Stamp Duty

A milkman, Andy Stapleton, is on his rounds when he sees the driver of a battered Skoda being manhandled by a man with a scar on his lip and two heavies. The driver, Joss Hargreaves, dies. The heavies go after Andy, who spends the next stretch of the episode trying to get a message through to Eddie by telephone and failing.

Eddie has problems of his own. He has been using his broadcasts to accuse a local businessman, Strickland, of a series of crimes, and the station's solicitor objects to the unsubtlety of it. Andy was in the same hospital as Eddie at Fordingdale and has a history of telephoning about murders that turn out not to exist, so Eddie treats the message as another false alarm until Hargreaves is found dead in his car at the foot of a cliff. Eddie goes to Andy's house, is knocked out by the two heavies, and wakes in a large storage freezer. Realising they have taken the wrong man, they force whisky into him by way of a warning and throw him out onto a motorway.

Recovered from the hangover, Eddie visits Hargreaves's widow. She is a plain, modest woman who says her husband travelled for work as a stamp collector and always came home on Fridays to help with the shopping. Two stamps in the house and Hargreaves's address book lead him to a firm whose secretary insists she has never heard of the man. Tracing Hargreaves to a luxurious house by the sea, Eddie talks to the woman there and finds she is the same secretary who brushed him off at the office. She tells him Joss worked for Strickland as a go-between, paying criminals in stamps, a currency that left no trail. When Joss wanted out, Strickland threatened him and, in the confrontation Andy witnessed, killed him by accident. In Don's office Andy denies any knowledge of what happened, and Eddie refuses to accept it and tells him he is going to help him. Andy sets up a meeting with Strickland on the coast, ostensibly to negotiate a price for his silence. Strickland admits what he did, and Eddie steps out and points out to sea: a Radio West colleague has been recording the exchange with a long-range microphone.

The construction here is clean rather than clever. The microphone is set up plainly in the first five minutes and paid off at the end, and the audience is not cheated. The freezer sequence and Eddie being poured into a car and pushed out onto a motorway is the most memorable thing in the episode and the most physical violence the series had yet done to its lead. David Ashton plays Andy as a man whose credibility is the problem rather than his nerve, and the scene in Don's office, with a man who has just helped secure the evidence claiming to have seen nothing after all, is played as comedy on both sides.

The episode's structural contribution is the return of a Fordingdale patient as a witness. Eddie's medical history has been used twice before as background; here it produces a character who knows something and cannot make anyone believe him, which is the position Eddie occupies at the start of the series. Against that, the episode is more plot than character, and the audience is asked to care about a dead stamp dealer it barely meets. The pun in the title is the whole apparatus: stamps as the collector's cover and stamps as the payment that leaves no record. It drew 23.2 million viewers, joint highest of the run.