Broken Souls

October 1944, and the damage the war has left behind is the subject of everything in the episode. Foyle is playing chess with his friend Dr Josef Novak, a Polish-Jewish psychiatrist who works at Sackville House, the military mental-health hospital near Hastings, when Dr Julian Worth, a young and ambitious doctor there, is found murdered. Worth had published an article built on Novak's patient records without permission, and Foyle is brought in to investigate the killing.

Two other strands run alongside. At a nearby farm, Fred Dawson, a disabled former prisoner of war taken at Dunkirk and only recently escaped, comes home to find his wife Rose and their son being helped by Johann Schultz, a German prisoner billeted at the Bexhill-on-Sea camp and sent out on work release; Dawson suspects his wife and resents Schultz's friendship with the boy. At the hospital, the head, Dr Iain Campbell, is conducting an affair with his secretary, Joy Phelps, whose husband Peter is a patient. When Schultz, knowing his time at the farm is over, escapes from the camp, he is later found dead near the farm. A third thread follows Samantha Stewart as she helps search for a missing fifteen-year-old former evacuee, Tommy Crooks, a telegram boy distressed by the bad news he delivered and by the recent death of his mother in a V-1 flying-bomb attack.

The investigation resolves both deaths, and the two crimes have separate culprits. Campbell killed Worth over a stolen love letter. Novak killed Schultz, acting on instinct and out of survivor guilt, after a newsreel report told him that his wife and daughter had been moved from a ghetto to the Majdanek camp. His own suicide attempt is the episode's closing weight. The sources record the killing and the attempt but do not say what became of him legally, and that gap is left open. The missing boy is sought and his father arrives in Hastings, though the sources do not describe where or how he is found.

Its strength is the structure that lets the series hold a murderer and a suicide in the same frame without confusing them, and Nicholas Woodeson's performance as Novak, which makes the distinction credible: the chess-playing friend of the opening becomes a man who kills a prisoner out of grief. It is the clearest use of survivor guilt as a motive anywhere in the run, and one of very few wartime records in which the killer is a close friend of the lead.

The weakness is the missing-boy strand, the thinnest of the three, whose resolution the sources leave vague, so that it works as background rather than plot. The episode is also one of only two series 5 records written by a screenwriter other than Horowitz, and Michael Chaplin's script departs from the usual formula by giving the two crimes unrelated culprits and motives rather than making them a single conspiracy, which lets the killing of a prisoner and the killing of a doctor carry very different moral weights.