Raga

June 1970, and Oxford is campaigning for a general election that nobody can agree on. A man is killed on the same towpath where Molly Andrews died, and Thursday, unwilling to close her case while the man who confessed to Benford's murder was also charged over Andrews, takes to patrolling the towpath at night. It is not an official plan. It is just Fred Thursday being Fred Thursday.

Elsewhere, an Asian restaurant driver is lured to his death at the flat of Oberon Prince, a television cooking-show personality who has gone missing. Dorothea Frazil tells Morse and Thursday she has covered six freak accidents in the past six months, and the number sits in the room like a verdict. Racial tensions spike when a Pakistani youth is fatally stabbed by a young supporter of the far-right candidate Martin Gorman, whose daughter happens to live in the same building as Prince. Morse learns Prince gambled in card games run by Gorman, and had recently won a lot of money. Prince's dismembered body is found jammed into a suitcase.

And the personal thread keeps pulling. Ludo tells Morse his wife is away and invites him over; Violetta is there. She asks him to rekindle the affair. He rebuffs her. She turns up at his home anyway, and he succumbs, which he will regret for the rest of the episode, possibly longer. Another woman is attacked on the towpath as the violence refuses to settle.

Russell Lewis wrote it, Zam Salim directed. Roger Allam is DCI Fred Thursday, Caroline O'Neill is Win Thursday, Carol Royle is Mrs Bright, Flora London is Bridget Mulcahy, Jason Merrells is Martin Gorman, Harki Bhambra is Bobby Singh, Buom Tihngang is Johnny Simba, Graeme Stevely is Adrian Sloane, Ted Robbins is Stanley Nayle, and Sia Alipour is Dr Farook Sardar.

The police work here is welded to the wider social fabric of the era, and the nervousness of civil unrest is in every frame.