Held For Questioning

Tommy Lee has barely had time to unpack since leaving prison, and already the safes of Thamesford are being opened all over again. The pattern is obvious enough that the task force's attention lands on the newly released man immediately, and Hawkins sets about trying to pin him down. But then a security guard is shot and seriously wounded during one of the jobs, and a series of break-ins stops being a nuisance and starts looking like murder.

The episode tightens from there. What had been a hunt for a busy safe-breaker becomes a race to find Lee before somebody dies, or before he slips the net entirely. Nobody in Thamesford is surprised to see Lee's name come up; surprise is a luxury the squad cannot afford. Norman Jones plays Lee as a man who knows exactly how much rope he has left, and Denis Quilley's Jack Taylor gives the story a second, harder face to reckon with. Pamela Miles appears as Mary Phillips, and the usual ranks are out in force: Sgt. Evans, PC Snow, Chief Insp. Rankin and Sgt. Burke, with Frank Windsor's Watt and Walter Gotell's Cullen keeping the pressure on from above.

Robert Barr and Elwyn Jones wrote it, and Gerald Blake directed. The show has always understood how quickly a property crime can curdle into something worse, and the episode makes that slide feel inevitable without rushing it. Every report of an opened safe is another chance to catch a break, and the atmosphere thickens with each one that gets away.

It is solid, workmanlike television of the kind the series could produce in its sleep, and the urgency is real even when the outcome is familiar. The guard lying in a hospital bed changes everything, and the net closes with Hawkins doing the best work of his week.