After the Goldrush

A raid on a gold bullion warehouse is the kind of job that should be simple to investigate: follow the gold. Nothing about it is simple. Gold is heavy and hard to hide, and selling it without leaving a trail takes time. The obvious line points Matteo's team at a veteran armed robber and the link between him and a local stripper, and the further they follow it, the less it looks like a straightforward heist.

But Hall goes at it from a different direction. He's got contacts in the Asian business community, and he uses them to trace where the gold is really going. It's the sort of unofficial legwork that gets results and gets people into trouble, and this time the trouble is Hall's own. With every step into the gold trade, he gets further from the safety of the squad room. Old coppers like him know the risk and take it anyway, which is both the strength and the weakness of the approach.

The two investigations run side by side, and the episode keeps them both moving. Around them the supporting cast fills the world of the gold trade's shadow economy: Sasha Behar's Yasmin, Paul Bhattacharjee's Krishna Shankar, Trevor Byfield's Micky Marshall, Hari Dhillon's Mahesh Singh and Surendra Kochar's Grandmother Singh. Sophie Dix's Angela Prudhoe joins the squad, alongside Kofi Amankwah's Garry Parker and Michelle Joseph's Briony Oxford. It's a busy episode, but every face earns its place.

David Joss Buckley and Roy Mitchell wrote it, Nicholas Prosser directed, and the script knows how the gold trade works, right down to who takes the cut. Hall's storyline carries the danger, while the rest of the team just gets on with the work.

It went out in December 1997, and the title does a lot of work: the gold is gone, and everything after the raid is about the mess left behind. The squad sorts it out, but not before Hall's detour puts him squarely in danger.