House Guests

The third series closes with "House Guests", a gathering-of-suspects story that shows the series could end a run the traditional way. Sir Gervase Ewell, a Jersey financier, has won a golf trophy for the third time running and is keeping it — but he will not be at the trophy ball, because he has house guests: a set of top European financiers, gathered at his mansion for a deal no one knows anything about. One of them, the episode keeps hinting, is there for reasons other than money, and the thefts from boats that Bergerac has been quietly investigating are about to connect to the grand house.

Bill Craig's script gives the hour the classic chamber-mystery shape — a mansion, a circle of wealthy men with separate agendas, and a detective who must see which of them is lying. Robert Tronson directs with a steady, room-bound patience, and the cast is the season's most senior: Donald Pickering, Robert Lang, Rosalind Ayres, Michael Culver, Frederick Jaeger and Moray Watson, a roll-call of British character acting that gives the proceedings a genuine weight. Terence Alexander's Charlie is present, as always, at the edge of the trouble.

The thefts and the financiers resolve into a single pattern — the stolen items, the unclaimed suitcase full of French newspapers, the discreet surveillance Bergerac is ordered to set up around Ewell's guests. The episode is less about catching a thief than about the impossibility of knowing what the rich are really doing behind the doors of a grand house, and the resolution, when it comes, is deliberately understated.

As a finale it is competent rather than climactic, and that is a fair summary of the third series as a whole: a varied, confident year that ranged from a hungover Bergerac to a rock star's yacht and ended on a dinner party. House Guests closes it in the register the series knew best — money, secrets and a house full of people with reasons to lie. A solid, well-cast ending to a strong season.