Entende Cordiale

"Entente Cordiale" sends Bergerac to France for the eighth series' most conventional mystery — a private detective murdered in Hungerford's study, and a small French town that would rather the past stayed buried. The dead man is Michel Carbonnier, a private investigator from St Armand who broke into Hungerford's house in the night, looking through the desk, and was killed by someone else in the dark. His passport leads Bergerac to France, to a town where the mayor plays boules and the wine merchant shrugs, and where a two-year-old death has been filed as an accident by everyone who knew better.

The case, when it unfolds, is a model of small-town corruption. Carbonnier's notebook lists three clients: the local lawyer Arranches, a vineyard family's daughter named Danielle Aubry, and the schoolmaster Planiol. Danielle — who will become central to Bergerac's life as the season unfolds — hired Carbonnier to investigate the death of her husband Jacques, killed two years earlier when a white Citroen forced his car off the road. The witness, Quarrie, changed his statement after pressure from the police and the lawyer; the town decided it was an accident; and the men involved — the mayor, the wine merchant, the building contractor — all had reasons to keep it that way.

Jeremy Burnham's script, directed by Ken Grieve, is a story about the cost of knowing the truth in a place where everyone knows everyone. Patrick Malahide, at his most silkily charming, plays Delage, the mayor, whose wife's car matches the one that ran Jacques off the road; the episode keeps the audience guessing how deep the conspiracy goes. Bergerac, on French ground without his authority, works with the local inspector Pageon and the reluctant witness Quarrie, and the mystery resolves into a portrait of a town that chose order over justice.

The episode also begins the series' most important late relationship. Danielle, grieving and determined, is the woman who will draw Bergerac away from the island he has spent eight years serving; her invitation to dinner, over her father's objections, is the seed of the season's endgame. The mystery itself is neat and well-played — Hungerford's smuggled paintings, the wine merchant's lies, the schoolmaster's missing daughter — but the hour's real business is the beginning of something. A solid, character-led entry that shows the eighth series could still do a proper French mystery, and that Bergerac's future was being written across the water.