Born Into the Purple

Someone is stealing from a very rich household, and the household is the problem as much as the thief. But the rich do not like being investigated, even by a man they have hired, and Bulman has to pick his way through drawing-room manners and excellent furniture to find out what is actually missing and who wanted it gone. Theft in a grand house is a question of manners before it is a question of evidence, and Bulman knows which questions to ask in which order.

Paul Wheeler wrote it, which shows in the dialogue-heavy construction. Bill Gilmour directed, and the episode is content to be a quiet one: rooms and conversations, and the slow accumulation of detail that solves a case in the genre's oldest tradition. Nobody is chased down a fire escape, and the solving happens where the genre does it best, in the gaps between polite remarks.

Don Henderson's Bulman is at home here, because the character has always enjoyed a puzzle more than a pursuit. Siobhan Redmond's Lucy McGinty works the edges of the household with her usual competence, gathering the small observations that the staff would rather keep to themselves. The two of them move through the house like people who have been in better ones and worse ones, and know that the best clues are in neither. There is a small, dry comedy in watching a man who has spent his life in police stations pick his way through a world of silver trays.

The title is a joke about entitlement, and the episode has the good manners not to spell it out. Born into the purple means born into the highest privilege, and an hour about valuables vanishing from a house full of them has a quiet irony at its centre. The best of these quiet episodes leave you feeling that the solution mattered less than the household it came from.