Department S

- Season 1

(1969)

Story dealt with an aircraft which arrived at destination six days late, evolving into a spy chase focusing on a brainwashed British diplomat.

In rural England a petrol tanker skids and collides with a van, killing its driver. When the van driver investigates, he finds that the tanker is not carrying fuel but its interior is decked out like the cabin of a yacht and there is a young woman in a bikini, apparently injured, inside. However, when the police arrive she has disappeared. Jason King finds a lighter with an insignia which he recognizes as belonging to an old acquaintance and so begins a trail leading to France and to South Africa.

Four men in fancy dress costumes are celebrating committing a robbery in a house near a building site when they are gunned down. When a man's body is recovered, locked in a trunk in a car that was pushed into a lake, the bullets that killed him match those from the gun of one of the murdered quartet. Stewart follows the trail to piece together the connection and to unmask the person who hired the robbers and who is holding Libby, a witness to the robbery, captive.

Needing to wake early next day to participate in a beauty contest Susan Lewis, staying at her father's pub in the village of Hambledown takes a sleeping pill but wakes in the night to see the entire population of Hambledown being helped into trucks by military men. Next morning she finds herself the only person in the village. When Department 'S' comes to investigate, a patch of scorched earth in a field where a gate post has been freshly painted seems to point to evacuation from an ecological disaster.

An aeroplane carrying a hundred and thirty passengers on a flight from New York asks for landing clearance in London but, having safely landed, it is discovered that there is nobody at all on the plane and the pilot is later found murdered in a warehouse. The mystery deepens when Annabelle finds a photograph of a reclusive industrialist apparently boarding the plane, although his name was not on the passenger list. Is it all part of an elaborate scheme to abduct him?

An estate agent shows a client a warehouse on a trading estate in which, to their shock, they discover that the entire ground floor of an elegant house has been constructed - furthermore there is a dead woman and an apparently deaf, demented young man, who is taken to a psychiatric hospital but killed before he can say anything more than a woman's name. From a freshly-painted portrait hanging on the wall of the elegant room, Jason deduces that the room is a copy of one in which another murder will soon take place unless Department 'S' can prevent it.

Stewart is at Colindale golf course in Scotland for a tournament but one of the players, Johnnie Collins, already disqualified for turning up late ,is found dead on a beach. Nothing sinister is suspected until his home is broken into and his golf clubs stolen. Stewart pursues another golfer, Eddie Curtis, who also disappears, the trail leading to a casino in London, which is part of a smuggling ring using the golfing circuit.

Three days after he disappeared on his way to see 'Don Giovanni' at Covent Garden, food critic Robin Skelton is found wandering in the Mexican desert. The Department is called in to investigate, and it becomes apparent that Skelton was mistaken for his double, rocket scientist Peter Sinclair, who is involved in tests for the American space schedule. Once they realize this, they discover that in the meantime Sinclair has also been kidnapped. The only clue Skelton can give the Department is 'Turtle in the Shell', which leads them to the Bahamas, where Sinclair has been ...