She's Out: Episode 5

Dolly lays down the plan and the ultimatum together: the mail train, or nothing. The women take riding lessons, which double as a way to study horses and the railway's security. By the end of the week they can talk horses and timetables with equal confidence. Dolly leans on Shirley's brother, DS Mike Withey, for the details on how the train runs and how it is guarded, an arrangement that sits somewhere between police work and family betrayal. Gloria and Connie, meanwhile, dig out a cess pit while they wait for the lime to arrive. Even the preparation has a grim edge to it.

But Mike comes back with a deadline. The train changes its route in three weeks, so the robbery has to happen inside that window, no excuses. The deadline sits over everything, including the cess pit and the lime that never seems to arrive. Dolly lays out the full plan and names the prize: between thirty and forty million pounds. It is a number big enough to make the room go quiet. Every woman in it is nervous, and every one of them stays.

Lynda La Plante wrote it, Ian Toynton directed. Ann Mitchell's Dolly is all certainty, with Linda Marlowe's Ester, Maureen Sweeney's Gloria, Anna Patrick's Julia and Zoe Heyes's Connie around her. Kate Williams's Audrey is nowhere to be seen, and the circle closes tighter around the job. Indra Ové's Angela, Maggie McCarthy's Kathleen, Adrian Rawlins's DS Mike Withey, Hugh Quarshie's DCI Ron Craigh and Douglas McFerran's DS John Palmer fill out the rest of the picture.

There is something theatrical about the whole enterprise, women on horseback taking on a mail train for the kind of money most people will never see. Everyone in the room knows the arithmetic, and none of them are doing it for pocket money. Desperation rarely looks this organised.