Who Killed Harry Field?

Who Killed Harry Field?, written by Geoffrey Case and directed by Colin Gregg, gives Morse a victim after his own heart — a fun-loving, drink-sodden raconteur and mediocre painter whose death in woodland is complicated by the fact that his wife insists he phoned her days after he appears to have died. Harry Field's canvases return, again and again, to the same mystery woman, and Lewis tracks her down, only to find she was his muse and of little help besides.

The art world proves a slippery place to investigate. John Castle's Tony Doyle, a schoolteacher who had been lending Field money, falls under suspicion, and Lewis comes to believe Doyle and Helen Field were lovers — a theory Morse dismisses, to his sergeant's frustration. Geraldine James's Helen Field and Nicola Cowper's Jane Marriot give the women in Harry's life a wary, guarded presence, while Ronald Pickup's Ian Matthews supplies a deeper, older connection that the case eventually hinges upon. Gregg keeps the pubs and studios dim and convivial, so the murder feels like a guest departing a party he was never going to leave quietly.

The thread of art forgery, hinted at as Morse digs into Field's past, gives the hour its spine, and the question of who painted what — and who profited — turns the inquiry away from the obvious lovers. Meanwhile Lewis, eyeing a transfer to Traffic, weighs whether he wants to keep doing this at all, and his restlessness adds a poignant undertow to the partnership. The solution is less a clearing of the fog than a confirmation that Field's charm was itself the trap, and that the people who loved him were also the people with reason to see him gone. It is a wry, melancholy entry, and one of the series' truest portraits of the artist as a man everyone liked and no one quite knew. The forgery angle deepens as Morse realises Field's gift was less for painting than for copying, and that the canvases bearing his name may have concealed other hands and other crimes. Ronald Pickup's Ian Matthews turns out to be the hinge between Field's bohemian present and a colder, older deception, and the murder resolves into a story about authorship and credit rather than love. Gregg's direction keeps the tone dry and faintly comic, true to a man who treated everything as material for a good story, and the mourning for Harry is always slightly qualified. Lewis, weighing Traffic against staying, gives the hour a rare glance at the future of the partnership, and Morse's reluctance to lose him is unspoken but unmistakable. It is an episode that trusts its audience to find the sadness underneath the wit. The paintings, it turns out, were less Field's confessions than his alibis, and the mystery woman's face was the mask behind which a colder fraud hid in plain sight.