Protection

Mr Chapman runs Cafe Terni, and the restaurant has just made the Good Food Guide. A listing like that is supposed to be the reward for years of hard work in the kitchen; nobody warns you it also paints a target on the door. The very next day a man calls on Chapman, introducing himself as Detective Inspector Andrews and offering police help at a price. The protection racket has arrived, and it has dressed itself in the nearest thing to a uniform it can manage. The giveaway is in the wording: real police do not offer help at a price, and the offer is a confession of sorts.

Chapman, played with proper worried dignity by Paul Jesson, has to work out who is safe to trust. Watt and Hawkins direct the case from the top, with Evans, Dodds, Perry and WPC Arthur working underneath, but the heart of the episode is the restaurateur's dilemma: pay the man in the suit, or gamble on the real police. John Junkin's Norden and Robert Whelan's Baxter circle the cafe, and Nicholas Ball, as the man calling himself Andrews, carries exactly the right blend of charm and menace.

Elwyn Jones and Alan Plater wrote it, which shows in the quality of the talk, and Jane Howell directed. The supporting cast is as solid as the series could always field, and the script keeps the focus tight on Chapman and his kitchen, where the real fight happens.

There is a pleasing irony at the centre of the whole thing. Chapman wanted his restaurant noticed, and it gets noticed, at the cost of attracting the wrong kind of attention. But the episode is less interested in the irony than in the mechanics of saying no to a protection racket, and how much courage that takes when the man asking carries a gun and a business card. It is a small, tense story about the price of a good reputation, told with the series' usual patience.