Time-Table

Jack Rogers is a veteran safe breaker with a problem solved. He has found himself a partner called Simmonds, a man the police files have never heard of, and together they are working their way around the country, cracking safes and never being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Every job comes with a perfect alibi, and the squad is left chasing men who, on paper, were nowhere near the crime.

The frustration is the drama. Watt, Hawkins, Cullen, Adler and Evans all take turns at the puzzle, and the episode does a good job of showing how an investigation stalls when the evidence keeps pointing at nothing. The title is the key. Somewhere in the timetables of trains, taxis and alibis there is a seam, and the whole hour is the slow, methodical hunt for it.

Bryan Pringle plays Simmonds, the ghost of the operation, and Peter Whitbread is Rogers, the professional whose skills are worth more to the partnership than his face. Jenny Hanley appears as Sara Jamieson, and Haydn Wood takes the small role of the Porter, part of the supporting furniture that keeps the world of the episode populated. Elwyn Jones wrote it, David Wickes directed.

The show always had a soft spot for the clever criminal, and "Time-Table" indulges it without quite admiring the men. The pleasure is in watching the police unpick a scheme that was designed to be unpickable, and the episode understands that the best alibis are ordinary ones. A man who was simply elsewhere, doing nothing worth remembering. That is the detail the case turns on, and it is a good one. The episode never cheats on that detail, which is why it satisfies. The hour rewards a viewer who keeps a notebook, which is as good a compliment as this show ever paid its audience.