Double Jeopardy

A tip-off puts Spender and Stick onto Lorraine Hope, a well-dressed woman whose movements do not add up. Tailing her is the opening move, and the surveillance establishes that she is up to something without establishing what. She is not the sort of person the local force would ordinarily follow, which is the first puzzle: who is she working with, and why does her diary matter?

The answer runs on a second track. A group of criminals from the south of England has come north to join forces with local muscle, and the plan is an armed raid. The two groups bring different things: the visitors supply the planning and the nerve, the locals supply knowledge of the ground. Jessel, Lew and Gene and Eddy Hackett are the names on that side of the case, and the north-south alliance is what makes it unusual for a Newcastle force. The link between the two strands is Hope. Her movements are the thread that connects the incoming men to the operation being planned, so the episode's detective work is pattern recognition rather than a series of interviews.

Into the middle of it comes a third problem, and it is the most distinctive thing in the hour. Dan Boyd asks Spender to help another undercover officer, Detective Constable Terry Knowles, who does not want the help. Knowles is running his own operation and resents the intervention. Two men who officially do not exist in the area cannot acknowledge one another, and Boyd, who arranges contacts he cannot make himself, knows the request will be resented and makes it anyway. David Whitaker plays the resentment without self-pity and returns to the part in the second series. It is a neat reversal: Spender, normally the officer nobody wants on their patch, is for once the intruder being tolerated.

The fourth strand belongs to Keith Moreland, and it is the most serious. Keith is not coping with his multiple sclerosis, his marriage to Astrid is under strain, and the episode shows a man Spender regards as his closest friend deteriorating while Spender is busy. Tony McAnaney, who wrote the series' music and plays Keith, is given material with no case attached to it, and the episode lets it stay unresolved, as an illness must.

The raid is stopped, the alliance broken up and Hope's position settled against the incoming group rather than as a separate offence. The title is doing quiet work: double jeopardy is the rule against being tried twice for the same offence, and everyone here is being asked to go over ground already fought for. The one real caution is the writer credit. It rests on the Wikipedia table alone, and the billing has not been reachable to settle it. Frances Tomelty's guest performance gives the tail something worth watching, and the MS thread is handled with a sobriety the genre usually avoids.