Widows: Episode 4

The lock-up is where the raid comes together, and the tension arrives with it. Dolly confronts Linda about Carlos first, warning her off the relationship with the kind of patience she does not actually possess. Then comes the harder news: Carlos works for Arnie Fisher. Linda will not hear it, not until she sees the two of them together with her own eyes, and then she makes a call that changes everything. The police are waiting for Carlos the next morning. He runs, a post van is in the way, and that is that.

Linda's guilt is the episode's quiet engine. She made the call, and the man is dead, and no amount of knowing he was a grass washes it off. Dolly does not soften the blow. Meanwhile D.I. Resnick, ordered to drop the investigation, resigns in a fury, which leaves the police side of the story suddenly empty. Dolly, in the meantime, has got hold of the security van's details, and the news is bad: the job has to happen two weeks early. Linda and Bella look at her with open mistrust. And then Harry walks into the hideout.

The cast holds firm: Ann Mitchell as Dolly, Maureen O'Farrell as Linda, Fiona Hendley as Shirley, Eva Mottley as Bella, with Maurice O'Connell's Harry back to complicate things, David Calder as Resnick, Paul Jesson and Peter Machin as his team, Kate Williams as Audrey Withey and Jeffrey Chiswick as Arnie Fisher. Lynda La Plante wrote it, Ian Toynton directed.

This is the episode where the plan starts to bend. Every secret the women keep has now cost somebody, and the moving of the date is the first real sign that they are no longer in control of the timetable. Harry's arrival at the hideout is less a return than an ambush, and nobody in the room looks happy to see him.