The Other Woman

"The Other Woman" is the seventh series' most personal hour for Bergerac, because the suspect is Susan. The body is found in a golf bunker: Graham Hawkesworth, a playwright living off the royalties from one hit play, struck repeatedly on the head, possibly with a golf club, by a killer whose strength does not rule out a woman. Hungerford, whose ball landed in the bunker, is the discoverer; Bergerac, investigating, is handed a case that keeps circling back to the people he knows. The dead man's wife Bonnie is promiscuous; the dead man himself, everyone agrees, was having an affair; and Susan's name is in his address book.

The affair, Bergerac is told, was with a woman who lived locally and whom he met only in the evenings. The evidence accumulates with terrible convenience: brown hair on the body, love letters signed to "Susan", a spade matching the murder weapon buried near the scene. Crozier, mindful of conflicts of interest, takes Bergerac off the case — which, of course, means Bergerac investigates it harder than ever. John Collee's script, directed by Peter Ellis, is a classic frame-up story, and the series plays fair: Susan's alibi is thin, her office diary has the appointment, and even the audience begins to doubt her.

The truth is elegant. Graham was never having an affair with Susan — or anyone. He was gay; the evenings he spent with a supposed mistress were spent with the vicar, Henry Morant; and the love letters, the address-book entry, the whole affair were a construction, a fiction he built so that his wife would leave him or kill him for it. He chose Susan as the fictional other woman because he met her once at a party. Bonnie, the real killer, took the bait: she found the letters, believed the affair, and killed her husband — then tried to frame the woman she thought had taken him.

The climax is properly tense. Bonnie, cornered, retrieves the rifle and prepares to shoot Susan; Bergerac tackles her, and she falls to her death from a balcony. The episode ends with Bergerac clearing Susan's name and the relationship — already strained by the season's changes — held together by the shared ordeal. It is a neat, well-made mystery with a genuine emotional cost: the dead man's fiction destroyed two women's lives, and the series does not pretend otherwise. A strong entry that puts Susan at the centre of the story without ever turning her into a victim.