The Untouchables

Bodie has a gambling problem, and for once it's useful. He's losing heavily at a card school when Rahad, an Arab diplomat with a sideline in assassination, offers to clear the debts. The price is information: secrets from inside CI5. It's a trap. But a trap has to look real, and looking real is where the fun comes in. For Bodie, losing money in public is the easy part. He's had the practice.

Cowley runs the operation. Bodie keeps losing and keeps feeding Rahad just enough truth to stay valuable. Doyle, meanwhile, hires Anna Jones, a sophisticated and very intelligent escort, to get close to the diplomat and keep an eye on him. The middle of the episode is careful choreography. Rahad gets convinced that Anna is a danger to him personally, and then he's photographed paying someone he believes to be a hitman to take care of her. The photograph is the whole point. It makes the diplomat's intentions visible, and once it exists, the trap snaps shut.

Brian Clemens wrote it, William Brayne directed. Keith Washington's Rahad is smooth and patient enough to be genuinely plausible as a man who kills people between meetings. Marilyn Galsworthy's Anna Jones is the sharpest thing in the hour. Robert Flemyng's Sir John Terringham, John Junkin's Hollis, Joseph Marcell's Nero, Nick Brimble's Hart and Lucy Hornak's Clare Terringham fill out the cast. Marcell is a few years from becoming the most famous butler on television, which is a nice thought to carry into the final act.

It's a con-game episode at heart, and the show has always had a soft spot for those. The pleasure is in the layering: watching the debts become the leaks, and the leaks become the staged photograph. Nobody gets shot in the back because everybody's too busy lying to each other, and that's a fair trade.