Months later, in a new case, actor and singer Charles Highbury, makes an insurance claim for the loss of his voice.

However, Mrs Litchen's fiancé confirms Sarah is not the woman who sold him the painting and Branwell proposes to her and they quickly marry.

Branwell and Sarah eventually find the forger of the paintings, who is in league with Clive Fisher, a cousin of Tracey Moreton.

Mrs Moreton had kidnapped the poodle and sent the ring to pressure the Branwells into staying silent and preserving her dead son's reputation.

Branwell resigns as a matter of honour, but on leaving is intercepted by board members keen to persuade him to stay in his post.

But the absence of necessary pace and drive appears especially regrettable from the production team who concocted the earlier, far more gripping, Green for Danger.

Borrowing from a thousand and one films noirs, it follows the misfortunes of Jack Hawkins, an insurance assessor whose investigation of a series of fires draws him into murder, marriage and blackmail with a fatalistic inevitability.