An Inside Job

Barlow is sure the supermarket robbery was an inside job, and he is the sort of senior officer who trusts his own certainty. The episode's quiet question is whether that certainty is doing the work for him. He wants a conviction, and a man who wants a conviction badly enough can lose his feel for the shape of a case. It is a believable failing, and the hour has the patience to let it play out.

The Dent family sit at the centre of it: Jack (Ray Mort), Alice (Eve Pearce) and their son Philip (Spencer Banks), with James Brabham (Roy Macready) and Robert Saunders (Eamonn Boyce) nearby. As the pressure mounts, the family tensions start to cost somebody, and the episode does not flinch from the price. The most damaging secrets, it turns out, are the ones kept closest to home. The police keep asking the right questions in the wrong order, and the answers only arrive once the damage is done.

Stratford Johns carries the weight as Barlow, with Norman Bowler's Hawkins, David Lloyd Meredith's Evans, Brian Hall's Drake and Julie Hallam's Forest around him. James Doran and Elwyn Jones wrote it, Keith Williams directed.

What stays with you is the way the investigation keeps working even as the audience starts to doubt the man leading it. Barlow is too good to be simply wrong, and too stubborn to notice the cost. It is a taut, uncomfortable hour about a clever copper talking himself into a corner. And the family at the heart of it pays for his certainty. The title is exact: this was an inside job, and the inside in question was closer to home than anyone wanted to admit. By the end the squad has its answer, and the cost of it is not something anybody can put in the file.