Dance Girl Dance

Young women are disappearing across Tyneside. They have been recruited by a local nightclub for dancing work overseas, and the pattern is that they go and do not come back. The recruiting is done as a legitimate business offer, which is exactly why nobody has treated the disappearances as a police matter. A proposition that looks like work is harder to complain about than a crime.

Spender's response is to go into the same line of business as the man he is investigating. He poses as an ex-shipyard worker with a load of redundancy money who wants to open a nightclub, and he approaches Palmer, the local villain who owns the club and runs the recruiting. The cover is well built because it gives him a reason to seek Palmer out rather than a reason to watch him: a man with cash and no experience looking for a partner is precisely the person a recruiter of girls would want to deal with. With Stick's help he puts together a competing operation, which forces Palmer into a commercial relationship and gives Spender a legitimate reason to know what he is doing.

This is the fullest use of Stick in the first series. He is not providing introductions here; he is inside the operation, plausibly a businessman, and the episode shows the character's usefulness extending well beyond knowing the right people. It is the arrangement the later series build on. Meanwhile Spender enlists the sister of one of the missing girls, Rose, and she works with him from the inside, which keeps the episode's attention on who the missing girls actually are rather than on a count.

What the girls are being recruited for is not the overseas dancing work they were promised. The nightclub is the front and the travel arrangements are the mechanism, and Spender's rival club gives him the access to break it up. The resolution is one of the clearer ones of the first series: the villain is the man he went into business with, the business was the trap, and the sister made it possible.

The episode is unusually grounded in its economics. The girls are recruited out of unemployment and a shortage of work, and the offer is attractive because the local options are not. Spender's cover story is the same economic position from the other end, and the dole queue and the benefit office sit in the same episode as the informal economy he is working in. The writing credit is the anomaly of the first series: John Harvey, an author outside the show's usual roster, wrote this one and never returned. What his script supplies is a construction around a legitimate business and a hard local economy, and the episode is better for it.