The Teddy Bears' Nightmare

Don Satchley is on a fishing break when he spots a figure on the far riverbank stealing a handbag from a courting couple's car. He shouts and starts the boat's engine to warn them, but the thief and the couple all run, leaving the bag behind. Don gives it to Eddie and asks him to trace the owner, which Eddie does through the shop that sold it. The purchaser is Christine Page, the woman Don saw, but she denies the bag is hers and shuts the door on him. His proof of identity is a small comic device: he turns on a radio in the shop and correctly predicts that a trail for his own programme is about to be broadcast.

Christine is being blackmailed by Stanley Reeves, who has photographed her at a museum with her lover, a plain-clothes police officer named Ken Beatty. Reeves sends the photographs to her, and she calls Eddie and tells him what has happened. His demand is that money be left in a litter bin at a shopping centre. Reeves then follows Beatty to a safe house where the officer is guarding an informer and witness named Joe Anderson, and goes to a criminal called Cahill, who wants Anderson found. The information about Beatty's affair, and Beatty's marriage, is what Cahill needs to open the witness's hiding place.

At the shopping centre Eddie chases Reeves after the pick-up but loses him and catches up with him later at the club where Reeves works as a photographer. By then Beatty's arrangement is in place. Eddie confronts him with everything he knows and tells him he will try to put a message on Radio West telling the informer to leave the safe house before Cahill's men arrive. The decision, and the risk, are handed to Beatty: he can prove he is a good officer by arresting Cahill when he comes. Eddie races to the safe house and finds Anderson, who has heard the broadcast and is on his way out. Beatty does tell his colleagues, and they arrive and arrest Cahill's men. At the police station afterwards Eddie spots Christine Page. She is a uniformed officer, on the beat. The blackmail victim and the constable are the same person, and the affair she was being blackmailed over was with a married colleague.

Three guest performances carry it. Donald Sumpter's Reeves is the most memorable, a grubby operator who enjoys the process of pressure more than the money, and the episode gives him his own milieu, a club where he photographs strippers. Ken Hutchison plays Beatty without asking for sympathy: a married man with a career he values more than either his wife or his mistress, and the episode makes Eddie force him into the right conduct rather than persuading him into it. Charlotte Cornwell's Christine is the pivot, and the trick of the ending depends entirely on her having been played for fifty minutes as a private individual, a humiliated woman with a lover and a stolen bag. For the regulars, Don gets his largest piece of action in the run, carrying the evidence around Radio West in a handbag on his arm to the visible bewilderment of his staff.

The episode is a conspiracy story with an institutional subject: a police officer protecting a witness, a blackmailer who can open that protection for money and a criminal who can buy it for the same. The safe house is the one setting in the run where the law is doing something the audience can approve of, and it is compromised by the private conduct of the man running it. The middle requires so much set-up, the museum, the photographs, the posted envelope, the litter bin, the club, that the chase has to carry more tension than one scene can hold, and Eddie loses Reeves and then simply finds him again. Andrew Sinclair reviewed it in The Listener the week after transmission, one of the very few contemporary notices given to a single Shoestring episode.