Cure

Mr Armour claims the gift of healing, and enough people believe him for the claim to reach Maggie Forbes and Jake Barratt. The police are not in the business of settling whether faith healing works. They need to know what Mr Armour is doing with the claim. So the two detectives decide to test his powers, and the results are frightening enough to make the whole business their case.

The episode circles an uncomfortable idea: a confidence trick and a genuine mystery can look exactly alike. Mrs McAvoy and Mrs Skeffington have their reasons for believing, and the police have to work out whether Mr Armour is a fraud or something stranger. But the test they devise produces results that refuse to be tidy, and the episode earns its unease without cheating. Faith and fraud are hard to separate even when nobody is frightened, and here somebody is.

The show usually deals in facts and fingerprints, so an episode that asks whether a man can heal by touch stands out, and the cast keeps it believable. Belief is hard to police, which is exactly what makes the case so difficult. The episode is more interested in the people around the gift than in the gift itself, which is the right instinct for a police story.

Peter Hammond and Terence Feely wrote it, Gerry Mill directed. Jill Gascoine plays Maggie and Paul Moriarty plays Jake Barratt, the pair who take Mr Armour on. William Marlowe is Russell, Kevin O'Shea plays Peter Phillips and Bernard Holley is Mike Turnbull. John Grillo plays Mr Armour himself, with Patricia Lawrence as Mrs McAvoy, Ann Morrish as Mrs Armour, Jenny Robbins as Mrs Skeffington and Nigel Rathbone as Steve Forbes.

A strange one, in the best sense. The episode leaves the question of Mr Armour's gift exactly where it found it. That is probably the right call. Whatever else it is, the episode makes you think twice about what you would believe.