Visiting Fireman

A Turkish police captain named Shebbeq arrives in London, and the first thing he does is look up his old friend Regan. The pair are after a gold-smuggling ring, possibly connected to an insurance firm that has just been fire-bombed. It is the kind of case that starts with one crime and keeps peeling back to reveal another, and by the time the hour is done the two officers have uncovered a second, darker form of smuggling and someone has put a bomb in Regan's car. The bomb in particular lands on his own doorstep, which is precisely where the villains wanted it.

Regan has other troubles too, in the shape of an over-zealous colleague who had him suspended. The episode juggles the two strands neatly: the car bomb supplies the violence, and the suspended-copper grudge gives the story a personal score to settle. Regan, of course, gets the last word on both.

The pairing is the point. Shebbeq and Regan are two professionals from different police worlds, and watching them size each other up and fall into a working rhythm is most of the pleasure here. Nadim Sawalha plays Shebbeq with a quiet dignity that makes the friendship feel real rather than convenient, and Thaw, for once, has someone to bounce off who is not Carter.

Tom Clegg directs, and the Kennedy Martin brothers, Troy and Ian, wrote it. Around Thaw and Waterman, Garfield Morgan's Haskins glowers, Morris Perry is the stiff-necked Det. Chief Supt. Maynon, and Valentine Palmer, Jim McManus, Frederick Treves, Michael Cronin and Ian Thompson fill out the ranks.

It is a brisk, confident episode that enjoys its own international flavour. And there is something cheering about a story where the foreign visitor turns out to be a copper, come to help rather than to rob.