Kick Off

Football crowds make excellent cover, and Tommy Nunn knows it. A man can vanish in a crowd of thousands without trying hard. Barlow has gone to the ground with an eye on the villain, and loses him in the crowd just as word comes in of a diamond robbery at a jeweller's nearby. The two incidents sit together far too neatly for coincidence. And the suspicion that they are connected drives the episode.

The set-up is economical: Nunn disappears, and a robbery happens. What follows is the familiar business of the task force putting the pieces back together, with Watt and Hawkins working the robbery while Barlow chews over what he saw, or failed to see, in the stands. The link between the two crimes is not proven, only felt, which is exactly the kind of hunch the episode enjoys testing. Walter Gotell's Chief Constable Cullen hovers over the whole operation, and there is a decent spread of police in the ranks. Insp. Jackson, Insp. Armstrong, Sgt. Evans, PC Nelson and PW Det. Con. Donald all get their share of the screen.

Elwyn Jones wrote it and Frank Cox directed. The episode uses the chaos of a match day the way the show always uses public life, as cover for crime and a headache for the police. There is nothing subtle about a diamond heist, but there is plenty of room for error when it is done in a hurry. There is something agreeably familiar about the whole thing, in the best sense: the crush of bodies and a villain who simply isn't where he was a minute ago.

Roddy McMillan makes a memorable nuisance of himself as Nunn, the kind of face the regulars will be seeing again. The diamonds, for the moment, are the smaller story. The man who walked away in the middle of a crowd is the one that rankles. Vanishing in full view is its own kind of insult to the police.