Good Listener

The title tells you everything. PC Snow takes the time to listen to an elderly bookkeeper, and that act of patience unravels a fraud that has been running for years. Miss Janet Thomson keeps the books for an established firm that has recently come under new management, and the new management, she has come to realise, is stealing through her ledgers. The scam has been going on long enough to look like business as usual. And the firm's good name is exactly what the fraud is living off, a reputation doing the work of a mask.

There is no shoot-out here, no grand forensic sweep. Snow just sits and lets her talk, and the details pile up until the picture is clear enough to act on. It is the quietest kind of police work, and the episode is smart enough to treat it as worth an hour of television: the long con against the long conversation. Fraud of this size is not broken open by one dramatic moment. It is broken open by somebody finally saying what has been in front of everyone's eyes for years, and watching Snow take her seriously, you remember how rarely crime drama slows down long enough for that.

Elwyn Jones wrote it and Leonard Lewis directed. Stratford Johns is Barlow and Norman Bowler is Hawkins, with David Allister as Jackson and David Lloyd Meredith as Evans. Terence Rigby's Snow does the listening. Sylvia Barter is Miss Thomson, Douglas Livingstone is Bert Fowler, Marilyn Harrington is Betty Adams, Jonathan Newth is William Overson and Reginald Jessup is Henry Gordon.

The show's usual virtues, done quietly: procedure treated with respect, and a small human act given its full weight. Sometimes the best evidence is simply a policeman who knows when to stop talking. It is an episode you could easily miss in the run of a series, and that would be a shame.