Advanced search

DI Crabbe retires from the police force after being shot and sets up his own restaurant. However, his ex-boss, Assistant Chief Constable Fisher constantly calls Crabbe back on duty.

To save money Fisher turns over the police catering to a mass production company, The Happy Ploughman, clients of Margaret. Henry is appalled but investigates after several acts of sabotage against the firm. Former police canteen manager Tom Selly and his bread supplier Flora McKee are suspects and Henry arrests Flora. However such is the resentment in the force that no one uses the new automated canteen and Fisher hints that he would like to find discrepancies in The Happy Ploughman's books that would allow him to revoke the franchise. Henry duly obliges, as well as catching the real saboteur.

The Chen family appear to be victims of racial harassment when their Chinese takeaway is set on fire, but widowed Mr. Chen will not go to the police so his daughter Mei asks Henry for help. It turns out that Chen is a gambler deeply in debt to a restauranteur in London's Chinatown who has been threatening him for the money he owes. When Pie in the Sky makes it to the final of the Great British Grub contest being held in London, Henry uses the trip to visit Chinatown and act as go-between. A winner and a loser return to Middleton come the end of the day.

Henry is drafted into Operation Grabbitback with bossy woman superintendent Chalmers, recovering stolen cars. Thanks to Henry, Chalmers catches the small fry and closes the case but Henry, with Fisher's help, apprehends a larger smuggling ring headed by two Russians, seeing off both Chalmers and an equally officious health inspector.

Henry and his team are called to a private boarding school where police Commander Colin Stilwell's son Alex has been beaten up by local youths. Henry initially encounters a wall of insular hostility from the establishment before Alex points him to another pupil, who has blackmailed the Chemistry teacher into manufacturing Ecstasy tablets, which he is selling around the school. Gary meanwhile creates a new blend of mustard and attracts the attention of a large food manufacturer who offer to market it. However, they want to alter the recipe, making it taste more bland, whereupon Gary, taking a leaf from Henry's book, puts his culinary principles first and tells them that the deal is off.

Henry and Margaret spend a day at the races with her new client Bob Bishop, who is resisting a take-over bid for his cider brewery. A mysterious man shadows Henry and then the corpse of stable lad Ben Tucker is found in a horse-box. Bob's brother Tony owns the stables, which are failing, and he is very curt with Henry when he comes to investigate. On the night he died Ben had argued with another stable lad Jerry Lawless over female jockey Jude O'Brien but he too is murdered and Bob's daughter Liz, another jockey, is found in his caravan with a bag full of bank-notes.

Liz claims the money is winnings from a bet and Henry releases her but notes that Jerry too has a healthy bank balance and surmises he was trading inside information for cash. Tony apologizes to Henry but tries to push Bob into accepting the take-over and Henry's mystery man proves to be a private eye, since Tony has been fixing races and the Jockey Club have hired him to get proof. Henry believes Tony got Jerry to nobble his horses and killed Ben when he found out. He has the correct motive but the wrong suspect and it's Margaret who literally stumbles on the real killer and has a close call with them. Meanwhile Nicola is annoyed when a spoilt school-friend appears to be making a play for Gary, though she is actually trying to poach him for her restaurant - unsuccessfully.

Charles Rider, a wine-loving regular at Pie in the Sky, is being threatened. It turns out he is really Joseph Webb, an ex-burglar turned supergrass, and now in witness protection. His collection includes many valuable bottles of wine, some of them stolen property and formerly owned by a bent policeman. His cronies have tracked Webb down and want the most priceless bottle back. So Rider comes to Henry Crabbe for help. Can Crabbe restore justice while keeping his friend safe?

Henry supplies the catering at his friend Alistair's pheasant shoot, where Fisher is among the guests. Another member of the party is shot and killed and it looks as if Fisher accidentally shot him but Henry's investigation reveals a crime of passion involving a love triangle, a jealous husband - and a cover-up.

Armed robbers in crash helmets target the restaurant and customer Cherry Burdett's jewellery is stolen. Obnoxious D.S. Stringer investigates, alienating everyone with his insistence that it was an inside job and a staff member alerted the robbers to Cherry's booking. He accuses Gary because of his past, then Nicola - at whom he makes a pass - and her boyfriend Paul. When news of the robbery reaches the press Henry closes the restaurant to do his own investigation, solving the crime in time to mark two years of Gary giving up alcohol with a celebratory cake.

The Crabbes holiday in London in a flat owned by ex-policeman Nick Spencer whilst he is in America on business. However Margaret finds his packed suitcase under the bed and hears an answer-machine message from his daughter warning that her violent ex-con boyfriend Danny is on his way to see him. Henry discovers Nick in hiding whilst Margaret discovers Danny's corpse in the dust-bin, killed in self-defence by Nick. Henry's loyalty is put to the test, as is the patience of Sally and Gary when the agency staff turn out to be a quarrelsome married couple.

