The Ghost in the Machine

The third series of Inspector Morse opens in a fog of academic ambition and old money. Julian Mitchell, the adapter who had already shaped the show's first season, returns for The Ghost in the Machine, and the result is a puzzle that keeps turning its own premises inside out. A baronet and university elder, Sir Julius Hanbury, has gone missing at the very moment he is being considered for the highest office in his Oxford college. Worse for the family name, a collection of intimate portraits from his private studio has vanished at the same time. When Morse and Lewis are called in, the chief inspector expects a straightforward theft with a titled victim. What he finds instead, in the cold stone of the Hanbury mausoleum, is the man himself, dead, and apparently the victim of his own household.

The arrival of a new face at the mortuary gives the episode its spine. Dr Grayling Russell, brought in to cover for the ailing Max, reads the corpse differently from her predecessor: the injuries, she insists, are those of a man who fell. That single clinical verdict detonates the whole assumption of murder. Patricia Hodge's Lady Hanbury carries the early scenes with a brittle, watchful composure, and Michael Godley lends the absent baronet a lecherous ghostliness through the photographs and testimonies that survive him. Irina Brook's Michelle, the au pair whose presence in the household proves more loaded than it first appears, is the thread the camera keeps returning to.

Herbert Wise, a director with a long television pedigree, stages the story with the series' customary restraint, letting the Oxford stonework and the family chapel do the emotional work. The plot thickens when Roger Meadows, the au pair's boyfriend, dies after someone sabotages his car's brakes. Lewis, poking through the attic, discovers a hidden photographic studio whose contents suggest the baronet was being blackmailed, and that Michelle was the subject of the compromising pictures. For a while it seems the case will close as a suicide masked as murder, with Lady Hanbury confessing to a grief-stricken deception designed to protect the family name and a life-insurance payout.

But Morse is not satisfied, and the detail that undoes her is theatrical: she claims to have been at Covent Garden on the night of the killing, watching Plácido Domingo in Tosca, yet Morse was in that very audience and never saw her. Pressed, she admits the truth she had concealed — a long affair with the family gardener, John McKendrick, and a struggle in Sir Julius's studio that ended in his death, which she dressed up as self-defence. McKendrick, it emerges, cut the brake lines that killed Roger Meadows to silence a witness. Hanbury, McKendrick and Michelle are all taken into custody, and the genteel house is left to reckon with what it sheltered.