Cash And Carry

There's nothing like a false alarm to make a copper suspicious. A report of trouble at a cash and carry company looks at first like just that, a false alarm, and yet Charlie Barlow won't let it go. The more he looks, the clearer it becomes that the robbery could only have been pulled off with a hand on the inside. So he sets a trap and waits to see who walks into it.

That gives the Task Force two jobs instead of one: catch the thieves, and find the man behind them. Anyone can nick the stock given the chance, but somebody had to arrange the whole thing, and that somebody is presumably still at work the next morning, cheerful and unsuspected. The episode runs on the gap between the two crimes, the visible one that sends officers scrambling and the quieter one that never leaves the office. Chasing the men who did the lifting is straightforward enough; proving who told them to is slower work, and it tends to make enemies.

Elwyn Jones wrote it and Simon Langton directed. Stratford Johns leads as Det. Chief Supt. Barlow, with Frank Windsor as Det. Supt. Watt and Norman Bowler as Det. Insp. Hawkins. The supporting cast is nicely filled out: Walter Gotell as Chief Constable Cullen, Terrence Hardiman as Insp. Armstrong, David Lloyd Meredith as Sgt. Evans, Terence Rigby as PC Snow, Susan Tebbs as PW Det. Con. Donald, Timothy Craven as PC Briggs and Peter Sallis as Lodge.

The casting gives it a little extra. Gotell, later a fixture of the Bond films as the KGB's General Gogol, sits behind the Chief Constable's desk, and Sallis, who would become the voice of Wallace and the mildest man in Last of the Summer Wine, is somewhere in the middle of the mess. You spend half the episode trying to work out which of them knows more than he's letting on.

It's a sturdy procedural about the way the deepest secrets sit right next to the everyday ones. And the man behind the robbery is the one worth watching.