For Love Or Money

Adler is investigating missing money from a bank robbery, and the case seems straightforward enough until he is talked into interviewing Patti Nolan at her home. She is glamorous, she is friendly, and she is exactly the kind of person a senior officer should not go to see alone. By the end of the episode it is not the missing loot the force is asking about. It is Adler, and whether he took a bribe. The trap works because Adler does not see it coming, and the audience is sitting right there beside him.

The episode is a neat trap, set and sprung in an hour. Carole Mowlam's Patti Nolan is the bait, and she plays the part with a warmth that makes Adler's mistake entirely believable. One visit to her flat and the suspicion is in the air, carried by Deputy Chief Constable Collins and Det. Supt. Blake, played by Nicholas Selby and Forbes Collins, the men whose job it is to ask the uncomfortable questions. John Golightly's Toby Cranshaw and Michael Byrne's Phil Ives complete the circle of people who have a version of events.

Elwyn Jones and Allan Prior wrote the script, Geraint Morris directed. The show was always good on the idea that policing is a profession like any other, with its own temptations and its own gossip, and this is one of its sharpest uses of that idea.

"For Love Or Money" asks the question in its title and refuses to give an easy answer. Adler has been outmanoeuvred, and the episode leaves him standing in the wreckage of his own good sense, a senior man who walked into a simple, elegant trap. The missing loot never quite stops being the point, which is what makes the accusation against Adler so much worse. It is a sour little story, well told, and John Franklyn-Robbins carries the discomfort of it beautifully.