The Red Circle

Mrs Warren keeps a lodging house, and she has a lodger who never leaves the room and never speaks to anyone, but receives visitors at odd hours. She also has a husband, and the husband has just been kidnapped and then released again, which is the sort of thing that happens in bad dreams and very rarely in boarding houses. But Holmes, listening to her story, decides the case is more important than it looks, and Holmes is almost always right about that.

The lodger and the kidnapping lead him away from the lodging house and into the middle of an Italian secret society called the Red Circle. A young couple, Gennaro and Emilia Lucca, have come to London to escape their past, and the past has followed them with a ticket already paid. Gorgiano, a name that frightens people who do not frighten easily, hangs over the story. Whatever the Circle wants with the Luccas, it is worth killing for, and Holmes would rather know what it is before it happens on his watch.

The episode is a nice demonstration of Holmes's patience. Most of the work is watching, waiting for the lodger's room to do the talking. The setting never stops being domestic, which is what makes the violence, when it comes, land so hard.

Jeremy Paul wrote it, Sarah Hellings directed. Betty Marsden and Kenneth Connor, two faces made for comedy who are entirely serious here, play the Warrens, and James Coombes and Sophia Diaz are the young Italians with everything to lose. John Hallam is Gorgiano, Tom Chadbon is Inspector Hawkins, Kerry Shale is Leverton, and Rosalie Williams is Mrs Hudson. Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke are Holmes and Watson.

The Red Circle shows how quickly a story can travel from a boarding house to an international conspiracy, and how little distance there really is between them. Holmes has always known it. The street outside Baker Street was never as quiet as it looked.