Lie of the Land

Lie of the Land sets CBS to guard pheasants and turns up a feud. Lord Melverley of Whitley Hall hires the firm to protect the birds in a wood before his annual Shoot on the Feast of Mortimer, because he fears hunt saboteurs. Heading for the wood, Ken finds an old Morris Traveller with a shotgun in the back and wonders whether the saboteurs have arrived.

The next day his bike breaks down outside the church, and the vicar, Peter Bradshaw, a bike enthusiast, fixes it. He mentions that he also looks after a Morris Traveller belonging to Ralph Cotterell, Lord Melverley's gamekeeper of twenty-five years, who was recently sacked. Cotterell is bitter. The sacking followed an incident in which sheep belonging to a neighbour, Chris Shepley, were poisoned. Ken sees the grounds for a feud when he separates Shepley and Lord Melverley in a fight at the Hall.

In the middle of the night Ken, Rocky and Laura find an intruder in the wood: Amanda Shepley, Chris's wife, who says she is looking for buried treasure. Their house has a carved plaque with an inscription about rings of silver and the brightest of stars, and the village has long believed in buried treasure.

Rocky looks up the parish registers and finds a Louisa May Dunham who died on the Feast of Mortimer in the seventeenth century, shortly before her wedding, rumoured to have had her dowry hidden by her father. He also finds two more plaques, in a pew and on a lectern, with pictures of stars and of stocks.

The full story emerges slowly. Lord Melverley fenced common grazing land, Chris cut the fences and put his sheep on it, and Melverley poisoned the land. Cotterell spoke for Chris in court and was dismissed.

Amanda's father had been butler to the present lord's father, who left him Dove Cottage but never handed over the deeds, and the present lord, short of money, wants the cottage back. Unless Amanda raises the money by the day of the Feast, it reverts to him. Long before she met Chris, she had an affair with Melverley, and has kept it secret from her husband.

Ken and Cotterell need the deeds, and need Melverley out of the way. Rocky solves the riddle: the moonlight through the holes in the stocks, on the Feast day, marks the spot. Ken has Harry tell Melverley that the Shepleys are about to dig up the treasure, and relies on his greed. With the lord gone, he and Cotterell retrieve the deeds.

That night Melverley crashes through the wood in his Range Rover just as the casket is dug up, shoots off the lock and finds two carved wooden doves. His noise has frightened the pheasants away, the Shoot has to be cancelled, and he goes into hiding.

Tim Firth wrote the episode and John Strickland directs. Frank Windsor plays Cotterell, Jerome Flynn plays Chris, and Duncan Bell plays the lord.

The moonlit stocks are the strength, a puzzle with a visual solution that the plot then uses as bait. The weakness is that the legal tangle, the deeds, the reversion and the old affair, takes a long time to set out. But the ending, in which the landowner's own greed ruins his Shoot, is as neat as anything in the series.