This week's case involves the murder of Max Klein, an East German man; he was killed five years earlier and the case has been reopened because bank statements with his fingerprints on were found as part of an anti-fraud operation. This leads Brian and Gerry to the recycling centre he worked at; a bit of nosing around there suggests there is certainly something dodgy going on but no indication of any involvement with a murder. Before moving to London Max worked as a 'puzzler' piecing together the shredded Stasi files left behind when the Iron Curtain fell. There aren't many clues left to investigate and his cryptic final words 'blue flower' had no obvious meaning. The only person who seems to have known him was a woman who had lost her son when he was hit by a taxi; she explains that Max was looking for his daughter; he told her that he'd managed to smuggle her out of East Germany two years before the communist state fell. DNA leads them to the daughter he never found and she has a very different story to tell
she has files showing that far from being a good man he was in the Stasi and arrested his own wife as she tried to escape.
This was a decent episode with a good number of suspects including; the fraudsters working at the plant, the taxi driver who killed the child and even Max's own daughter. During the course of the investigation there are plenty of laughs to be had; I particularly liked the scene in a bar where Gerry prevented a crook from getting away while relaying an anecdote concerning a villain with a sawn off shotgun and a parrot on his shoulder! There is also some tragedy; we see how the taxi driver still hasn't got over killing the child even though he was cleared who would? If there was a fault it was that it fell into the TV cliché of having the only major character that didn't have an obvious motive turn out to be the killer still it was entertaining and that is what matters.
This was a decent episode with a good number of suspects including; the fraudsters working at the plant, the taxi driver who killed the child and even Max's own daughter. During the course of the investigation there are plenty of laughs to be had; I particularly liked the scene in a bar where Gerry prevented a crook from getting away while relaying an anecdote concerning a villain with a sawn off shotgun and a parrot on his shoulder! There is also some tragedy; we see how the taxi driver still hasn't got over killing the child even though he was cleared who would? If there was a fault it was that it fell into the TV cliché of having the only major character that didn't have an obvious motive turn out to be the killer still it was entertaining and that is what matters.
