- Blackmail, corruption, and the finding of a body in a park causes some complex problems for the Homicide squad, who find it difficult to sort out the truth from a mass of conflicting evidence.
- Two petty criminals, Phil Kennedy (Colin McEwan) and Bernie Meadows (Noel Browne) are driving around suburban Melbourne late at night looking for cars to break into. While they are parked in one street, they see a Mercedes Benz pull up and park there. The driver of the Mercedes, Pascoe (Max Meldrum) gets out of the car and goes into the house that he has parked in front of. Kennedy notices that Pascoe has left the keys in his car door.
Kennedy and Meadows quickly take advantage of the situation, using the keys to steal the Mercedes. Between them, they drive their own vehicle and the stolen Mercedes to a nearby park. Their plan is to do a quick strip job on the Mercedes before hitting the road. Meadows has a look inside the boot for anything valuable while Kennedy rifles inside.
Suddenly, Meadows screams out, then runs to his car and drives off. Kennedy then has a look inside the Mercedes' boot, and after pulling a few items out, he finds the body of a naked man (Gary Gray) wrapped in some bedsheets. Kennedy dumps the body on the ground and drives off in the stolen Mercedes, hiding this vehicle in his garage.
The next day, the naked man's body is found, and after the police are called, Detective Peter Barnes (George Mallaby), Detective Sergeant David Mackay (Leonard Teale) and Senior Detective Jim Patterson (Norman Yemm) are sent to the park to check it out. They find no identification on the body, but they find a few other items beside it, including a Mercedes Benz tyre iron and a bracelet inscribed with the words "KL loves DW", and send them off to Forensic to be checked for fingerprints.
By this time, Kennedy has completed his search of the Mercedes and found the name and work address of its owner. He pays Pascoe a visit at his office with blackmail on his mind. Kennedy tells Pascoe to give him $500 every month, or the police will be told where to find Pascoe's car. Pascoe agrees to the arrangement.
Meanwhile, the police have received a call from landlady Hilda Mercer (Vivean Gray), reporting the disappearance of her tenant. Hilda tells them that his room is splattered with blood everywhere. She is brought to the morgue, and identifies the body as that of her tenant, David Whittaker, which accounts for one set of initials on the bracelet.
As detectives start to backtrack Whittaker's movements, they catch a few more breaks, finding the fingerprints of Meadows on the tyre iron, and using the serial number of the iron to identify Pascoe as the owner of the stolen car.
Barnes and Patterson pay Pascoe a visit. He tells them that he no longer owns the car, but cannot recall the name of the person that he sold it to. The detectives think that the information he has given them is false, but don't have enough to take things any further.
They have a little more success when they bring Meadows in and he fesses up to what has happened. With his information, the police swoop on Pascoe and Kennedy, and also find where the stolen Mercedes Benz is. Before long, Kennedy and Meadows are charged with the theft of the Mercedes, and Pascoe is questioned further by Barnes and Mackay, while Patterson travels 60 miles to the small town that Whittaker had called his home.
After a couple of hours of intense questioning, Pascoe eventually comes clean about his part in the mess. He had hooked up with Whittaker at a private homosexual club, then later dropped him off at his flat while he went to get a bottle of drink. He swears that when he returned, he found that Whittaker had been beaten to death, and at that moment, he panicked, wrapped the body in some bedsheets, dumped the body in his car boot and drove home to get a shovel to use to bury Whittaker. It was while he was getting the shovel that Kennedy and Meadows stole his car.
While Barnes and Mackay had been questioning Pascoe about Whittaker's death, Patterson discovers that Whittaker had left his home town after a scandal with the local high school teacher (Bryon Williams). When he finds out that the teacher's name is Kevin Lang, he realises that it matches the other initials shown on Whittaker's bracelet. Patterson tries to ask some questions of Lang, but he leads Patterson and the local police on a wild chase that ends after Lang finds himself in a dead end at a quarry. Lang is arrested and brought to Melbourne for questioning.
A little while later, Lang tearfully breaks down, and in between sobs he admits that he is the one that killed Whittaker. He had been upset that Pascoe had left him and his town to move to the big city, and had gone to Melbourne to beg Pascoe to come back to him. Lang had lost it after Pascoe met his suggestion of reconciliation with laughter. Kevin Lang is charged with Pascoe's murder.
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