Jailbait

A dangerous traitor has walked out of prison, and the escape was arranged. Craven and Haggerty have to find out who organised it, and the possibilities are not comforting: the criminal underworld, or the traitor's friends abroad. A man's life depends on the answer, and the clock is running. Every hour the fugitive stays free is an hour in which the people who put him away start looking over their shoulders. The escape itself is not the mystery; the mystery is the door that opened. The traitor's friends abroad, the script suggests, are the likelier movers, but the underworld has its own reasons to oblige.

Michael Chapman wrote it, William Brayne directed. George Sewell is Craven, Patrick Mower is Haggerty, Paul Eddington is Strand and Frederick Jaeger is Commander Fletcher. There is an Attorney General in the cast, which tells you how high the affair reaches, and a news editor, which tells you how soon the story will be public. Colette O'Neil is Rose Filmer, Paul Shelley is Palliser, Olaf Pooley is Eastry Senior, Barry Keegan is Horniman, Clive Morton is the Attorney General and Charles Morgan is the News Editor.

The title is a small joke the show is in on, and the episode itself plays it straight. The pleasure is in the mechanics: whose hands arranged the break and whose silence made it possible. The interviews stack up, the witnesses close ranks, and the trail keeps leading back to the question of who benefits from a traitor walking free. Rose Filmer, Palliser and Eastry Senior drift through the edges of the case, each of them carrying a piece of the answer the detectives cannot quite reach.

It keeps the focus firmly on the business of detection, which suits this series well, and the running clock keeps the talk from drifting. There are no heroes here, just two detectives working a leak, and that is plenty. The episode does not pretend the institution that lost the prisoner is blameless, and the questions about the leak are aimed upwards as often as down.