The Hermit

Barlow and Watt are looking for a reclusive individual to help with their inquiries into a diabolical crime, which is a roundabout way of saying the trail has gone cold. The trouble is a gang of thieves who have chosen Thamesford as their hunting ground, preying on elderly residents and their valuables, with a taste for antiques and silverware and a base of operations in a London antique shop. Elderly people keep their valuables close and their doors locked, which makes them the perfect prey for a gang with no conscience and a good van.

Watt is hard on their case, but the gang are well organised and they work fast. Undercover work gets the CID nowhere, until the thieves set their eyes on the silverware of an old war veteran, a man the neighbourhood knows as the hermit. The hermit's silver is the first thing the gang want that the police can do something about. Suddenly the hunt has a shape.

Elwyn Jones and Allan Prior wrote it, Michael Simpson directed. Stratford Johns is Barlow, Frank Windsor's Watt, with Susan Tebbs as Betty Donald and Terence Rigby as PC Henry Snow. Andreas Malandrinos plays James Partland, the hermit whose silverware draws the gang out. Jeffrey Segal is Parrish, Harry Landis Knocker, Anthony Jackson Corry, Joan Cooper Miss Dobson and Frank Singuineau Frank. A small cast, a slow build, and a target who has been overlooked all his life.

But there is a neat symmetry to it. The gang hunt the old and the isolated because they are easy targets, and it is the most isolated man of all whose belongings finally give the police their way in. The hermit turns out to be the piece the whole puzzle was missing, which is the kind of ending this series delivers best: patient, and exactly where you should have been looking. The episode has a gentle menace to it, the kind that creeps up on you.