Now You See It, Now You Don't

The arrest is almost an accident. Pearson and Lincoln stop John Dean for stealing cars, and while he is being taken in he drops a piece of paper. On it, a list of cars, stolen to order. Two of them have already gone missing from their owners, which makes the list evidence of something bigger than one man on a joyride. But Dean himself is the real find. The name is an alias, and the man wearing it is wanted by the Metropolitan Police in connection with the Hatton Garden robbery.

That is the neat trick of Robert Barr and Elwyn Jones's script, directed by Vere Lorrimer: a routine collar opens a door onto a much larger job. The episode has the good sense not to pretend the local team is suddenly running the Met's case. They pass the prize up the line, and the drama is in watching them realise what they have caught. Hawkins and Grant steer; Lincoln and Pearson did the catching. Dave Hill's Det. Insp. Williams is on hand for the wider picture. Andrew McCulloch is John Dean, the quiet centre of it all; Stephen Kane plays Peter Mellor, and John Hartley's Tommy Kelly, Harry Fielder's Keith Brogan and Eric Mason's welder fill out the edges of the story.

There is something almost comic about a professional being undone by a folded list, except the stakes climb as soon as the name checks out. For a man with a false name and a bigger crime behind him, it is the kind of mistake that undoes years of care. No lab work, no surveillance vans. Just a man in a hurry and a piece of paper he should have eaten. It is a small, tidy piece of television that knows a good break when it hands one to its detectives. And it is a reminder, if one were needed, that the biggest cases often start with the smallest slip.