Conspiracy

Dawes runs a small gang of safe breakers, and at the start of this one he is doing the sensible thing: taking his new girlfriend to Spain for a holiday, putting the crowbars away and letting the sun do its work. His absence is Adler's opportunity. With Dawes out of the country, Adler decides to play mind games with an old flame of his, Lucy Brett, using the one woman who might know how Dawes thinks to pull the strings of the operation.

The episode leans into the personal, and it is better for it. Ray Brooks plays Dawes as a man who believes he has left his working life behind, and Jo Rowbottom's Lucy is the complicated part of Adler's past that he is willing to use. The mind games are the engine of the hour, and they run on the small resentments between people who used to matter to each other. The holiday in the sun sits uneasily against the police work going on back home, where Evans, Nesbitt and Knowles keep the pressure on the gang's local connections, helped by PW Det. Sgt. Green, played by Heather Stoney. Gretchen Franklin, Robert Bridges and David Hargreaves fill out the supporting cast as Mrs. Walters, Casey and Carter.

James Doran and Elwyn Jones wrote the script, and Paddy Russell directed. The episode is a reminder that the show's best material often comes when the case and the personal get tangled together.

"Conspiracy" is a quieter title than the plot suggests. There is no grand plot here, just a patient policeman using what he knows about a woman to get at a man. It is the kind of episode that rewards watching for the performances rather than the twists, and Ray Brooks, an actor who always knew how to carry charm and menace in the same scene, makes Dawes worth the wait.