Lady Luck

Regan knows who robbed the bookies. Proving it is the problem. A bookies robbery is a small thing to hang an episode on, but Lady Luck lets it grow. Marcia Edmunds, a middle-class housewife, finds Regan in a pub and offers a trade: the names of the gang, her own husband among them, in exchange for a night with her. Regan takes the names and does not take up the offer. The one witness who can place the husband has an alibi of his own, and it is cast-iron; breaking it takes most of the episode.

But underneath the robbery, a colder game is running. Helping justice along is not Marcia's game. She wants rid of a husband she has long tired of, and Regan feels the shape of it even as he works the case. Moira Redmond plays her with a bright, brittle composure, the calculation visible behind the charm. The episode is a patient one, built on a couple of good performances and a script happy to let suspicion simmer.

Norman Rodway plays the husband, a man with a cast-iron alibi and, you suspect, a long history of being hard to live with. James Cossins's Colonel Rosier and Daphne Oxenford's Mrs Rosier give the story its country-house edges, and Peggy Bullock, Carolyn Hudson and Tony Allen fill the corners of the pub and the bookies. Ranald Graham and Ian Kennedy Martin wrote it, Mike Vardy directed, and Garfield Morgan's Haskins and Dennis Waterman's Carter do their usual solid work.

This is a story about the grind of proof. Regan knows the truth from the first scene; the episode is the slog of turning that knowledge into something a court will take, while Marcia waits to collect her payment. When the alibi finally cracks, she gets what she came for, just not the way she offered to pay for it.