Another Man's Castle

Philip and Diana Hosken are moving house, and when they reach the new home the removal van containing everything they own has been stolen on the way. Terry Bowen is an ex-boxer, a businessman and an acquaintance of Erica's. He shows a young couple into a seaside house they have rented, furnished with the Hoskens' stolen property. To raise spending money, the girl suggests selling the colour television to a trader in the local market. When the police are told about the theft and question the trader, the television he has taken in matches the description the robbed couple gave.

Questioning the two removal men, Eddie sees the younger of them telephone Bowen's associates while he is talking to the other. Bowen's current scheme is to frighten an old man out of his cottage, and he is also sheltering two wanted criminals in the area. Hearing about the trader from the police end, Eddie visits him and is told about the girl in the red top. Bowen invites Eddie to a seaside charity event, where Eddie draws portraits of the children; among his earlier work Bowen spots a drawing of the girl, made from the trader's description. He confronts the couple about the television and takes all their money. The girl has kept back an antique chess set and suggests selling that to the trader instead. The trader asks them to come back in an hour and then tells Eddie the girl has returned. Eddie, recently knocked unconscious by one of Bowen's men while looking round a vacant house, comes to the stall and talks to her, and she agrees to help him.

She visits Bowen at his office and says she needs money to disappear, because Eddie wants her as a police witness. Bowen pays her and then confronts Eddie at the old man's cottage, the next property on a list Erica has given him. He is about to assault Eddie when the old man sets fire to his own cottage and goes inside. Bowen and Eddie go in after him, and while they are getting him out the police arrive and arrest the two wanted criminals Bowen has been hiding, exposed as bank robbers who had been forced to move when they saw the fire. Bowen has been under police surveillance for some time, for reasons unconnected with anything Eddie was investigating. Eddie's involvement turns out to have been beside the point.

The episode is a property story. Everything in it is about who is entitled to occupy what: a stolen van load of furniture on a rented seaside house, an old man's cottage, a list of properties held by a man evicting the occupants one at a time, and a flat that belongs to a woman whose ex-husband has come to call. John Forgeham carries it and it is the best guest part of the second series after Diana Dors's: a villain who is charming, self-made, generous when it suits him and genuinely fond of Erica, and who is also an extortionist who drives an old man out of his home and lets a young couple live in stolen furniture. The two halves of the character are never reconciled, which is the right way to play it.

The weakness is Eddie's passivity. He is knocked unconscious twice, does not find the sea house, does not catch Bowen and is not responsible for the arrests, and the fan literature's conclusion that he need not have been there at all is hard to argue with. The Erica strand, the ex-husband and the eviction, is raised and dropped without a scene that pays it off. What the episode does do is arrive at a more honest account of how private investigation works than most of the run offers: the client is helped and the villain is taken by accident. It also marks the change of gear in the second half of the season, since the last three episodes were script-edited by Chris Boucher and this is the first of them. It drew 11.0 million viewers.