Copper Wire

Tiger Mulholland is a professional, and the first thing a professional thief learns is who to work with. His latest partner, Jeff (James Marcus), is a novice, and the pairing is a mistake the whole episode can feel coming. The job goes wrong, as jobs with novices tend to, and the trail leads straight back to Barlow, an adversary Mulholland remembers from his Newtown days.

The old score is what gives the episode its shape. Barlow wants more than the arrest; he wants Mulholland to talk. And the two men know each other well enough that the interview becomes a contest of memory rather than a plain interrogation. It is a rare procedural where the past counts as evidence, and both men know it. Mulholland knows what Barlow wants from him, which is why he keeps his mouth shut with such care.

Stratford Johns carries it as Barlow, with David Lloyd Meredith's Evans, Victor Brooks's Inspector Lipton and Leslie Southwick's Sergeant Tapsfield on the police side, and Allan Surtees's Osbaldeston and Wally Thomas's Cosway in the criminal orbit. Peter Kerrigan's Mulholland is the kind of villain worth waiting for: patient and watchful, hard to rattle.

Keith Dewhurst and Elwyn Jones wrote it, Peter Cregeen directed. The pleasure is in the history between the two men, the way a rivalry from years back sharpens every exchange. Whether Mulholland finally talks is the question the hour sets up, and the answer has less to do with the case than with two stubborn men refusing to give each other the satisfaction. Two old adversaries, a handshake and a grudge: the episode gets a lot of mileage out of them. It is content to let two men sit in a room and remember each other, which is more gripping than it sounds. There is no hurry.