"I really stole it, you know. $20,000 was like highway robbery."
 "It certainly was."

CAST

TONY CURTIS (DANNY WILDE)	ROGER MOORE (LORD BRETT SINCLAIR)

Hannah Gordon (Lucy)	John Ronane (Rupert Hathaway)	Leon Greene (Abel Gaunt)
Michael Wynne (Policeman)	Talfryn Thomas (the Poacher)	Michael Sheard (Walden)

 

ORIGINAL AIR DATE 31st DECEMBER, 1971

Danny buys a country cottage - but he is also buying himself and Brett into dire danger!
 

The cottage is undoubtedly old. At one time, it may have been picturesque. But it's now empty and derelict, standing forlornly alone in the middle of a field.

But Danny Wilde sees it through rose-tinted glasses. This most Anglophile of Americans has just purchased it. The cottage is his little bit of England.

Brett Sinclair  sees it in its true colours - a ramshackle old place that's going to need a lot done to it to make it habitable. But he goes along with Danny in promising to give him a helping hand in the renovations.

Neither suspects the menace that lurks within its four walls and the first hint of danger comes when the local squire, Rupert Hathaway, turns nastily threatening when Danny refuses to sell. Rupert owns all the land around and had no idea that the cottage had been sold.

The mystery deepens when Brett meets an attractive girl named Lucy  who says she is a bird-watcher on holiday. But why should a bird-watcher possess a gun?

There's a shock for Danny when he goes to the well for some water and hauls up a corpse. The spinning handle knocks him unconscious, and it is Lucy who pulls him to safety when Rupert and his men are searching for him. When he regains consciousness, Danny finds scenes of terrible destruction in the cottage, the word "DEATH" inscribed on a wall and, in his car, a crudely made wax figure with nails driven into it. All the signs of black magic and, in the local inn, Brett hears frightening stories of the cottage being haunted.

Yet when the local policeman, Constable Harvester  investigates, no body is to be found in the well!

Lucy's activities become even more suspicious until, after Danny has been menaced by hooded figures and tied up, she reveals that she is a member of the Fraud Squad. She guesses that the body in the well was that of one of her colleagues who had been working with her on a case in which Rupert Hathaway is believed to be the central figure with the cottage playing a vital part in the racket he is running.

Danny and Brett have a lot to overcome before Danny can enjoy his little piece of England!
 

Michael Sheard (Walden) is an actor whose characters seem to usually die in nasty ways. In this episode his character is killed by the 'witches coven'. As Admiral Ozzel in The Empire Strikes Back, he is strangled courtesy of Darth Vader. In Dr Who, Sheard is strangled by his own brother in one story and has his brain fried by Daleks in another.  He is also familiar to Grange Hill viewers as a schoolteacher but managed to successfully cheat death in the playground