Revolving Funds

Frank does not take kindly to cheats. When a crooked card player fleeces Ron Blythe, Frank decides the matter needs settling. But the settling takes him into the family's money. The cash, it turns out, is in Danny's suitcase, and Danny has just come back from America with a case full of dollars waiting to be laundered.

What starts as a card table grievance turns into a tour of the laundering operation, with the money moving through the club and everyone watching it the way you watch a fuse. The beauty of the setup is that nobody is quite sure whose money it is anymore, which is the point of laundering in the first place. Frank wants the cheat to pay up and Ron to be made whole. Danny wants the suitcase back without anyone asking how it got heavy.

DCI Sarah Turnbull takes a serious interest, and DC Lambton, DS Fielding and DCS Graham keep the pressure up. The two investigations, Frank's and the law's, keep crossing paths in the club's back rooms. Frank wants justice for Ron. The law wants the dollars, and Danny wants to keep both of them out of his pockets.

The episode has a pleasingly small engine. Nobody is trying to conquer the world; someone just cheated at cards, and the consequences ripple outward from there. Frank's revenge is a family matter, the laundering is a business matter, and the two of them keep knocking into each other in the same narrow corridor.

Jeremy Burnham and Murray Smith wrote it, Richard Standeven directed. Don Henderson's Frank, Leslie Grantham's Danny, Caroline Bliss's Turnbull and Barbara Wilshere's Carol lead, with Leon Herbert, Peter Gowen, Frederick Warder, Nigel Harrison, James Saxon and Thomas Craig completing the cast.

Revolving Funds keeps its title honest: the money goes around, and everyone it passes through ends up a little dirtier. It is the rare episode where the plot is the money itself, and the money behaves like a character with its own ideas.