Road Rage

Four villains come back from Spain needing a big score, and they find one fast: a lorry full of computer parts on the motorway. The hijack goes smoothly. The getaway doesn't. Two motorway patrolmen get in the way, and the gang shoots them both down. That's the point where the episode stops being a heist story.

But the deaths land hard on the squad, and hardest on Nick Hall. CI Samson, the dead officers' boss, is an old friend of his, and friendship turns into pressure: Hall's team takes the case, and they carry it under the weight of everyone's grief and fury. Four killers are out there and the patrolmen's colleagues want blood. The squad knows the clock is running, because men like these don't hang around to be caught.

The frustration builds the way it does in these stories: leads that go nowhere and villains who keep moving, while the force can't get ahead of them. The episode does the grind well, which matters, because the payoff depends on it. The show has always been good at the waiting parts of police work, and here the waiting is the whole second act. When the last-minute tip-off finally lands, the confrontation has earned its place.

Roy Mitchell and James Quirk wrote it, Nicholas Prosser directed, and the cast is the settled third-season line-up: Grant Masters's Matteo, Simone Lahbib's McCarthy, Robert Willox's Donachie, Gary McDonald's Oxford, with Nicholas Ball's Hall at the head. Norman Eshley's Samson carries the grief of the dead men's station. The villains are a properly nasty quartet: Andrew Tiernan's John Isles, Jason Merrells's Steve Lunt, Richard Banks's Joseph Singer and Daniel Bowers's Gary Combs.

It went out in November 1997, and it's the show at its grimmest. Four dead-eyed professionals who'd shoot a policeman for being in the way. The episode never pretends the work of catching them is glamorous, and that's exactly why it works.