A Lesson in Murder

The episode begins not with a body but with a legal humiliation: a conscientious objector, David Beale, has his application refused by the judge Lawrence Gascoigne on the ground that he said he would help a child injured in a bombing raid, which the judge treats as inconsistent with his objection to war. Beale is taken to the Hastings police cells, tormented by the officers holding him, and found dead there, having hanged himself. Foyle is left with the question the film never quite answers: how a man who refused to fight was driven to that.

Elsewhere the town is preparing for invasion, road signs coming down and a civil-defence committee told that Hastings is expected to hold out for seven days without support. Kept late at the meeting, Sam talks Foyle into dinner at Carlo's, the Italian restaurant run by his old friend Carlo Lucciano, whose worry is what Mussolini's declaration of war will mean for an Italian family in an English town; his son Tony asks Sam to a dance. The case itself settles on the judge's household. An eleven-year-old evacuee from London, Joe Cooper, is staying with the family. Gascoigne's daughter Susan is carrying on a secret relationship with a local tradesman, Peter Buckingham, against her father's wishes, and Foyle grows suspicious about the real purpose of the factory where Buckingham works. Then a hand grenade rigged to the summerhouse door kills Joe when he opens it; the trap had been laid for the judge.

While guarding the house, Milner is caught in what appears to be a compromising position with Susan and is sent away by the judge. Shortly afterwards Gascoigne is found shot dead inside a room whose windows are locked, and the investigation concentrates on the gun. The killer is his wife, Emily Gascoigne, who had been appalled by her husband's treatment of the evicted boy and by the death that treatment led to; she shot him inside the locked room, and the discovery of the gun is what fixes her. The sources do not establish whether she also set the grenade trap, and that should not be asserted. The dead objector's case and the judge's death are linked not by one criminal but by a chain of cruelty: Beale's death begins the story, Joe's is the middle of it, and the judge is killed because of what he was. Two threads carry into the wider run: Milner's wife Jane leaves him for her sister in Wales, and the Lucciano family is introduced as Foyle's private life outside the force.

The strength is that moral chain. The film makes the murder the least of its deaths, which is unusually bleak for a Sunday-night drama, and Oliver Ford Davies plays the judge as a man neither unusually cruel nor aware of his cruelty. Cheryl Campbell's Emily is revealed to the audience long before the locked-room question is raised, so the solution arrives as a moral fact rather than a trick. The weakness is a crowded middle: the Home Guard meeting, the Lucciano dinner, the factory thread and the Milner-Susan misunderstanding all compete before the judge is killed, and the factory strand is raised and then left. It is also the earliest strong showing of Horowitz's interest in how the law fails rather than in how clever a criminal is, and it puts David Tennant, Sophia Myles and Danny Dyer on screen before their later fame.