Wolf to the Slaughter: Part One

An anonymous letter lands on Wexford's desk, telling him that a girl named Ann has been killed by a small, dark young man called Geoff Smith. Before he can decide what to make of that, the town obliges with something messier. A love-nest on a side street has been wrecked, and the carpet is soaked through with human blood. There is no body. There is, however, an eccentric woman named Anita Margolis who has vanished, and the bundle of cash she was carrying has gone with her. Anonymous letters are the small-town detective's curse: they arrive full of certainty and empty of names.

Wexford and Burden disagree about what happened to Anita, and that argument gives the story its life. One reading makes her a victim. The other makes her a woman who simply walked off with the money. Neither version quite fits the blood-soaked carpet, and the friction between the two detectives stops the case from settling into anything comfortable. The man named in the letter hovers over the whole business without ever quite arriving.

George Baker's Wexford is patient and watchful, and Christopher Ravenscroft's Burden is there to prod him along. The town around them is properly peopled: Carmel McSharry's Ruby Branch, Russell Hunter's Monkey Matthews, Nicholas Gecks as Rupert Margolis, Kim Thomson as Linda Grover and Jean Heywood's Mrs Penistan all get a turn. Louie Ramsay's Dora and Robert Reynolds' Mark Drayton fill out the picture, and Christopher Ellison pops up as Mr Kirkpatrick. Clive Exton wrote it, and John Davies directed.

This one runs on atmosphere rather than answers. Blood with no body is a fine opening image, and the episode makes the most of it. Anita stays missing, the letter stays unsigned, and the viewer is left weighing the same theories Wexford and Burden are arguing about. That is the right way to open a four-part story.