On October 25th I caught up on Monday night’s edition of New Tricks after making notes on the episode the week before and just about recovering from the loss of James Bolam from the series and not too sure about his replacement Steve McAndrew played by Dennis Lawson. The episode last night was scheduled for next week and the BBC decided to pull the planned episode because irony of ironies it covered under age sex in a children’s home in Glasgow and would have been shown half an hour before the Panorama special on Jimmy Saville.
I was uncertain about the continuation of the series until two strong stories in two weeks has made a significant difference to my original view following the departure of one of my favourite TV actors and character actors of all time, particularly because of his performance in the Beiderbecke tapes.
Two weeks ago I was fully engaged with the Blue Flower. Papers were found in a lock up which related to a man whose killing by a knife would was unsolved five years before. The man was an East German who had come to the UK as soon as the Berlin Wall was removed and was still looking for his daughter some 15 years later.
He and his wife had attempted to enter the West a couple of years before wall came down and they were caught at the wire fence, although with only a sufficient hole to pass their baby through to the waiting helpers, and organisation called the Blue Flower whose members attempted to infiltrate government organisations in East Germany, including the secret police, in order to undermine the regime. While the Wall divided Berlin the boundary between East Germany and West Germany in general was fortified but not as by a wall.
The papers found in the lock up garage suggested he had access to personal documents and his work had been at a local refuse centre as a picker someone who checked the contents of bins on a conveyer belt in order to remove any documents such as bills which were then shredded. While this line of inquiry had outcomes it did not prove central to the main story. When the team visit the Refuse centre they are met with hostility by the manager and by the person in charge of the conveyor belt system. Jerry takes the opportunity while the new man engages the head to check out the office of the man controlling those on the conveyor belt and discoverers a store of personal data confirming the involvement with Data theft. However the team are warned off because a special squad are investigating an international Identity theft operation which the Refuse centre is providing with info. They have a man working on the team. Nevertheless two of the team members attend a club having found a note of a meeting that evening. This proves to be an arrest sting by the special squad who are no amused at the continuing interest of the UCOS, who are helpful apprehending the Manager when he attempts to evade capture. It is therefore evident that the death of the East German is not related to his work at the Refuse centre.
The East German man had spent a couple of hours every day close to the centre of Shepherds Bush, near the Market at the busiest time, before going on to work hoping to catch sight of his daughter. although how he obtained a current photo was never explained. She had been adopted but comes to the UK and had got into trouble. It is through this, that her DNA and her location are traced, although it is not clear how such a link was possible. What I question is that given the skills of the father as a former member of the State Secret Police that he was unable to find or that his talents were not taken up by a private security or detective agency because as it transpires he was one of the good guys.
In fact at first UCOS had no inkling about why the man was standing on a street corner for 2 hours and the background to his activity until they went to the scene at the same time he did and encountered the mother of a boy who had played chicken with a friend and been knocked down and killed by a passing taxi cab whose driver had no opportunity to stop. The mother had visited the site of his death every day then as she had continued to do, delivering flowers from the nearby florist where she worked as manager and despite her tragic story she became my number one suspect,
Examination of the records concerning the death of the son confirmed that the driver was no responsible, a verdict which the mother continued not to accept. Contact with the driver reveals him to be good man haunted by what happened. What emerges is that in fact the East German man had not been after the Taxi driver as a friend of the mother but he had had become concerned that she was set on revenge while her balance of mind was understandably disturbed.
Too late the team appreciate that their investigation has rekindled the mother’s inability to accept that the boy’s death was self inflicted. They find she had stabbed the Taxi driver who remains fighting for his life at the end of the programme. She has taken an overdose but insufficient for her to be taken in to police custody for the assault and the death of the East German man who she admits was stabbed accidentally by her as he attempted to take the knife from her that she intended to use on the Taxi driver.
The team have located the daughter but she runs away having become hostile to all authority figures. The find a memory stick which reveals that she is responsible for a Blog on the activities of the Blue Flower the organisation which enabled her to be brought up in the West.
All the available evidence to the Team and to the daughter indicate that her father had been responsible for the arrest of his wife as she attempted to escape with the child to west as the girl urgently needed medication not readily available in East Germany at the time. As a consequence of his action as a member of the secret police his mother, who had become a member for the Blue Flower organisation had died in custody.
