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Fay Collins, who was just about to return to her hometown from London
for her birthday, is found dead, and soon enough, an acquaintance of hers,
Marion Hastings (Margot Trooger), pops up and claims she has seen him with
a man who turns out to be big-time publisher Clifton Morris (Albert
Lieven), and the scarf Fay has been strangled with appears to be his.
Inspector Yates (Heinz Drache) soon starts questioning Morris, and it
seems every little detail is pointing to him - which makes him almost too
perfect a suspect. Morris even seems to play his role as culprit well,
as he tries to pay a woman, Dinah Winston (Eva Pflug), to serve as his
witness while letting himself be blackmailed by a nightclub performer
(Erica Beer) - and when Dinah Winston is found dead in his appartment, it
seems his fate is sealed ... apart from the fact that Yates had a man
follow him and as a result, unbeknowest to Morris, he actually had an
alibi for the second murder - Yates won't let Morris know this yet though,
because he figures Morris is still the key to the whole case. Then
Morris gets into a fight with Fay's brother (Hellmut Lange), who accuses
him of being the killer and claims he even has some evidence to prove it,
and ultimately, Morris knocks his opponent out. Yates later tells him that
Fay's brother was actually killed in their fight - which is a blunt lie -,
upon which Morris calls his firend the priest (Horst Tappert) and
confesses to him that he has been set up by a blackmailing ring which Fay
has worked for, and it seems the head of the ring, whoever that was, has
killed Fay to get a fortune out of Morris. With this information, the
priest goes to the police, and Yates decides to use Morris as bait to get
a lead on the actual murderer. Morris is soon contacted by Marion
Hastings, who's obviously part of the ring, and she finally leads everyone
to artist Hopedean (Dieter Borsche), a marginal character so far who now
tries to kill Marion and this way reveals himself as being the killer of
the whole story. TV-series in six parts that seems terribly
old-fashioned today - stagey direction, German actors desperately trying
to come across as British, an overly convoluted, terribly constructed plot
- but was an amazing success in West Germany when it first aired. Seen
from today's point of view, the six-parter seems somewhat loveable because
of its shortcomings (rather than despite them) in a nostalgic sort of way,
but as a whodunnit as such, it's actually a bit of a disappointment.
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