The Daughters of Cain

A year on from the return of the specials, Morse was back in the same Thursday slot, and the man writing his second film in a row was the series' most faithful adapter. Julian Mitchell had been turning Colin Dexter's novels into two-hour television since 1987, and The Daughters of Cain, from the eleventh book, sits squarely in his territory: a puzzle dressed as a domestic tragedy, in which the university provides the scenery and the real crime happens in a council house. Herbert Wise, whose credits ran from Callan to the imperial excesses of I, Claudius, directed with a stately patience that suits the material.

The body belongs to Dr Felix McClure, a retired don of Wolsey College, found stabbed to death in his flat. The only clue is a single letter — K — among his appointment notes. Morse and Lewis circle the dead man's past: Ted Brooks, the college scout McClure dismissed years before; Matthew Rodway, a student who died in murky circumstances after falling from a window; and Ashley Davies, Rodway's friend, a rich young man who trains racehorses and is engaged to Kay — the K in the diary — who happens to be Ted Brooks' stepdaughter. Kay, we learn, is an escort, and Morse's interviews with her crackle with the series' familiar blend of attraction and reproach. Phyllis Logan, later to find her most famous home below stairs at Downton Abbey, plays Julia Stevens, the schoolteacher dying of a brain tumour who has made herself Brenda Brooks' fierce protector; Gabrielle Lloyd's Brenda is a woman worn down by years of her husband's violence; Amanda Ryan's Kay carries the cool defensiveness of someone who has been hurt and has decided never to show it again; and Tony Haygarth's Ted, hospitalised after a heart attack, sweats and blusters like a man who knows the net is closing. Bernard Brown's McClure and Jason Riddington's Ashley Davies complete the circle of the dead man's acquaintance.

Then Ted Brooks vanishes from his sickbed and is found stabbed in the river, killed with an antique knife stolen from the museum where he worked — the same kind of blade, Morse notes, that killed McClure. The neat solution, that Ted killed McClure and someone killed Ted, does not survive contact with the evidence. Brenda confesses to destroying evidence that would have incriminated her husband; Julia, collapsing mid-interview, retreats into fragments of Macbeth, quoting the murder of Duncan while the tumour eats her speech; and after her death a letter arrives in which she claims sole responsibility for Ted's murder. Morse and Lewis know the letter is a lie — they are certain the three women, Brenda and Kay and Julia, acted together, that the daughter escaped her abuser and the mother and the dying friend closed ranks behind her. But the Crown decides not to pursue accomplices, and the case closes with justice half-done.

That ending is the film's quiet provocation. Dexter's novel resolved differently, with Brenda arrested; the television version leaves the women free, their guilt known only to two policemen who cannot prove it. It is a rare moment in Morse where the series sides, however tacitly, with the killers — and a reminder that its sympathies, like its hero's, were never really with the university at all.