Thicker Than Water

Margery Keeverton is looking after the estate of her uncle, Geoffrey Keeverton, who has just died. He had made a considerable amount of money from a fairground amusement arcade and has now left it all to her. While staying at her late uncle’s house, she starts to receive nuisance phone calls which make it clear that she is being followed and which referred to an unpaid debt. Ken and Harry are asked to help. Because Harry rather fancies Margery, he is keen to help and even takes a week off work. Margery’s solicitor, Peter Haymon, has very little confidence in Ken’s abilities as an investigator. Harry takes Margery to the races but they happen to meet Haymon, spoiling Harry’s plans for a romantic day out. A friend tells Harry that Haymon is “one of the shiftiest lawyers in the Midlands”.

Ken and Harry keep watch on the house each night and their patience is eventually rewarded when they see a shady figure prowling round in the garden. They give chase but the man escapes, after giving Harry a black eye. However he leaves his coat behind. In the pocket Ken finds a plastic .22 bullet. He soon discovers that these bullets are used in fairground rifle-ranges, so he visits the local fairground and meets an elderly woman, Pat Goran, who runs the shooting stall and comes from a long line of showmen. Her grandson Ian wants to buy into a slot-machine stall. Ken suspects that Ian is the mysterious visitor to Margery’s house. He challenges Ian who admits that he had attacked Harry but claims that Keeverton’s house rightfully belongs to him because Geoffrey was his father! Pat tells Ken the whole story: Geoffrey had been married to Pat’s daughter. They separated but Geoffrey paid maintenance for Ian because he was “a fair man – very generous”.

Ken suspects that Margery is trying to discredit Ian so that she won’t have to share her inheritance with him. He also learns that she has been buying up arcades all over the place, enlarging the family empire. However he realises that she is innocent when she produces some notebooks that she has just found which list many payments to Pat Goran, whom she assumes is a man. When Ken and Harry mention Pat Goran’s name to Haymon, he immediately refers to her as “her” – how does he know that Pat is a woman rather than a man? They decide to set up Haymon by tipping him off that they are close to locating Pat. When he rushes round to the fairground and threatens Ian, Ken is watching. By stranding Haymon at the top of the Big Wheel, Ken extracts a confession from him: once he had persuaded Margery to expand the estate, he was planning to introduce Ian as the rightful heir, thereby claiming a larger amount of commission from Ian for restoring a larger estate. Haymon is discredited and Margery gladly agrees to share her inheritance 50:50 with Ian.

CBS are approached by a father and son, Joe and Calum Trevellyan, who are larger-than-life Northumbrian farmers with very strong (and rather unconvincing) Northumbrian accents to prove it. They want help in recovering their trial-winning sheepdog, Clara Bow, who has been stolen from a sheepdog trial in Haltwhistle by a farmer from Nottinghamshire. Ken gives the job to Rocky. Rocky and Calum raid the farm and steal the dog. Calum escapes but Rocky is left behind to face the music. After a few hours Calum returns the dog to the farmer. But when Rocky sees him later, he still has a sheepdog. Calum confesses to Rocky that he has operated a little scam: the dog that he had stolen was not Clara Bow but a champion stud dog which he had “borrowed” to father Clara Bow’s pups.

Notes and episode list © Martin Underwood, 1997

Page last modified: 17 December 2008, 23:48