Find the Lady

At a club on the coast, a new wave band led by the singer Toola is halfway through a number when Gary Molecombe gets up and interrupts the performance. Gary was sacked from the band and believes their manager, Kenrick, murdered his girlfriend Chrissie. Kenrick has two of his men throw him off the pier. The police find him the next morning and take him into custody. Toola telephones a disc jockey she knows at Radio West and asks whether Eddie can help.

Eddie traces the guitarist through a tattooist and a café, and is told that Chrissie had been Kenrick's girlfriend as well as his own. Chrissie was a beauty queen, and the woman running the local competition caravan, working under Kenrick's instruction, says she was untrustworthy and has gone to London. Kenrick is no more helpful. Gary's brother, a police constable, thinks Gary is deluded and describes him as schizophrenic. Gary follows Kenrick's men to barred gates leading into a cave system, gets through them and finds a laboratory producing LSD in tablet form. He takes pills as evidence and tries to telephone Eddie. Kenrick's men catch him, and he is later found dead in his flat from an overdose, presented as a suicide. A photographer comes to the station offering a picture of Chrissie taken a few days earlier, but Erica is certain it is a fake, because the clothes in it date it by at least a year.

Eddie finds the laboratory himself and works out what it is for, and reaches the airport where Kenrick is watching the band board a flight to Hamburg against their wishes under a clause in their contract. He explains that a very large quantity of LSD is being smuggled out in the band's luggage. Kenrick tries to escape in Eddie's car; Eddie jumps onto the bonnet and holds on while the constable forces the car to a stop with his motorcycle. Kenrick is arrested, and it emerges that he did kill Chrissie in a fit of jealousy. Eddie says goodbye to Toola and leaves as she and the band play to a full club.

The title is the name of a three-card trick, and the episode plays on what the audience is shown: Chrissie is dead, then apparently alive in a photograph dated a year earlier, then dead again. It was the last of the eleven to be made and placed ninth, and the fan guide's view is that it would have worked as a series finale. It is also the series' only drug-manufacturing story, and it barely uses the station: no phone-in case, no studio scene of consequence, and no appearance by the regulars in the final act. What it has instead is place and music. The seaside town, the club, the caravans and the pier give it a physical identity the Bristol episodes do not have, and several minutes of screen time go to Toyah Willcox performing with her band, with additional music credited to her because the songs were her own material rather than written for the episode. Putting a live punk band on BBC1 in a Sunday-night drama slot in 1979 was unusual, and the episode gives it a platform in character rather than as a novelty turn. Gary Holton's performance as a young man who is right about a murder and wrong about everything else is the best acting in the hour. The ending is rushed and the bonnet chase is fanciful, and the episode drew 9.9 million viewers, the lowest of the run, against the Royal Variety Performance on ITV.