Servant of Two Masters

Bodie and Doyle get the job nobody wants: watching their own boss. Cowley appears to have lifted two canisters of a new nerve gas and been recorded trying to sell them to Otto Hahn, a German buyer. Their orders come from Plumb, Cowley's rival, who wants the pair tracking their chief's every move. And Cowley, typically, asks them to shadow an Arab gentleman called Malik instead, which they rightly suspect is just to keep them off his scent.

They trace him to a country mansion, where Hahn's men catch them, and Cowley stands there denying he knows anyone. The question the episode keeps asking is a good one: is the man who built CI5 selling nerve gas for profit, or is he running a longer game to expose the real traitor? The pair never get a straight answer, and the audience is kept guessing alongside them. The recording of the deal is the one hard piece of evidence, and even that could be staged. Every piece of evidence against Cowley looks damning, and every piece of his behaviour looks like misdirection.

Brian Clemens and Douglas Watkinson wrote it, Ferdinand Fairfax directed. David de Keyser is Hahn, Glynn Edwards is Alfred Cole, Ina Skriver is Jutta, John Savident is Robert Plumb, Dennis Burgess is Dr. Forbes, Tony Scannell is Man 1 and James Lister is Karl.

Gordon Jackson gets the best of it, playing Cowley as a man who lets his own men think the worst of him because the job demands it. The ambiguity holds to the end, which is the point. And Glynn Edwards, forever Moxey from Minder to most viewers, pops up here and makes the supporting cast feel like a roll call of familiar faces.

It is a skilled piece of misdirection, building suspense through doubt rather than explosions, and it trusts the audience to stay interested in a question with no easy answer.