The Bounty Hunter

The gang has done the job and taken the money, and that should be the end of the story. It is not. Heavies turn up demanding their agreed share of the loot, and the polite fiction that robbery is a clean business comes apart. But if the gang refuses to pay, the threats stop being about money and start being about a mate currently inside and his wife.

The pressure cooker is the whole episode. The robbers, James Langley (David Sinclair), William Ross (Prentis Hancock), Harold Dalton (Mark Moss) and Lawrence Morgan (David Hargreaves), have the money and no safe way to keep it. The heavies hold the advantage, and the danger reaches past the gang itself to the families they thought were out of it. Everyone involved understands what happens to a man's people when the debt is not paid, and the episode leaves that understanding unspoken, which is worse. The heavies are not in a hurry, and a calm man asking for money is scarier than a shouting one.

Stratford Johns and Frank Windsor lead as Barlow and Watt, with David Lloyd Meredith's Evans and Brian Hall's Drake in support. Jimmy Gardner's Tom Price and Bonnie Hurren's Betty Price carry the human side of the ledger, the ones caught between the gang and its debtors.

Robert Barr and Elwyn Jones wrote it, Gilchrist Calder directed. The episode has the shape of a western: a hold-up followed by strangers riding in to collect. The satisfaction is in watching greed meet its bill, and in the reminder that a criminal's family usually pays for the crime twice. Tight, grim and neatly done. The episode is not in a hurry either, which suits the material: the longer the standoff lasts, the worse every option gets. It is a lean hour, and all the better for it.