The Funk Hole

A raid on a government food warehouse goes wrong when a Home Guard patrol fires on the thieves, and a nineteen-year-old named Matthew Farley is hit and left behind. His mother, Kate Farley, reports him missing, and the search takes Milner and Sam to Brookfield Court, a country guest house full of well-off Londoners who have left the city for the duration. Foyle's own investigation of the theft barely begins before he is called away to answer a different charge: he has been accused of making seditious remarks in an air-raid shelter in London.

A detective chief inspector, James Collier, comes down from London to investigate the sedition claim, and Foyle is suspended and placed under house arrest. Collier also takes over the search for Matthew Farley, and his handling of it is aggressive: he has Brookfield Court turned over without producing much. Sam criticises his methods openly and is sent back to her Mechanised Transport Corps depot and a bullying commander, and Milner is left to work under a man he does not trust. Unknown to either side of the enquiry, Matthew Farley is inside Brookfield Court all along. He is gravely wounded, no doctor is called, and he dies; his body is buried in the woods on the estate. When it is uncovered, the search of the house for contraband intensifies, and then a guest, the London town councillor Frank Vaudrey, is found dying in the summerhouse. Collier concludes suicide. Milner does not believe it, and he risks his career by passing Foyle details of both cases while Foyle is confined to his house. Foyle slips away to London and learns the truth about Vaudrey's past: he had been responsible, during a botched wartime evacuation, for the deaths of Collier's mother and sister.

The killer is Collier himself. Vaudrey's complicity in those deaths is his motive, and the death in the summerhouse, concluded a suicide by the very man who caused it, is his revenge hidden behind his authority as the investigating officer. Foyle's exposure of the connection is the evidence that identifies him, and the sedition charge against Foyle is shown to rest on remarks he did not make. The film also closes the series' family thread. Andrew is home on medical leave after an emergency landing that went badly because of the coastal anti-aircraft defences, and is short-tempered with his father and with Sam. She takes him out at Foyle's suggestion; he apologises, takes her to see Gone With the Wind, and on the walk home they kiss. When he is recalled to duty the two decide to separate, on the reasoning that Foyle compartmentalises his life and would not approve.

The strength is the inversion: Foyle under house arrest, investigated rather than investigating, while his accuser is the murderer. Nicholas Farrell's Collier is the most effective guest antagonist of the early run, played from the first scene so that his aggression reads as competence until it does not. The weakness is a slow first half, with the Brookfield Court guests introduced as a large, largely interchangeable group before the deaths clarify who matters. It is the series' bleakest early statement about institutions, and it ends the second series on its best audience while giving Sam her first sustained attachment. Corin Redgrave appears as Foyle's senior officer, a role carried into the following series.