Bleak Midwinter

Bleak Midwinter sets its bleak reading of the season against the small comedy of a confiscated turkey. Foyle catches a restaurateur selling illegal Christmas foods and has the food seized as evidence, and from there he turns to the death of Grace Phillips, a munitions worker killed at the factory, on the face of it through an error of her own. At her funeral the behaviour of the people around her begins to raise questions, and suspicion falls on her lover, Harry Osborne, who is visibly scheming. The case is then overtaken by a second death that lands inside the police station, when Milner's estranged wife Jane, back in town, is murdered after a public row between the two of them in a restaurant, leaving Milner himself a suspect.

The investigation looks for a connection between the two women and finds one it had no reason to expect: Grace Phillips and Jane Milner had worked together as hairdressers before the war. At the factory a second munitions worker, Phyllis Law, tries to blackmail the foreman, Eddie Baker, over a collection taken up for Phillips's elderly mother, because Law has discovered that Phillips was an orphan and that the collection was therefore a fraud. Constable Peters separately admits that he tampered with evidence against Milner to get even with him over a reprimand in the Christmas-food case, which is how the suspicion against Milner was made to stand up. The obstruction here is not a ministry but a constable with a grudge.

Osborne turns violent when Stewart brings Foyle's car to the garage where he works and he realises she is with the police; he attacks her and stabs one of his co-workers as she flees. Foyle finally confronts him in the cellar of the bank next to the hairdresser's shop, and Osborne admits the whole of it. He had asked Phillips to steal explosives for a break-in at the bank safe, and he had used rat poison to silence her when she became a risk. He had killed Jane Milner too, in order to take from her a condemnatory letter that Phillips had written to her. The two murders were one plan, one woman killed to keep her quiet and the other killed to recover what she had said.

The structure is the episode's strength: the second murder reopens the first, and the answer depends on a link the police had no reason to look for, a shared pre-war working life, so the mystery turns on the ordinary rather than the sensational. It also puts a regular character under suspicion of murder for the first time, and Anthony Howell has to play the professional composure of a policeman and the private wreckage behind it at once. Mali Harries returns to the character of Jane Milner after more than a year's absence and is given a death that lands as a consequence of Milner's own past as much as of the killer's plan.

The weakness is the alignment: the factory strand and the bank plan take a while to merge, and the midpoint depends on the audience's patience with two cases that do not yet connect. As the opener of Series 4 Part 2, the first of the two 2007 episodes, it concludes the Milner marriage and is among the most domestic of the series' mysteries, since two of its three central figures are connected to the regular cast. It drew around 8.18 million viewers.