The florist who had killed him does inform the UCOS team that as he died he had uttered a phase in German which translated means the Blue Flower. The team had examined his former residence in a hostel type block which is now empty awaiting demolition. Nothing had been found at the time or since. They make a separate visit and work out that the dimensions of the room suggest not just a hidden compartment but a significant storage area, reached by pressing a flower on the wallpaper behind a wardrobe which has been coloured Blue. That he was able to construct the room and has amassed a vast quantity of material is not questioned by the team but from photos on display and from the journal they learn the truth. Both had been members of the Blue Flower organisation but having only been able to ensure the child was rescued it was the mother who had the idea that the husband should arrest her and therefore protect his position and be able to escape, find his daughter and tell her the truth of what happened.
The team are therefore able to show the daughter the room and his work as well as the photos so she can reappraise her views and feelings about the man. Despite some of the flaws in the storyline the episode had the feel of authenticity, because it was so sad, with the man dying before completing his mission. He had been able to trace the girl to Shepherds Bush and had stood close to the Market entrance for an hour or more before undertaking his work shift in the hope of seeing the daughter presumably having gained a recent photo, although this was also not made clear. He had done this for year upon year in all weathers. At the end she has the new understanding to comfort her but as with many such stories in real life there was no happy ending
The latest episode Part of a Whole ticked many boxes of interest and in terms of storyline about the machinations of the Secret Service and their engagement with criminals for political purposes.
Stephen Fisher an urbane and apparently cold heated senior figure in the British Security Services has from time to time intervened in the activities of UCOS and until now appeared to have some kind of hold over the Deputy Assistant Metropolitan Commissioner, DACC Strickland, one of whose functions is to supervise the activities of the UCOS team under the Unit Leader played by Amanda Redman and to set their priorities and work programme.
As the episode begins Fisher returns to his bachelor flat and senses and spots something is wrong to exit quickly before it is blown up leaving the assassins to conclude he has died, something which the media accept was a gas explosion death. Strickland summons the full team to meet him at an out of town shopping centre car park to explain that their involvement while concerned with the death of a Journalist several decades before not only directly involves Fisher but himself as they had been part of a team assembled to undertake an illegal break in for their country to find out what the Journalist had known. The contents of the files had been photographed in relation to his work uncovering something related to Terrorist organisation in Northern Island and a well known crime boss in London although at the time they had known very little about what they were doing except it was in the national interest.
The Journalist had been killed in a hit and run in the presence of his then nine year old daughter who had never accepted that the death was accidental. When recently preparing to put a home on the market the daughter had come across a set of papers from those days, spreadsheets full of figures with one page missing. When older she had gone to a fellow journalist friend of her father about her concerns and he had promised to investigate but had never come back to her. She had more recently gone back to the police an somehow, I cannot remember how, the information had come to the attention of Stephen Fisher who understandably had commenced to make inquiries of his own and this had ignited the touch paper for the past to intrude on the present in such a dramatic way..
When interviewed the journalist first pretends ignorance and substantiates the original story but when interviewed more formally he confesses that he was aware more of the investigation that had been undertaken at the time but had become scared on learning that the principal target had been a major London Criminal of his day.
Meanwhile Strickland has set about contacting the other members of the unit that broke into the home of Journalist for the government. He finds that one has already died in an alleged accident and the second appears to have died from a heart attack. At this address he finds Fisher there, The find that a another colleague was at a Security Service safe house having received the warning message from the man who had alerted Fisher and Strickland to meet her with Fisher going in and Strickland waiting outside in the car,
Meanwhile Jerry and the new man have leaned on a snout who admits that it was the Crime boss who hired the hit men that placed the bomb in the flat of Fisher and who would appear to be responsible for the other deaths. The criminal is also identified from the papers provided by the daughter and he is visited by the team and shows contempt for their interest revealing that he remains a Secret Service Asset. This explains why suspicion since the death of the Journalist that the Criminal was involved in Drugs Prostitution and people trafficking and various other criminal activities but was never charged.
Jerry and he new man have been keeping an eye on one of the men of the Crime boss at a cafe and manages to learn by subterfuge that two men on a motor bike are going to an address which they follow and which happens to be the road where the safe house is located. As luck and good scripting would have it the killers arrive as Fisher is leaving the house and he is shot twice in the chest but not mortally. One of the two men is hit and injured by the vehicle of Jerry and the new man. The other escapes. The injured is chased down to a car park where he is about kill Jerry but fortunately one of the other original unit members who has also been trailing UCOS team members is on hand to kill the assassin before he can shoot Jerry. The team then pull a stunt which gets the phone off the man who had received the tip off call that led the assassin to the safe house indicating that the tip had come from within the service.
