Run For Your Money

Barlow gets a case here that suits his temper. Twenty thousand pounds has gone missing from the company accounts of Arthur Austin's former employer, and Austin himself is not apologising. The money, he seems to think, is the least interesting part of the story. That attitude is exactly what pulls the investigation along, because a man who believes he has already won is usually the easiest man to trip up.

The supporting cast does its share. Watt is on hand, Hawkins too, with the Chief Constable keeping a long-distance eye on proceedings and Evans supplying the legwork. Ronald Radd plays Austin with a complacent edge that makes you want the net to tighten around him. Around him cluster A.G. Fenton, played by Neil Stacy, Sara Jamieson (Jenny Hanley), Rose (Jenny Till) and Miss Peters (Pamela Sholto), the small crowd of colleagues and hangers-on who find themselves in the orbit of a man under suspicion.

Elwyn Jones wrote the script and David Sullivan Proudfoot directed. The episode is a reminder that embezzlement is a quieter crime than the ones the Task Force usually chases. There is no running through back streets here. The theft happened with a pen and a set of ledgers, and the investigation proceeds the same way, one patient question at a time.

But the title has it right. The money has run, and so has Austin's loyalty to the people he used to work beside. What makes the episode work is watching Barlow treat a sum of money as a puzzle rather than a prize. Radd's Austin gives him a worthy opponent, smug enough to be worth catching and stubborn enough to make the chase interesting. It is not the most explosive hour the series produced, but it is a tidy, well-made one, the kind that rewards close attention without ever raising its voice.