Trove

May 1966, and Morse is back from light duty at County Police's Witney Station, where he spent several months under DI Church. Oxford greets his return with three problems at once: a suspicious suicide during a parade, a missing Oxfordshire girl, and the theft of historical artifacts from a college. A veritable trove, and someone went to a lot of trouble to lift it.

Morse is convinced the three cases are connected, and he drags a beauty pageant and a local by-election into the frame with them. Inspector Thursday and Superintendent Bright think he is seeing patterns where none exist, and the disagreement gets loud. A missing notebook and a Masonic lodge make sure nothing runs smoothly, and the mystery just keeps deepening.

It is the kind of episode that lives on the friction between Morse's instincts and everyone else's procedures. He is usually right; the fun is watching him prove it the hard way.

Russell Lewis wrote it, Kristoffer Nyholm directed. Shaun Evans is Morse, with Nigel Cooke as Walter Fisher, Jessie Buckley as Kitty Batten, Jessica Ellerby as Diana Day, William Mannering as Dr Malcolm Speight, Philip Martin Brown as Bernard Yelland, Abigail Thaw as Dorothea Frazil, Beth Goddard as Barbara Batten, Jonathan Coy as Archie Batten, and Nick Waring as the Force Medical Examiner.

There is a beauty pageant, a by-election, a missing notebook and a Masonic lodge in this one, which is a lot of plates to keep spinning, and the episode manages it without dropping any of them. Jessie Buckley's Kitty Batten is a quiet highlight, the sort of performance that makes you watch the margins of the frame. Morse, back from his exile at Witney, is in full stubborn form, and the show clearly enjoys letting him be difficult in the right cause.

The way a handful of small local dramas can weave together and wreck an officer's assumptions is the great pleasure of the genre, and Trove does it with relish.