She's Out: Episode 4

The next job is taking shape, and it needs horses. Dolly sends Julia to find the nearest stable and Connie to get friendly with the man at the railway station, which sounds more like a holiday plan than a heist until you remember who is organising it. While that is happening, Dolly and Julia take Connie's boyfriend's body to the graveyard and bury him under a grave prepared for the following day. Ester and Gloria take the guns to be fenced. Loose ends, all of them, being tied.

The police raid the manor again and this time they get someone: Kathleen makes a run for it and is arrested. They find nothing on the others, which must be galling. But then the evening turns personal. Angela announces she is pregnant, and Ester attacks her, and out of that ugly scrap comes the revelation about Mike Withey's connection to Shirley. The past keeps surfacing whether the women want it to or not.

Dolly brings them back to the matter in hand: the robbery, which has to happen on horseback if any of them are to have a future. After burying a body and losing Kathleen to the police, a plan involving horses sounds almost sensible.

Lynda La Plante wrote it, Ian Toynton directed. The usual company is on good form: Ann Mitchell's Dolly, Linda Marlowe's Ester, Maureen Sweeney's Gloria, Anna Patrick's Julia, Zoe Heyes's Connie, Indra Ové's Angela, Maggie McCarthy's Kathleen and Kate Williams's Audrey, with Adrian Rawlins's DS Mike Withey and Hugh Quarshie's DCI Ron Craigh closing in from the other side.

A crew this seasoned keeps going because it has no choice. Nobody is under any illusion that the police will keep missing them. The exposure is always one search warrant away, and still the women press on, shovels in hand and horses on the horizon.