Dany

Some witnesses need protecting. Dany needs protecting from everyone, including the police who want to find her. She is a young French student on the run from the German authorities and from an international network of pornographers, and both are looking for her. Maggie's job is to reach her through another student, win that girl's trust, and get to Dany before anybody else does. The trust part is the whole ballgame: without it, the witness stays lost and the network stays in business.

The episode is quieter than the plot sounds. Ray Jenkins and Terence Feely wrote it, Gerald Blake directed, and the drama comes from conversation rather than chase. Maggie has to persuade a frightened young woman that the law is the safer option, and the script does not pretend that is an easy sell. But there is also a version of this story where the police are the villains, and the episode knows it.

Joanne Whalley plays Dany with the wary stillness of someone who has learned not to trust kindness; her name would get considerably larger over the following decade, and you can see why here. Her scenes with Gascoine are the heart of the episode, two women circling each other in a language of suspicion. Frederick Jaeger's Helmut Ritter and Benedict Taylor's Diethelm Baren give the pursuit its cold edges, and Brian de Salvo's Brotherton does his bit closer to home. Gwyneth Powell's Det. Insp. Mary Woods joins the squad for this one, which is a welcome addition; the case needs more than one woman working it.

It went out on 19 November 1982. The subject matter is grim, the telling is restrained, and the ending leaves you wondering what happened to Dany after the credits, which is about as honest as television gets. It is a story about how hard it is to help someone who has stopped believing help exists.