Loving Arms

Fred Booth is a retired engineer whose wife Lilly is sick and deeply religious, and the money for her care has run out. Along comes Artie Ward, a wide boy with a proposition: build guns, get paid. Fred believes he's making replicas, harmless display pieces. The guns are real. Ward sells them to teenagers, and the teenagers use them to hold up small shops across London.

The trouble arrives on a night an off-duty copper is shot dead with one of these faulty weapons while chasing a gang of youths. The lad he was chasing dies as well. Two dead, one of them police, and Regan has to trace the guns from the streets back to the bench where they were made. He takes it personally, the way he does, and the hunt gives the episode its engine.

This is one of the show's plainer stories, and the plainness suits it. Nobody is glamorous. Artie Ward, played by Roy Sone, is all patter and cheap charm, the obvious villain. But the episode is more interesting when it looks at Fred. He is a decent man sinking, too proud to ask for help, and the script keeps him human as everything around him curdles. Clifford Kershaw gives him a tired dignity, and Anne Dyson's Lilly carries a quiet ache in the scenes where the sick wife suspects more than she is told.

Robert Wales and Ian Kennedy Martin wrote it, with Tom Clegg directing. Garfield Morgan's Haskins does his usual fretful turn, and Alan David, Mona Hammond, George Tovey and Julian Littman fill in the edges of the case.

The guns themselves are the real villain: shoddy pieces that kill whoever gets in the way. By the end Regan finds his source, but the price is a dead policeman and a dead boy, and nobody walks away with much of a win.