The Russian House

June 1945, and the war in Europe is over while the general election is coming. Foyle is still in post only because his superiors cannot find or persuade a replacement, and has told them he will step down in four weeks regardless. His old commanding officer from the First World War, Brigadier Timothy Wilson, now at the War Office, asks him to find an escaped Russian prisoner of war, Ivan Spiakov, who fought alongside the Germans in Normandy. The episode opens on a transport of prisoners, when two of them break away: Spiakov escapes, and the second man jumps to his death from a bridge rather than be retaken and sent home. Spiakov makes for a house on the Sussex coast where his friend Nikolai Vladchenko works as a groundsman, and where Samantha Stewart has just begun work as a domestic, and the artist Sir Leonard Spencer-Jones is shot dead there.

Milner is now a Detective Inspector in Brighton, called to investigate the killing, and is cool and distant when Foyle arrives at the scene, following the trail of the Russians against Milner's jurisdiction and his wish to run the case himself. Foyle's inquiries take him to the Russian House in London, a supposed safe house for White Russians, and his attention to it makes him the target of an attempted contract killing, in which Sam's fellow guest Adam Wainwright is shot in the shoulder. He learns that former prisoners of war are being forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union, where they are likely to be executed, and that exposing the practice would reveal the British government's complicity in it. The historical background is real, including the programme known as Operation Keelhaul and the ship Almanzora, used to carry returnees to Odessa.

The suspects in Sir Leonard's shooting are his disinherited son Maurice Jones, a Labour politician; the disappointed returning gardener Tom Bradley, denied the job he was promised before the war; and the missing Russian, Vladchenko. The published record does not name the killer. The sources establish that Foyle identifies the murderer and that the answer is a person no observer would have suspected, but they state neither the culprit, nor the motive, nor the method, and no name has been supplied here in place of that gap. The episode also ends a political phase, as the election puts the Churchill government out.

Its strength is the way the private murder is graded against state-sanctioned killing, so that the investigation becomes a moral test rather than a puzzle, and it makes the British government an adversary in fact rather than in attitude. It is the first record to trade the Home Front for the early Cold War.

The weakness is set against that: the murder investigation is the least clear of the three series 6 cases in the available sources, and the reunion of the leads is arrived at through coincidence. Sam's own thread also begins here, with Wainwright's failing guesthouse and her offer to help him run it; the sources note the bunch of bananas she brings him as an anachronism, since the first post-war shipment did not reach Britain until December 1945.