The Hide

Foyle is handing over the Hastings police station to his successor with almost no ceremony and has booked a passage to the United States when a newspaper headline stops him. James Devereaux, the son of a distinguished local family, has been arrested for treason for joining the British Free Corps, the small unit of British prisoners recruited by the Germans to fight for the Nazis. Foyle reads the case and takes it on, for reasons he keeps private, and finds in the cell a damaged young man who will not help his own defence and appears content to hang.

A separate murder runs in Brighton, where Milner, now a Detective Inspector, is investigating the death of Agnes Lyttleton, strangled in the room she rented from the Devereaux family's retired housekeeper and working as a secretary on the family history for Sir Charles Devereaux, James's father. A photograph of a soldier she called Jack was taken from beside her bed. The two cases merge through Jack Stanford, a comrade of Devereaux's in the Free Corps.

What Foyle establishes is that the letters Devereaux sent to Lyttleton, a childhood friend from the estate, carried coded information that she forwarded to British intelligence. After Devereaux went missing from the Free Corps, Stanford took over the identity of Jack, the nickname Devereaux's mother Caroline used for her son, and continued the correspondence; when Lyttleton became a danger to him, because she could testify in support of Devereaux and expose the deception, Stanford murdered her to stop her. The final revelation is why Devereaux will not defend himself: he stays silent to punish his father, Sir Charles Devereaux, who murdered his wife Caroline years earlier, and the young James watched it happen, unnoticed, from a bird hide on the estate. The war rewarded the wrong man, since the soldier welcomed home as an informer was the collaborator and the man on trial for treason was the one who had been feeding intelligence out of the Free Corps. The episode also supplies one piece of Foyle's own past, an affair with Caroline Devereaux after she nursed him in the First World War, which ended when she found she was pregnant and returned to her husband.

Its strength is the construction of a case in which a man's silence is the clue, and a solution, a father's murder witnessed by his son from a hide, that gives the public treason trial a private cruelty beneath it. Andrew Scott's Devereaux, holding a withheld reason without explaining it, is the performance the episode turns on, and Michael Kitchen is given the only piece of Foyle's private history the run supplies.

The weakness is that the episode carries a great deal of plot, and the Caroline Devereaux revelation arrives late and with little preparation in the earlier series 6 records. Its place is the end of an era: it is the last episode of the whole run set in wartime Hastings and the last appearance of Anthony Howell as Milner, and it closes the Devereaux case and the programme's first period with the engagement of Stewart and Wainwright, staged in the debris of the collapsed guesthouse.