Final Score

The shop robbery is Tommy Nunn's work, or so the task force believes, and then the cleaner turns up with the evidence that changes everything. Elsie Young is arrested carrying a suitcase full of money and uncut diamonds, which makes a modest smash-and-grab look suddenly, embarrassingly small. A cleaner with a suitcase full of uncut diamonds is not the usual shape of a shop robbery; the scale of the haul takes the case somewhere bigger.

Barlow, Watt and Hawkins now have to work backwards from a cleaner with a suitcase, and the episode enjoys the awkwardness of that. And Avis Bunnage makes Elsie Young a proper handful of a woman, the kind who knows exactly what she has done and intends to give nothing away lightly. The chase, such as it is, is for the people behind her, the ones who handed over the suitcase and stayed out of sight. Madeleine Mills appears as WPC Berry, while Terrence Hardiman's Insp. Armstrong and David Lloyd Meredith's Sgt. Evans crowd the edges and George Pravda's David Kahn adds a continental air of big-money business to the proceedings.

Elwyn Jones wrote it and Paul Ciappessoni directed, and the piece has the brisk, no-nonsense pace of the show at its most confident. A robbery that looks solved in the first ten minutes turns out to be only the beginning, which is a fair description of half of good police work: the easy answer is usually the one that needs re-examining. It is one of those episodes where the arrest is only the middle of the story.

For the cleaner, the suitcase was a lifetime's worth of trouble. For the task force, it was the break they needed. The title suggests a football result, and there is a sporting neatness to the way the case resolves, with the score finally running the task force's way. Nunn, wherever he is watching from, will know the feeling of a match that got away.