The Secret of Bay 5B

The third series closes with The Secret of Bay 5B, written by Alma Cullen, and it is perhaps the season's most deceptive puzzle, a murder that looks like the work of a jealous lover and turns out to be a careful edifice of lies about money, betrayal and a marriage quietly coming apart. A flamboyant architect, Michael Gifford, is discovered strangled in his own vehicle in a concrete multi-storey car park, and the only physical traces are a parking stub and a diary entry noting a meeting. Jim Goddard, a director who understood how to make the mundane menacing, turns the grey concrete levels into a kind of labyrinth.

The investigation sprawls in classic Morse fashion. Lewis, searching the dead man's home, is struck down by an intruder who has already ransacked the place, and the assault lends the case an immediate urgency. The trail leads to Brian Pierce, Gifford's business associate, who owns paintings far beyond his means, and then to an insurance firm whose number appears in the diary. Andrew Wilde's Edward Manley, the company manager, blandly insists Gifford held no policy at all. Morse, pursuing the dead man's romantic life, meets Camilla, a London call girl Gifford had pursued with obsessive intensity, and learns of threatening letters and a tape he sent her.

The heart of the tangle is Rosemary Henderson, an insurance employee with whom Gifford did conduct an affair in the very car park where he died — Mel Martin plays her with a controlled, watchful poise, and the relationship was real, not the fabrication it is later made to seem. Her husband George, portrayed by George Irving, is a brooding presence who has plainly found something incriminating, and when Pierce takes his own life before the police can reach him, and George is later shot dead in his woodland cabin, the obvious reading — a cuckolded husband's vengeance — sits heavily on the evidence. Philip McGough's Brian Pierce, meanwhile, supplies the financial undertow, his embezzlement from the firm a quiet reminder that greed and lust are rarely the only motives in a Morse case. Cullen's script earns its resolution by undermining that reading. The concealment was never the Gifford affair but Rosemary's own entanglement with Manley; it was Manley who shot George during a struggle at the cabin, claiming it was accidental, and Rosemary who rang him to arrange the earlier meeting that gave him his chance. Both are taken in, and the humble parking ticket, swapped to forge an alibi, is what finally unravels the deceit. As with the best of the early Morse, the solution arrives not with a flourish but with a weary recognition of how readily respectable people will lie to protect what little they have left.