The large family of much-married Irishwoman Kit Kelly book the restaurant for a wedding banquet for her and her new husband, American television writer Byron De Goris. Byron's briefcase is stolen from his hotel and Henry is suspicious of his reaction and even more so when Margaret tells him that the groom is not Byron De Goris but his friend James Jackson. Margaret had known them both thirty years earlier and discovers that Byron killed himself and James assumed his identity. Henry has to find out why.

Henry is leading a stake-out of a pizza parlour, whose delivery drivers are suspected of robbing customers though Fisher doubts its cost effectiveness. Money problems hit the restaurant too. John and Steve have moved on and the account is in the red. Things look up with the knowledge that old bone of contention Hooperman has died, Henry's wooing the bank manager with his culinary skills and the arrival of new chef Gary, an ex-con and reformed drunk who nonetheless helps Henry catch the pizza gang. Unfortunately this success makes Henry so valuable an officer that his retirement is once more put on hold.

When Fisher allocates Henry to guard Sasha Wilkes, due to testify against her gangster husband, in the police 'safe house', D.C.I. Harding, who had expected the job, is resentful. Sasha is initially hostile but, won over by Henry's cooking, comes to confide in him. Harding uses a drug pusher called Vicky, who once knew Henderson, to discredit Henry and also discloses the safe house's location to Wilkes. Henry averts disaster and parts as friends with Sasha but wonders if they were used as bait by Fisher because he already suspected Harding.

Fisher sends Henry and the squad to a meat factory where animal rights protesters are demonstrating against the owner, Mr. Trubb's, use of veal in his Trubbs' Thunderbolt sausages. However, Henry finds to his surprise that the sausages contain soya and are wholly meat-free. Margaret, meanwhile, is concerned when her friend Julia, a wealthy widow, falls for a pilot much younger than herself and agrees to finance a bucket shop for him.

Henry has to solve a series of thefts from lorries and gets unexpected help from private security firm Troubleshooters. Their accuracy is such that he is suspicious of how they came to know of the crimes and believes that there is a possible informer within police ranks feeding them information for a reward. Troubleshooters are due to play the police eleven in an important football match. Both teams boast an ex-professional, in the police team's case Kirk Flowerbridge, who has a murky past and a liking for the drink. Fisher tasks Henry with minding Kirk and keeping him sober for the match. In the process of helping Kirk,Henry gets to identify the informer.

As Henry mysteriously loses his sense of smell he is intrigued when Fisher seems obsessed with arresting tyre exporter Peter Watson and suspects that Fisher, about to divorce his wife, is having an affair with Mrs. Watson. In fact she has discovered that her husband is defrauding her charity and is using Fisher to trap him. Having seen the case through Henry, feeling used by Fisher to catch Watson, resigns from the police and immediately regains his sense of smell. With Gary turning down the offer of work at another kitchen, Henry and his staff and colleagues have every reason to drink to the continuing success of Pie in the Sky.

Henry is appointed as the head of the Public Duties Squad, which essentially sells its services to the private sector, and, instead of the trusty D.S. Cambridge,he has two new staff members, W.P.C. Jane Morton and P.C Ed Guthrie, both of whom appear to have been side-lined in the past. Their first task is to guard a new housing estate which has been subject to vandalism. Local villagers claim that it is in the way of a centuries old right of way and, as usual, Henry has to use his diplomacy to form a resolution. On the home front there is trouble for Henderson when he is accused of growing tomatoes which do not conform to E.E.C. regulations and Henry has to sort out Gary, who is unhappy that waitress Nicola has left and is less than cordial to her replacement, Sally.

As Freddy Fisher launches a campaign to make the police more popular with young people, a boy named Nicky comes to Pie in the Sky, claiming he is there for work experience. Henry uses him in the kitchen and he impresses everyone, but then the till is robbed, and Nicky, who was not sent by any school, disappears. His mother last saw him a week earlier, the night a liquor store was robbed by a violent teenage gang. Henry tracks Nicky down to a childhood haunt, and finds out that he was bullied into joining the gang and now regrets it, which he proves by leading its members into a police trap.

Whilst investigating thefts of valuable plants from gardens,which are always replaced by the Gardens of Eden landscaping firm, Henry has to team up with the incompetent National Horticultural Division to stake out likely targets. By coincidence Margaret employs Gardens of Eden to create an alfresco eating area though the identity of the real thief is rather a surprise.

Henry's team go to the garish Luxor Hotel to protect the jury in the long-running fraud trial of Marcus Benson, accused of embezzling the Police Benevolent Fund. Several of the jurors are intimidated, including the reasonable foreman,Eric Dunfries. Henry discovers that the pretentious manager is a friend of Benson and uses the fact to make him give scope to Andrew, his talented but put-upon chef. The saboteur, in fact, turns out to be working against, and not for, Benson, whilst back at the restaurant Sally learns to get the better of a sex pest.