The Female Factor

It's the classic set-up, played with the dials turned up: a KGB officer called Terkoff takes a young woman named Sara Seaford and drops her, seemingly by chance, into the path of Sir Charles Milvern, a man being tipped for Number 10. The secrets are only the means; the aim is to take Milvern apart, career and all. What Terkoff doesn't know, or doesn't care about, is that Sara is the long-lost daughter of a murdered prostitute.

The murder is what pulls CI5 in. Ann Seaford was found dead, and the case lands with Doyle, who knew her from his Drugs Squad days. His leads are thin and unpleasant: a pornographic film and the smell of an Eastern bloc operation. Sara, it turns out, wasn't just unlucky. She'd been groomed for the role with drugs and a life that left her no way out, and pointed at Milvern as the honey trap. Around her move Simon Culver, the posh pimp with a quiet violence behind the harmless manner who had a hand in Ann's death, and Sam Baker, the handler who watches the whole ugly business with a professional detachment that's somehow worse than cruelty.

It ends where these things usually end: an underground car park, gunfire, Sara in the middle of it. Bodie takes Terkoff down and Doyle takes a bullet. But the last word belongs to the partnership — Doyle limping off, Bodie already working out how to turn the crutches into a chat-up line. That's the show's trick: it can do a pub fight won one-handed without spilling a pint, and then turn around and gamble a woman's life in a car park.

Brian Clemens wrote it, David Wickes directed. Gordon Jackson's Cowley, Martin Shaw's Doyle and Lewis Collins's Bodie anchor it, with Anthony Steel's Milvern, Walter Gotell's Baker, Felicity Dean as Sara, Pamela Salem as Ann, Barry Justice as Culver and Patrick Durkin as Terkoff.

The plot is familiar. The honey trap is as old as spying, and the episode earns its keep by remembering the girl at the centre of it. Sara gets out. That counts for something.