The Visitor

Watt's old friend Bill Brown has a problem at the Bull Hotel: walk-in thefts, small stuff, the kind that empties the coat rack when nobody is looking. Brown runs security there and would rather have the Task Force take a look than answer for it himself. The thefts are walk-ins, the kind where somebody strolls in off the street and out again with somebody else's property, and the management is getting jumpy. Watt agrees to help, and for a while the case is exactly the size it looks. Then he meets Lord Hocking, and his nose twitches. The peer is too good to be true, and Watt has never trusted anything that polished.

The episode has the good sense to point suspicion elsewhere. Frederick Treves is Hocking, all bluff and title; Ralph Bates is Pierre Mandel, a man who carries a suitcase and wears a shoulder holster, which is the kind of detail that gets a detective's attention and keeps it. The holster is the giveaway; the suitcase is the question. Megs Jenkins is Mirabelle Mollison, Carol Drinkwater is Bonnie Danley, and John Malcolm's Brown looks on as his quiet hotel fills with people who are not what they claim. The guest roster has the feel of a theatre company dropped into a hotel bar.

Elwyn Jones and Allan Prior wrote it, Vere Lorrimer directed, and the tone is one of the show's lighter ones. Watt, Hawkins and Grant work the room; Lincoln and Pearson do the fetching. It is a day of classic police work among familiar faces, the sort of episode that thrives on watching professionals take a small case seriously and enjoy the puzzle of it. There is no great villainy on offer, and none is needed.

Nothing here is going to shake the force. But the show always understood that most policing is like this: a hotel full of strangers and a senior officer trusting his nose. Sometimes that is more than enough.