Where the Jungle Ends

A group of mercenaries dressed as soldiers rob a bank and get away by plane, parachuting out over the English countryside. It is a raid staged for an audience of one: Simon Sinclair, a smooth London gangster they want to impress and then coerce into hiring them for something bigger. What the men do not know is that one of the people coming after them knows them all too well. Bodie served with them in his mercenary days, and their leader Krivas killed his girlfriend.

That personal edge gives the episode its engine. The capture of a gang member called Benny Marsh hands Cowley the opening he needs, and he does something only he would think of: he suspends Doyle and Bodie, publicly, so the gang stops watching them and starts suspecting each other. The pretence lets the pair move where the official hunt cannot, and the suspended agents have to sell the act to the gang and to their own side, which makes every scene a small performance. The reunion between Bodie and Krivas is exactly as bitter as it should be, with years of shared history in every exchange.

Brian Clemens wrote it and Raymond Menmuir directed. David Suchet plays Krivas with the coiled stillness he would later bring to Hercule Poirot, a thought that makes the whole episode feel slightly more sinister in hindsight. Del Henney is Benny Marsh, Geoffrey Palmer is Sinclair, with Christopher Reich as Franky, Paul Humpoletz as Tub, Leon Lissek as Pole and Jeremy Bulloch as Denver, a man who would soon be better known in a galaxy far, far away.

It is a personal grudge dressed up as a police operation, and the series was always at its best when those two things turned out to be the same. The title suggests the wilderness follows a man home, and for Bodie it always did.