Deceived by Flight

Anthony Minghella, who had written the very first Morse and would later win an Academy Award for The English Patient, returned to the series with Deceived by Flight, a script that buries a narcotics conspiracy beneath the gentlest of English surfaces. The story begins not with a body but with a reunion. Anthony Donn, Morse's room-mate from two decades before, turns up in Oxford for the annual fixture of the Clarets, the old boys' cricket side, and phones his old friend to share a bag of chips on a bench. He is plainly troubled, yet he will not say why, and that reticence becomes the episode's haunting thread. Daniel Massey gives Donn a warm, evasive melancholy, the look of a man carrying a secret he cannot yet name.

Morse is also drawn into a separate atrocity, the firebombing of a radical bookshop that has left three people dead, and for a time he suspects the two investigations are linked. When Donn rings to say he has remembered what he meant to tell Morse, and is then found dead in his rooms in circumstances that look like a freak electrocution, the personal and the criminal seem to lock together. Anthony Simmons directs with a looseness that suits the cricket scenes, and the boarding-school atmosphere is punctured by Lewis going undercover. Kevin Whately's sergeant postpones his leave to take Donn's place both as a porter and as a player, and the sight of the steadfast Geordie wielding a bat, winning the resentful respect of Nicky Henson's Vince Cranston, is one of the lighter pleasures the series allows itself.

Jane Booker's Philippa, who arrives as Foster's wife and is revealed as a customs officer, pivots the second half: she and her colleague have spent two years tracking a drug-smuggling operation that maps neatly onto the Clarets' foreign tours. Morse's instinct, for much of the running, is that Donn's death and the bookshop atrocity are chapters of the same story, and the scripts teases that connection cruelly before pulling it away. Yet when a second body falls during the match — Peter Foster, stabbed with a scissors in the changing room — Morse realises he must delink the two deaths after all. The cocaine, it turns out, was hidden in Roly Marshall's wheelchair, and it was Jamie Jasper who killed Foster. The more devastating truth lies at home: Donn's wife Kate, played by Sharon Maughan, murdered her husband, and Morse arrests her at her radio studio, with Cranston exposed as her lover and accomplice in the deception. It is a sombre note for Minghella to strike, the domestic murder proving more shattering than any conspiracy of smugglers, and it leaves Morse with the old ache of a friend he could not save.