The White Feather

The war is going badly in Belgium and northern France, and the series' second film opens on the ugliness it exposes at home. A young woman, Edith Johnstone, is caught cutting telephone wires near a military base at the moment invasion is expected daily; she is unrepentant, certain the Germans will arrive and reward her. The enquiries lead Foyle to a hotel on the coast, The White Feather, just as his sergeant is drawn into something else. DS Paul Milner, newly fitted with an artificial leg six weeks early and still on crutches, accepts a lift from a stranger in London and finds himself at a private political gathering, the Friday Club, listening to a fascist creed delivered as ordinary political argument.

The stranger is Guy Spencer, and what makes him dangerous is that he does not rant. He tells the room that the war is not England's war, and outside a passer-by who voices his disgust at the meeting is set upon by Spencer's men and beaten nearly to death. Spencer disclaims the violence, but the movement is his, and Milner finds the argument seductive not on its merits but because his own sacrifice in Norway has left him with no answer to what it was for. The threads converge at the hotel, which is run by Margaret Ellis with her husband Arthur and their son Stanley, and where the Friday Club meets privately. Among the guests are an MP, Ernest Bannerman, and a Whitehall official, Rosemary Harwood, carrying something Spencer wants badly: a letter said to be from Lord Halifax about a negotiated peace. During Spencer's private meeting at the hotel, Margaret Ellis is shot dead.

The investigation turns over Edith's fisherman boyfriend, the missing Foreign Office letter, an army intelligence contact and the origin of the murder weapon, a gun taken from the room of one of the hotel's guests, before the answer settles on the person closest to the victim. The killer is Arthur Ellis, Margaret's husband, who had lived under his wife's domination and wanted to be free of it. The arrest closes the case; the political strand is left to the wider war rather than to the police. Two side currents matter as much as the solution. Milner's wife Jane is openly repelled by his prosthetic leg, refuses to have it in the bedroom and undercuts him at every turn, and it is her contempt that gives Spencer's rhetoric its footing. And Spencer lends Milner The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the antisemitic forgery, which is the clearest statement of what the club is.

The film is built around Charles Dance's Spencer, and its effect depends on him being reasonable-sounding rather than monstrous; the speeches are delivered as argument, which is what makes Milner's drift towards them plausible. The weakness is the mystery itself: the victim is killed during a meeting attended by a houseful of suspects, and a husband wanting free of a domineering wife is a thin motive beside the political material surrounding it. What distinguishes it is that its ending is not about the murder at all but about a country that contained a movement willing its own defeat. It also gives Milner the most damaging thing done to a regular in the early run, and hands Sam a first small domestic scene at Foyle's tea table, where she eats the last of the lemon curd.