Now We Are Dead

The committee business from last week has gone sour, the way committee business always goes sour in Spider's world. Quilter, who sat on the board, has been murdered. Bucket-Face Smith has vanished. And in somebody's study Spider turns up something nasty that he wasn't meant to find. The episode doesn't dawdle over which of these is the worst; it lets them pile up like weather.

The nastier thought is the one that sticks. Spider becomes convinced the police were tipped off about the break-in, which means someone inside the game sold him. That's a different fear from the usual one. He can plan around the law and he can plan around the villains, but he can't plan around a leak he can't see. His answer is to get close to Thresher's daughter, Cindy, which is either a clever move or a fatal one. The episode spends its length letting him find out which.

Kenneth Royce and Murray Smith wrote it, Carol Wilks directed, and it went out on the first of August 1977. The board from When We Were Very Greedy is back: Ronald Lewis's Peter Thresher, Glyn Houston's Tom Moody and Derrick O'Connor's Knocker Roberts, with Jennifer Lonsdale as Cindy and Amanda Boxer as Nina Thresher. Stephen Yardley's Spider carries the paranoia well, and Don Henderson's Bulman, Dennis Blanch's Willis, Vivienne McKee's Maggie and Mark Dignam's Fairfax complete the familiar picture.

It's a paranoid hour, and the show earns the paranoia. By this point in the series Spider has been used, hunted, drowned and nearly blown up, and the suspicion that the people feeding him information are also feeding on him feels less like nerves and more like arithmetic. The title is the grim joke. Everyone around him is dying or disappearing, and the only real question is who's next on the list.