Strickland had visited one of the original unit members and his wife. It was a challenge for him to make the visit because he had a serious affair with the wife although it was not clear of this was before or after they had married. Since leaving the service the man had become a successful investment banker and very wealth and well connected. It then transpires that the phone call came not from the man but his wife who had been in the security services since recruited direct from Oxford.
The reason why Strickland was sure this couple were involved in the break in, in seeing the missing secret document, in the death of the journalist and in subsequent and more recent attacks and deaths comes from Brian working out that the missing papers of the inquiry team into the death of the had been hidden in another file. When this file was looked at it appeared to reveal nothing as the witnesses were unable to identify anything about the car however what they did say prompted the team to revisit the daughter and she recounted how she had been pulled back from the car by a woman who had sat on a park bench said she would return but never did. Although it happened decades before she might remember the woman from her eyes and who had spoken she remembered the woman talking to another man on the scene. Other witnesses had seen the woman before that day one at a cafe where the father had taken the daughter for some food. It all suggested that the woman had been following.
The story that unfolded also had a ring of potential authenticity as had the Blue Flower. The criminal had been used as an informant on the terrorist group in Northern Ireland through selling those drugs and whose information had contributed to the eventual peace process. He had therefore been protected since despite his continuing criminal operations. The husband had seen the missing document which provided him information which tied the payments being processed for the trafficking involved. The journalist had been taken out by the criminal without the approval of the Secret Service but the couple had been protecting him since. And provided the information when Fisher started to ask awkward questions which led to the attempts on his life and those of the other members of the team.
Strickland was able to blackmail the couple into upping sticks and departing these shores with their ill gotten gains and at the price of the criminal and the other assassin and crime gang’s members being “give” to the police for prosecution.
This still left UCOS with a sour taste although Fisher was intent on doing some of his own sorting when he returned after recovering from the bullet wounds.
The other two earlier programmes proved less interesting. One concerned a poet whose body had been found burned and where a loan shark who was imprisoned always claimed he was not guilty. Jerry was hostile to poetry until he discovered it could be effective as a means of engaging young women in conversation and turning their heads. Woman are throwing themselves at the best friend of the dead poet who had since become a nationally and internally known name and wealthy. A kind of John Betjeman of his day!
The crux of this case was that the poet in question did not die but was secreted away for decades and which solved one of the mysteries of someone who went missing at the same time and who could not be found. His accomplice was someone who was viewed as a suspect, commercially successful contemporary poet whose work had suddenly taken off with the death of his friend and where the finger was pointed out by someone who recognised some of her former boyfriend’s personal experience in the latest published volume which the author could not known have about. The reality was that because he was officially dead the poet had passed his continuing work to his friend to be published as his so they were both able to make a good living, one in comparative seclusion although it amazes me how people are supposed to be able survive in such ways without needing a doctor, dentist, bank accounts and other services where accurate personal information and proof are required in the first instance of registering.
The other story was about tennis and the suicide of a brilliant young tennis player shortly after she had lost an important game to her rival. There were suspects galore in this, a separate/divorced addict of a father with gambling debts who had asked the girl to lose to stop him being beaten up. The girl’s agent because she had said she was going to leave, also her main rival and the rival’s mother. The culprit was the girl’s own mother in terms of a manslaughter charge after her daughter had lost the match upset with news that her younger sister had gained a scholarship position with the tennis coach who had abused her and groomed others and where the mother knew but did not want to jeopardise the financial success which would have come from both talented daughters. The girl had lost the crucial game and confronted her mother after learning her young sister had been given a scholarship to work with the coach and the mother had then visited the daughter to prevent her going to the police leading to the girl toppling from the roof garden of her flat. The rival to the girl had been in the flat in the toilet at the same time and knew somebody had been present and told her mother who had persuaded her not to say anything. Although the two girls had been rivals on the court they had been friends of it contrary to popular understanding which causes UCOS to commence on the wrong track. The episodes could have been called Mothers or Some Mothers more accurately.
In both programmes a number of individuals could be expected to be sent to prison as part of justice system involvement.
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