial picks him for the part on the grounds that he looks like a young Robert Donat. The tailor says the jacket was made for Jimmy Colefax, who is sailing around the world in a yacht he built himself and keeping in touch by regular radio link-ups with his wife Val, broadcast on Radio West. Eddie learns that Betty's husband did odd jobs for Val around the house until he was dismissed. Jimmy's public relations agent complains to Satchley and Don reprimands Eddie for harassing a station contributor, which is the first time the commercial interest of Radio West and Eddie's work for a client come into direct conflict. Eddie visits the hypnotist being paid to calm Val's nerves and begins to doubt his credentials, follows the group to a disused watermill, and is contacted by C.J. Daniels, an elderly radio amateur who has calculated from the transmissions that Jimmy's broadcasts are originating locally rather than from the Atlantic.

The solution is the best piece of construction in the series. Eddie loops the tape of Jimmy's broadcasts and, in the gaps between sentences, can hear a train and a saw. That takes him to the empty mill and to the garage where the yacht is stored. When he brings Don to see it, the boat has gone. Val then admits that Betty's husband never worked for her: he stole Jimmy's clothes from the sawmill, which is how the jacket and the medallion ended up on a drowned man. Using a colleague to run a local triangulation during the next broadcast, Eddie traces Jimmy to his boat. Jimmy admits that he set out, turned back, and has been faking the rest from the mill because of nerves and stress. His agent and his wife insist he will now complete the journey properly. When he puts to sea the yacht is found empty, and Val and Eddie can only conclude he fell or jumped.

The episode is a story about faking a life in public, and the fraud is not for money. It is the first of the series' endings in which the case resolves without an arrest, and the first with no crime to prosecute. The reaction it provoked is itself part of the record. The portrayal of the refuge drew national newspaper correspondence and a producer's apology in the Radio Times, with readers objecting to the suggestion that a women's hostel would use blackmail and sexual favours to raise funds, and Robert Banks Stewart replying that the characters were fictional and the intention had not been to cast reflections on such hostels generally. Fay Weldon's Times column referred back to the controversy and, in the same piece, argued that the series' habit of attacking its own format was the measure of its quality. Sylvia Coleridge's comic turn as the radio amateur gives the solution to a member of the public rather than to Eddie, which is the series' own point made structurally. It drew 22.2 million viewers.