The Partnership

Sonia has lunch with her friend Jenny Kelson, who works at a travel agency. Back at Radio West, Sonia looks out of a window and sees Jenny being threatened in the street by a man called Ray, who throws an envelope onto the seat of her car and scratches the paintwork with his ring. Jenny later calls at the station with information for Sonia and leaves the wrong envelope behind, the one Ray threw into the car. It contains a large sum of money and a threatening note.

Eddie takes it back to her at the agency. Jenny says her husband Brian is a penniless artist and that she is arranging an exhibition of his work. In a bar with the two of them, Sonia sees Ray threaten her a second time. Eddie follows Jenny and Ray to a car park beside the motorway and, borrowing a camera from a boy sitting in a parked jeep, photographs the two of them talking. He then rents a car in Don Satchley's name and follows Ray to a farm and back into the city, taking more photographs, until the hire car is towed away for illegal parking and the bill goes to Don.

At the farm, which belongs to the Martins, Eddie finds a locked shed and talks his way in by pretending to want one of the puppies the couple breed, then comes back at night and drugs the guard dogs by putting sleeping tablets into three bags of sausages. The shed is full of household goods and furniture. Listening to the radio at Erica's flat he hears an interview with a man whose house was emptied while he was on holiday, and that takes him back to Jenny, who admits what she has been doing. She has been telling the Martins when her agency's clients are going away, which allows their houses to be burgled, and the money funds her husband's studio. Eddie sets a trap: Don agrees to pay for Eddie and Erica to spend a night in a hotel so that the flat is left empty, Jenny passes on the news that Erica has gone to Amsterdam, and the Martins and their men break in and are arrested by the police.

Mike Armstrong's script belongs to the run of property-fraud stories the series uses, but the interest is in the middle section, where Eddie follows Ray and photographs him while borrowing a camera from a child and running up bills in his employer's name. The fan guide calls the double act with the boy the most enjoyable part of the episode, and it is also where Eddie's behaviour is at its most wayward: drugging dogs with sausages, impersonating a puppy buyer, spending his boss's money on surveillance. The episode also gives Sonia her largest part in the first series outside Listen to Me, on the strength of the production's own view that Liz Crowther had been underused at the reception desk. Jenny carries the moral weight, since she is a criminal funding her husband's work, and what she gets for it is an exhibition that a barrister looks at and calls talentless. Eddie's closing suggestion that Brian could come and help him paint his boat is the joke the episode ends on. It is also the one episode of the first series the fan literature regards as merely average, and the assessment is defensible: the threat is administrative rather than physical, and the villain disappears halfway through and is arrested off screen. Kevin Whately appears in a small part as a footballer, four years before Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. It drew 12.6 million viewers.