Muse

April 1968, and the newly promoted Detective Sergeant Morse is barely settled in the rank before the bodies start. A cab driver and ex-boxer named Joey Sikes is killed on the night of an attempted theft of the last Fabergé egg, which was to be auctioned at an Oxford college. The next day an Oxford don, Robin Grey, is murdered in his rooms. The link between the two men is Eve Thorne, a sex worker and artists' model who was seen with both. Then the art dealer Simon Lake, Grey's best friend and the man organising the auction, becomes the next victim, and the egg vanishes without trace.

Thursday finds that Lake and Grey belonged to an elite gentleman's club, and Morse works out the real scheme: the two men were colluding with the artist Gerard Pickman in an insurance fraud over the egg, which may not even be genuine. Pickman ran the art classes where Thorne modelled, and everyone's version of events keeps circling back to her.

All this while Morse copes with George Fancy, a lazy new constable he has been told to mentor, and the reappearance of Joan Thursday, who has been away and is not about to make his life simpler. The episode closes on a radio news report announcing the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, and it lands like a weight.

Russell Lewis wrote it, Brady Hood directed. Abigail Thaw is Dorothea Frazil, Tom Durant Pritchard is Simon Lake, Tom Wisdom is Gerard Pickman, Nathalie Buscombe is Cassie Pickman, Mark Arden is Eddie Nero, Robin McCallum is the Master, Victor Gardener is Joey Sikes, Charlotte Hope is Eve Thorne, Roger Barclay is Dr Robin Grey, and Sean Rigby is DS Jim Strange.

Deceit wearing the guise of high culture is an old Oxford habit, and this episode catches it beautifully.