Lord of the Files

A fight in the Paradise Club is broken up by Danny and Frank, and the casualty list includes the son of a former gangster turned building magnate, hurt in the scuffle. The fight is quick and ugly, the sort that starts over nothing and ends with somebody's son in hospital. A few days later a computer expert is gunned down in broad daylight, and suspicions quickly surface that the killer got the wrong man. Then Danny's car is blown up.

But the question hanging over the episode is whether Jimmy Dexter is behind it all out of revenge, or whether there is more to it. Larry Lamb plays Dexter with a stillness that keeps the answer out of reach, and the mystery holds. The key, when it comes, is the Lord of the Files of the title, and it leads to a final confrontation on the top of a high-rise.

The episode is at its best when it stops explaining. It lets the attacks land one after another and trusts the audience to add them up. The car bomb is the one that gets Danny's attention; everything before it was somebody else's problem. Dexter, if it is Dexter, is the sort of enemy who does not warn first, and Lamb keeps him readable without making him chatty.

The title is a working joke. Somewhere in London there is a man who knows everything, and the show enjoys the idea that a filing cabinet is the most dangerous object in the story. The high-rise finale pays it off properly.

Murray Smith wrote it, Selwyn Roberts directed. Don Henderson, Leslie Grantham, Barbara Wilshere, Peter Gowen, Leon Herbert, Kevin Short, Jack Galloway, Larry Lamb, David Swift and Bill Thomas make up the cast, with Short's Ronnie Blythe, Galloway's Nesbit, Swift's Wartbug and Thomas's Wickens in support.

The high-rise finale is the payoff the title promises, and it is worth the wait.