Fun Times for Swingers

A naked woman throws herself from a parking garage, and the photograph in her purse sets Frost on the trail of Damien Law — a handsome gigolo found beaten to death in his own flat not long after. The two deaths are the bookends of a case that runs through the respectable bedrooms of Denton.

Law, it emerges, was Frankie Barton, a married father who turned to gigolo work to pay toward his son's spinal treatment, and his client list reads like a who's who of the town's unhappy wives. Frost, working with the reserved Scottish DS Prentice, persuades Law's associate Harvey to hand over the list and arrives at Anne-Marie Pearce, wife of a wealthy philanthropist. The affair was her escape from a loveless, impotent marriage — and her husband Cyril, possessive and controlling, beat her savagely when he found out. Cyril confesses to killing Law during a confrontation: Law was blackmailing him over irregularities in his charity accounts. He jumps from a bridge before he can be arrested, leaving Frost to comfort the injured Anne-Marie.

The subplot is the episode's slyest joke. A wave of break-ins at an exclusive cricket club, of which Superintendent Mullett is a proud committee member, turns out to be the work of the club captain's wife, who hates Denton and hopes the damage will push her husband to move back to Oxford. And when Frost clears the club's members in the murder case, it is because Curzon, the escort agency owner, was organising an orgy for several prominent committee members at the time of the killing. Frost delivers the news to a horrified Mullett with the relish of a man who has waited seasons for this.

Fun Times for Swingers, written by Robert Smith and directed by Peter Smith, is the series at its most satirical — a murder mystery played out among the town's respectable hypocrites. The title is the punchline: for all the club members' outrage at the gigolo's clientele, their own alibi is a group sex party. Martin Jarvis, as the smooth-talking Harvey, is the episode's velvet glove.