The Missing Civil Servant

The title promises a missing civil servant, and the episode delivers one. But the real heat is elsewhere. Riesen is leaning on Spider now, and the question hanging over the whole hour is blunt: has he got himself tangled up with American crime, and if so, what does that mean for the man who owes him? A vanished civil servant is normally the kind of case Bulman could work with his eyes shut. This one doesn't stay that simple.

What makes the hour tick is the way a domestic investigation keeps snagging on international threads. Every lead Bulman and Willis pull loops back towards the same faces, and every face belongs to Spider's world. And Riesen's name keeps surfacing in the whisper of it all, which is never good news for anyone involved. Maggie Parsons watches the whole thing from close range, and her worry is the most honest thing in the episode. Penny and Norah hover at the edges. Laidlaw, Warren and Dodson move through the story like pieces on a board someone else is playing.

Brian Croucher's Riesen is the engine. He was a live wire in the season opener, and here the pressure he applies turns up the volume on everyone else: Stephen Yardley's Spider, Don Henderson's Bulman, Dennis Blanch's Willis. Vivienne McKee, Fiona Curzon, Pamela Cundell, William Squire, Johnny Shannon and Arnold Diamond make up the rest of the field.

Tim Aspinall and Kenneth Royce wrote it, Ken Grieve directed, and it went out on the fourth of July 1977, deep in the second season run. The missing civil servant is the hook, but the episode is really asking who owns Spider now, and the answer keeps moving further from home. That's the quiet kind of danger, the sort that doesn't break down your door. Somehow that makes it worse.