Death Is Now My Neighbour

Morse had never been much for valentines, so it was a small irony that his 1997 special should hang on one. Death Is Now My Neighbour opens on a quiet Oxfordshire close, where a young physiotherapist, Rachel James, is shot through her kitchen window early one morning as she makes breakfast. The killing looks motiveless until the next day, when the same gun, or one very like it, kills her next-door neighbour, the journalist Geoffrey Owens. Morse, staring at the street, notices what everyone else has missed: there is no number 13 on the drive. The killer, working from a list, counted wrong and murdered the wrong woman.

From there the investigation climbs the hill to Lonsdale College, where the Master, Sir Clixby Bream, is stepping down and a pair of dons — Julian Storrs and Denis Cornford — are fighting to succeed him. The contest, it emerges, is the engine of both deaths. Owens had been blackmailing half of Oxford, and among his victims is Angela Storrs, whose past as Alice Martin — a woman who shot her wealthy husband and burned his body on a yacht, then changed her name and married into the college — is about to catch up with her. Julian Mitchell's script, from Dexter's twelfth novel, gives the college its due as a theatre of petty malice, and Charles Beeson directs the special with a brisk, contemporary sheen.

The cast is a festival of British character acting. Richard Briers, beloved sitcom everyman, is magnificent as Sir Clixby, a lecherous little tyrant who presses his advantage on young Shelly Cornford and lies about it afterwards; John Shrapnel's Julian Storrs oozes academic entitlement; and Roger Allam, later to become Endeavour's Chief Superintendent Thursday, brings a wounded decency to Denis Cornford, whose world collapses when his wife's desperate bargain with Sir Clixby comes to light. Shelly, played by Holly Chant, dies falling downstairs in the aftermath — the adaptation softening the novel's suicide — and Cornford resigns his fellowship in ruins. Maggie Steed's Angela Storrs is the film's cold centre: a woman who killed once to escape a marriage and will kill again to protect the life she built. When Morse and Lewis find that it was Angela's daughter, Diane, who shared Julian's hotel room in Bath on the morning of the second shooting, the alibi dissolves and the case is over.

But the episode's true business is elsewhere. Morse has fallen, helplessly and delightedly, for Adele Cecil, the cellist neighbour who teases him about his mysterious first name. The running joke reaches its payoff in the final scenes: challenged to solve the clue, Lewis decodes around eve — an anagram of Endeavour — and at last learns the Christian name his guv'nor has guarded for a decade. It is the first time the series reveals it on screen, a gift to fans who had been guessing since 1987, and it is typical of the film's sweetness that the revelation comes not from a case file but from a woman in a pub. The final shot, of Morse and Adele heading for an overnight stay in Bath, suggests that the old bachelor may have found something the job never gave him. The affair would not survive the specials' end, but for one autumn evening, Morse got his valentine after all.