Nice People Die in Bed

The second episode, "Nice People Die in Bed", airs a week after the pilot and immediately shows what the series can do with a closed room. Sir Edward Lister, director of an international charity, is found dead in his hotel suite during a fundraising dinner. The island's doctor, Denis Lejeune, confirms a sudden cardiac arrest — but notes the body was moved after death. The dead man was dressed, his shoes marked, wet paint on his trousers; he had been dragged. Bergerac, called in while Hungerford and Deborah look on from the dinner, is given a death that is natural and a crime scene that is not.

The investigation turns on the dead man's last hours. Lister left the hotel at six for a mysterious meeting and never reached the dinner; a woman's perfume is on his jacket, but no sexual activity; and his suite has been ransacked by a thief who is still hiding in it when the chambermaids arrive. John Kershaw's script, directed by Martin Campbell — years before his James Bond films — keeps the circle tight. Rosemary Martin's Lady Diana Lister carries the composed grief of a widow with something withheld; Richard Morant's Peter Cassell, the cleric who served as Lister's assistant, denies an affair while the evidence accumulates around him.

The engine of the mystery is the charity itself: Lister was about to expose the misuse of its funds by a Central American government and call for the money to be withdrawn. The document proving it is in his briefcase. In the resolution, the respectable surface of island philanthropy cracks to reveal the men who profited from the dead man's integrity — and the theft, the affair and the heart attack all resolve into a single, unglamorous greed.

What stays with you is the confidence of the thing. Campbell stages rooms full of polite people and lets the temperature drop whenever Bergerac names the dead woman's husband. The episode confirms the pilot's promise: the series would not always need politics and gun-running; a hotel, a committee and a woman who knows more than she says were enough. Nettles plays Bergerac's irritation at being managed by his betters as the character's defining note, and it lands here for the first time.