Service of All the Dead

St Frideswide's is the kind of church Morse usually walks straight past: modest, stone-cold, and full of people who know one another's secrets and keep them. Service of All the Dead, Julian Mitchell's second adaptation for the series, puts a knife into that quiet world and watches the congregation bleed. The body of Harry Josephs, a shabby, drink-ruined figure with old ties to the parish, is found stabbed to death inside the church itself, and the certainties of the little congregation shatter at once.

Morse and Lewis arrive to find a parish closing ranks behind its vicar. John Normington, one of British television's most dependable character actors, gives Lionel Pawlen a gentle, watery dignity — a man of God who seems barely able to look after himself, let alone commit murder. Around him circle the volunteer helpers of the parish. Michael Hordern, the grand classical actor, is Dr Starkie, a retired doctor whose courteous manner masks a sharp, watchful intelligence; Judy Campbell, a stage actress of formidable pedigree and mother of Jane Birkin, is Mrs Rawlinson, the church's reigning matriarch; Harold Innocent's Archdeacon drifts through the proceedings with the serene unaccountability of ecclesiastical office. Among them is Ruth Rawlinson, and Morse, who can never resist a face at evensong, finds himself dangerously distracted. Their tentative closeness — shy, awkward, conducted in the margins of parish life — is one of the softest, most human strands the early series ever gave its hero.

Then a second member of the congregation is found dead, and the case tilts into panic. The press begins whispering of a random killer stalking the faithful; even Chief Inspector Bell, played again by Norman Jones, starts to wonder whether Morse's obsession with the parish is missing the obvious. Morse, as ever, trusts the evidence over the headlines. The deaths, he insists, are not random; they are rooted in the history of the church itself. Lewis, as ever, grounds the theorising: while Morse tilts at ecclesiastical windmills, it is his sergeant who notices the small, practical detail that cracks the case. The answer, when it comes, is one of the series' most quietly chilling: the killer was never a stranger slipping through the dark, but a trusted figure of the congregation, shielded by the very devotion the faithful extend to their own. The pattern was an illusion — the work, simply, of one man with a long memory and a longer grievance.

Director Peter Hammond, whose career stretched back to the golden age of 1960s television, shoots the episode in stone and candlelight, giving the country church a gothic beauty that suits the story's slow-burning dread. Maurice O'Connell's doomed Josephs haunts the margins of the film, and a young Gina McKee — years before Our Friends in the North made her famous — flits through a tiny role as a girl in a betting shop. The church, Morse reflects, has always known how to keep its own counsel — and its own corpses. The title, borrowed from a service for the dead, proves grimly apt: everyone in St Frideswide's is mourning something, and one of them is mourning with a knife. Service of All the Dead is the early series at its most atmospheric — a murder mystery that feels, appropriately enough, like a confession.