Sway

November 1966, in the run-up to Remembrance Sunday, and Oxford has a strangler. A housewife found dead in her own home, a silk stocking around her neck, becomes the third such death in a month. All three women were married, all three were alone, and all three were missing their wedding rings. The detail is the sort that sticks in the throat.

Morse traces the stockings to the only shop in town that sells them, Burridges Department Store. The trail promptly gets bloodier: another customer becomes the strangler's next victim, and a male employee is stabbed to death inside the store. Suspects surface, motives blur, and the case turns into the kind of web where everyone looks plausible and nobody looks clean.

For Inspector Thursday it gets personal. A face from his past, a man he thought long dead, resurfaces in the middle of the investigation, and the fallout reaches into his family life and into his working relationship with Morse. The procedural stuff is excellent; the Thursday business is what gives the episode its ache.

Russell Lewis wrote it, Andy Wilson directed. Shaun Evans is Morse, Jack Laskey is DS Peter Jakes, Roger Allam is DI Fred Thursday. Michael Thomas plays Rufus Haldane, Gina Bramhill is Gloria Deeks, Cécile Paoli is Luisa Armstrong, Joe Bannister is Alan Burridge, Sean Rigby is PC Jim Strange, James Bradshaw is Dr Max DeBryn, and Anton Lesser is Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright.

The detail work is excellent: silk stockings, missing rings, a department store as the crossroads of a city's secret life. Morse's shop-floor slog is the engine, and the episode trusts the process. What stays with you is the domestic horror, the sense that these women were killed inside their own ordinary evenings, and that the police only ever arrive after.

A taut piece of work, and one that earns its darkness honestly.