A Desirable Little Residence

"A Desirable Little Residence" is the fifth series at its most quietly devious — a property story in which the house is the crime and the land beneath it is the secret. Susan is asked to sell Ocean View, a small, unremarkable bungalow inherited by Carol Miles from her grandmother, who died of a heart attack and was not found until the next day. The bungalow should be a hard sell. Instead, the offers come thick and fast: an elderly couple at the asking price, then a mainland biker, Kirk Barnett, at seventy thousand, then an old fraudster, Major Lonny Rice, backed by a dealer in stolen goods, at eighty. Bergerac, sniffing the pattern, realises that everyone in the market for Ocean View knows something he does not.

Rod Beacham's script, directed by Robert Tronson, plays the mystery beautifully slowly. The bracelet found in the garden carries the initials K.B. — Kirk Barnett is really Kirk Baines, whose father Brian was arrested near the site fifteen years ago with millions of pounds' worth of stolen diamonds that were never found, and died in prison seven years later. The bungalow, Bergerac realises, was built on top of where the old man hid the jewels. Every offer on the table is a man trying to buy the right to dig.

The episode's best trick is the con at its centre. Carol Miles, the bereaved granddaughter, is in on it with Kirk: she tracked him down after inheriting the house, and the two of them have been running the bidding up, knowing that if Kirk tried to buy the bungalow outright, everyone would assume the diamonds were there. The real buyer who emerges from the auction is Nick MacVie, a Belfast builder with Jersey residency and no principles — and he, it turns out, is the man who actually killed Carol's grandmother: he tried to buy the house, she refused, and she had the heart attack after he raised a hand to her. He left her to die.

The finale is properly nasty. MacVie, caught, tries to bury Susan alive in a trench, and Bergerac's rescue — the scuffle on the scaffolding, MacVie swinging in midair, the banging from a pipe that proves Susan is alive — is one of the series' most visceral moments. A sharp, cynical hour about property, greed and the bodies beneath the foundations.