Puck

Spender starts digging into a local villain called Tommy Thornton, and the digging turns up something he did not expect: Thornton is blackmailing an ice hockey star. Paul Ducheyne is a sportsman whose career and private life are being held over him by a man with enough local reach to make reporting it impossible. The blackmail is the case's public face, and the episode's method is accumulation rather than pursuit. Spender turns over a criminal's affairs until something usable falls out, which is a slower way of working than the chases of the series opener.

Tom Bell's Thornton is the reason this episode matters. He is cast as a villain with a household and an organisation rather than a single-handed crook, a man whose authority comes from leverage over people in ordinary local life, including its sport. He is also written to last: Thornton returns in the 1993 feature-length special, which makes this the opening instalment of the show's closing storyline. Laure Killing is introduced as Janet Thornton, and the marriage is established as strained, which matters because Spender's involvement with Janet becomes the engine of the next episode and eventually of the special.

Around them sit Ernie Peters, a figure in Thornton's orbit, and Paul Thornton, Tommy's son, which makes the blackmail case a family arrangement as much as a criminal one. Michael Vartan plays the athlete as a man cornered by someone with more power in the locality than he has.

The ice hockey setting is unusual for a British police drama of the period and gives the blackmail a public dimension: the crime is committed against something the locality takes seriously, so it is a matter of community consequence rather than a private dispute. The series had already built episodes around a missing Newcastle footballer and an unlicensed boxing racket, and this follows that pattern of attaching crime to a local sport.

The weakness is the premise as catalogued. A detective digging up dirt on a criminal who is blackmailing a sportsman is a familiar construction, and the located summaries show no twist beyond the discovery of the blackmail itself. The exact functions of Ernie Peters, Paul Thornton and Jim Harris are not expanded anywhere beyond their billing, so their part in the story cannot be stated with any confidence. Nor does the record say how the blackmail is resolved or whether Thornton is ever charged. What is clear is that the episode gives the series an antagonist it can carry across an episode, a season and a special, and that Bell's casting is the reason it works.