MacGuffin’s Transputer

Laura has left CBS: according to Rocky this is because she felt that Harry was taking her for granted. Charlie Hardiman is having to answer the phone and act as secretary. Harry is desperate to find a permanent replacement but all the girls that he has interviewed so far are proving to be singularly useless.

Robert MacGuffin, a hardware designer who works for a computer company, Pictel, believes that his former secretary, Alexandra Wilton, is stealing the design for the company’s latest transputer. He wants Ken and Harry to watch her. He suspects her of industrial espionage because she has just resigned for no apparent reason (or so he says) and she already has a prison record for cheque fraud. Ken and Rocky set up their cameras and binoculars in a disused warehouse opposite the studio flat where she lives. Rocky follows Alex to the ice rink where she meets her boyfriend, Jim Parham.

When Ken sees a middle-aged man arrive at Alex’s flat and offer her a cheque which she refuses, he tries to get closer to find out what is happening. Could this be the man that she is selling the computer design to? (In fact he later turns out to be her father!) Ken shins up a convenient fire escape outside her window and hears an argument: Alex tells the man “I don’t want it” and the man calls her “an ungrateful bitch”. But as the man is leaving, Alex sees Ken half-way up the building. Thinking on his feet, he claims to be suicidal and about to jump. She invites him into the flat to “tell her all about it”. Ken’s cover is well and truly blown.

Alex applies for the secretarial job which Harry has advertised, causing him a certain amount of consternation. However he quickly realises that by offering her the job he will have the perfect excuse to keep an eye on her. Ken takes some convincing on this point. As Rocky is showing her round the office he has to surreptitiously remove the file containing their case-notes on her!

When MacGuffin comes to the warehouse where Ken and Rocky are watching Alex’s flat, he sees their photographs of her boyfriend, Jim Parham, and tells them that Jim works for Wyatt Corporation, a rival electronics firm. Later he phones Ken to arrange a meeting at his office. However once Ken has set off, MacGuffin goes to Alex’s flat, lets himself in with a duplicate key and hides the transputer circuit board in her toilet cistern. That night, purely by chance, Parham finds it when the toilet won’t flush properly. In the middle of the night he unsolders all the chips and sneaks away with the design. Ken sees Jim leave in a hurry and decides to confront Alex about him. She is rather horrified when she finds out that Ken is the would-be suicidal jumper, but he explains that MacGuffin has asked CBS to watch her... and why. When Alex sees the remains of the circuit board, she realises that her former boss has planted it, Her suspicions are confirmed when MacGuffin asks Ken to search the house – obviously he wants Ken to find the “stolen” circuit board. Angry at the way MacGuffin has deceived her and for the way that he sacked her without any explanation, she suggests that they replace the transputer in his safe to thwart his claim that it has been stolen.

It turns out that MacGuffin has offered Pictel’s confidential design to Jim Parham and his boss Henry Maple. When they realise what he has done, they decide to tell Pictel. Jim admits that he only started going out with Alex to find out some background information about MacGuffin; discovering the transputer was an unexpected find.

Ken, Harry, Rocky and Alex gatecrash a party at Pictel. Alex does a quick change into a slinky black cocktail dress and hides in MacGuffin’s office. She connects a lap-top PC to the electronic lock on his safe and starts to search for the combination. Meanwhile Parham and Maple tell Liz Kennedy, MacGuffin’s boss, that he has offered the transputer to them. MacGuffin denies everything because he fully expects Ken and Harry to report that they have found it at Alex’s flat. When Liz demands to see inside his safe, MacGuffin is gobsmacked to find the transputer (or what is left of it) still there. She fires him immediately but decides not to involve the police because neither Pictel nor Wyatt want any adverse publicity. Liz offers to take Alex back and give her a job “in promotions” but Alex takes great delight in telling her that she already has a job – in “the security business”.

Notes and episode list © Martin Underwood, 1999

Page last modified: 17 December 2008, 23:48