Fat Chance

Fat Chance, scripted by Alma Cullen and directed by Roy Battersby, drops Morse into a world he finds both attractive and dangerous: a house of women campaigning for the ordination of priests, where a young graduate, Victoria Hazlett, collapses and dies during a theology exam. The post-mortem points to poisoning, though one substance in her system resists identification, and the circumstances — she had been injured falling from a bicycle whose brake cable someone had cut — turn an academic misfortune into something deliberate.

Morse is drawn, against his better judgement, to Emma Pickford, a member of the collective played with warm self-possession by Zoë Wanamaker, and his attraction curdles when he learns she lied about her whereabouts on the night Victoria died. Maggie O'Neill's Hilary Dobson, who says the bicycle was hers and the cable had been tampered with, is on the shortlist to become chaplain at St Saviour's, and she points the finger at the anti-women faction led by the Reverend Geoffrey Boyd. David Gant's Boyd is a useful antagonist, all injured propriety, and the suspicion that a reactionary campaign is to blame sits heavily until the evidence points elsewhere.

Battersby gives the piece a clean, almost clinical surface that the subject's passions keep breaking through, and the link to a local weight-loss clinic widens the circle of possible motive. Kenneth Haigh's Freddie Galt adds a rougher note from outside the pious household. The pleasure here is in Morse's discomfort — a detective who can read a latin inscription at a glance is wholly out of his depth among women who will not explain themselves to him — and the case becomes a quiet study of how desire and piety can mask the same evasions. By the close the obvious culprit has been upended, and Morse is left with the familiar mixture of vindication and chagrin. The investigation edges from the religious house toward the clinic and the people who moved between them, and Morse's professional judgement is complicated by his personal one in a way the series handles with unusual frankness. Sarah Carpenter's Victoria, dead before the story properly begins, is present only in the accounts of those who envied or protected her, and the question of who cut that brake cable becomes inseparable from the question of who could not abide a woman becoming a priest. Battersby resists any easy sermon, letting the Oxford quads and the cramped women's house stand as two faiths in competition. The solution, when it comes, implicates a quieter jealousy than the political one everyone assumed, and Morse is left to account for having trusted his own infatuation over the evidence in front of him. Wanamaker's Pickford, composed and unrepentant, is the episode's most memorable creation, a woman who declines to be decoded by a man who thinks he understands desire.