The Wolvercote Tongue

The second series of Inspector Morse opens, as the first had, on an Oxford that looks settled and benign and turns out to be anything but. The setting is the Randolph Hotel, that grand Victorian pile on Beaumont Street where visiting Americans have long come to taste the city's prestige, and the occasion is the impending gift of a remarkable object: a medieval jewel known as the Wolvercote Tongue, promised by a wealthy tourist to the Ashmolean. When that tourist, Laura Poindexter, dies suddenly in her room, the donation dies with her, and so, rather more suspiciously, does the Tongue itself.

Morse, played by John Thaw with his accustomed mixture of weary suspicion and sudden appetite for a puzzle, is not satisfied with the verdict of natural causes. His instincts, sharpened across a first season, tell him that a woman about to hand over a priceless relic does not simply expire without consequences, and the disappearance of the jewel confirms it. The inquiry pulls him into a circle of academics and hangers-on for whom the Tongue is less a treasure than a temptation. Theodore Kemp, the museum curator and a historian with a reputation for casual cruelty to women, is found dead in the river Cherwell; his wife, disabled and dependent, takes her own life; and a young woman named Lucy Downes is killed when a telephone box is brought down on her. Each death seems isolated. Morse, of course, is convinced they are not.

Julian Mitchell, the series' most dependable adapter, wrote this opening hour, and Alastair Reid, who had directed the very first film, returns to give the material its cool, unhurried gloss. The pleasures here are the pleasures the show had already perfected: the slow accretion of detail, the offhand erudition, the way a single mislaid object becomes the key to several deaths. Simon Callow brings a plump, oleaginous charm to Kemp, the sort of man who mistakes conquest for distinction, while Kenneth Cranham's Cedric Downes supplies the episode's colder, more calculating menace. Kevin Whately's Lewis, dependable and increasingly exasperated, grounds the fantastical plot in common sense.

What gives the story its spine is the question of who wanted the Tongue and what they were willing to do for it. The husband, Eddie Poindexter, vanishes almost at once, and the trail leads through Downes and back to a scheme in which the jewel was removed not for greed exactly but for a more private and squalid calculation. The resolution is characteristic of early Morse: not a single murderer but a chain of small, sordid decisions, each one made by someone who thought themselves clever, none of whom reckoned on an inspector who refuses to let a coincidence lie. The episode re-establishes the partnership at full strength and reminds the viewer that, in this Oxford, the most beautiful things are often the ones most worth killing for.