Friends and Enemies

Second series, new leaf. Spider Scott has bought half of a small executive aircraft charter company, and there's something quietly pleasing about seeing him climb into a cockpit instead of up a drainpipe. He flies the planes himself, with his partner, and for a while it looks as though the burglar really has hung up his gloves. Then an old acquaintance from the criminal days books a flight, and Spider thinks nothing of it. You can see the mistake coming a mile off. His best friend turns up dead in the Thames, and the fresh start is over before the paperwork has dried.

The mystery pulls the old crowd back into frame. Bulman and Willis are on the case, their path keeps crossing Spider's, and that's exactly the kind of attention a reformed thief doesn't need. Maggie Parsons is still around and still close, while Don Stevens, Warren, Laidlaw and Riesen circle the investigation like men waiting for a verdict. And every man in that circle knew the dead friend personally, which narrows the list of people Spider can trust to roughly no one. For a man trying to outrun his history, the river has a way of sending it back to him.

Tim Aspinall and Kenneth Royce wrote it, Ken Grieve directed, and the cast settles back into place like a hand into a worn glove: Stephen Yardley's Spider, Don Henderson's Bulman, Dennis Blanch's Willis and Vivienne McKee's Maggie, with Oliver Maguire, Fiona Curzon, Pamela Cundell, Johnny Shannon, William Squire and Brian Croucher completing the list.

The title does double duty. The friend in the Thames belonged to Spider's old life, and the customers now paying for his honesty carry agendas of their own. In this line of work the two lists keep swapping names, and nobody keeps the score but the river.