The Bruce Partington Plans

The body of Cadogan West is found in an underground tunnel near Aldgate Station, his skull smashed, the kind of death that looks like a fall and smells like a murder. What catches Holmes's attention is the reaction to it. His brother Mycroft is taking a very personal interest in the case, and Mycroft does nothing without a reason. The reason, when it comes, is the size of the British Government. The dead man was carrying the top secret plans for a new submarine, and three of the ten pages are missing. Mycroft's interest is the tell: the Government is rattled, and the Government does not rattle.

Mycroft, on behalf of the Government, asks his younger brother to find the pages before they reach a foreign power. The investigation takes Holmes somewhere unusual: into the Underground, into tunnels and timetables, and into the lives of the people closest to Cadogan West. The trail runs through the dead man's fiancee, a colonel, and the clerk at Woolwich Station, and the answer, when it comes, is sitting in plain view on a railway line. The Underground setting is a gift to the production, all soot and moving shadows, and it is used properly.

John Gorrie directed, from John Hawkesworth and Conan Doyle. Charles Gray's Mycroft is the great pleasure of the piece, all bulk and certainty, the man who is the Government when the Government is not looking. Sebastian Stride is a sympathetic Cadogan West, Amanda Waring's Violet Westbury grieves properly, and Geoffrey Bayldon's Sidney Johnson is a neat little villain. Denis Lill, Jonathan Newth, Robert Fyfe and Rosalie Williams complete the company.

The episode is a proper thriller, the sort where the answer is hidden in a timetable and the villain is a man with a reputation. Mycroft gets his pages back, which means the Government can sleep, and Holmes gets the satisfaction of having done it. And for once, the two brothers part on terms that suggest they might almost like each other.