Late For a Funeral

"Late For a Funeral" is the first series' most atmospheric hour, a wartime ghost story wearing a modern murder investigation. A diver exploring the seabed off Jersey finds a crashed Luftwaffe plane and releases the skeleton of its pilot — and is killed, his oxygen line cut, by another diver who does not want the discovery known. The bodies surface together, reported by a horrified Francine and her tour party, and Bergerac is handed a case that reaches forty years into the island's past.

The dead pilot is identified from his dog tags as Oberleutnant Karl Sheringer, whose wartime photograph appears in film of Hermann Goring. The dead diver is Terry Castle, a rig worker and barman whose room has been ransacked and whose charts are gone. Dennis Spooner, returning after Portrait of Yesterday, wraps the two threads together with the patience of a man who trusts his material: the German War Dead Commission, a Nazi file sold to men who are not what they seem, and the islanders who remember the occupation in a way the tourists never will. Henry Herbert directs with a sombre feel suited to the subject; the sea here is not the postcard blue of the publicity stills but cold, grey and holding secrets.

Christopher Ellison — years before his long, hard-edged run in The Bill — brings a dangerous energy to the supporting cast, and the older players, James Cossins, Gary Watson and Leon Eagles among them, give the wartime generation a worn, watchful gravity. Jersey itself is a character: an island occupied within living memory, where a wreck off the shore is not ancient history but a debt still unpaid.

The episode is slower and moodier than the season's comic turns, and it is the better for it. Bergerac fits this material — the patient man nudging a closed community to speak — and the murder only makes sense once the wartime secret is understood. The funeral of the title is both literal and figurative: someone is laid to rest, and so, at last, is the silence around the plane. If the mechanics of the reveal lean on coincidence, the atmosphere carries it. A quietly powerful hour that shows how a single death could open a forty-year-old wound — and that the island remembers more than it admits.