Wolf to the Slaughter: Part Four

The final part opens with the sort of problem that would send most detectives to the pub. Wexford and his colleagues now know the identity of Anita Margolis's killer. There is just one difficulty: the man died about eighteen months before the murder. Every piece of the case has led somewhere coherent, and the destination is a dead man. The investigation appears to have run itself into the ground.

What follows is a careful working-through of how that could possibly be true. The episode has the quiet confidence of a story that has laid its tracks and can now afford to walk slowly. Wexford picks at the timeline, testing what the dead man could and could not have done, and the gap between the two dates begins to look less like an ending and more like a door left ajar. The pleasure here is watching a puzzle that appears solved refuse to stay solved.

The cast is in good order. George Baker and Christopher Ravenscroft carry the questioning, while the supporting players deepen the picture: Jean Heywood's Mrs Penistan, Nicholas Gecks as Rupert Margolis, Mitzi Rogers as Mrs Anstey, Carmel McSharry's Ruby Branch and Donald Hewlett's Russell Cawthorne, with Hal Dyer as Mrs Cawthorne. Robert Reynolds' Mark Drayton and Kim Thomson's Linda Grover finish the roll call. Ruth Rendell and Clive Exton wrote it, and John Davies directed.

The story has been good at withholding, and this final chapter earns the right to start giving. The dead-man twist is the oldest trick in the mystery book, and the episode plays it with a straight face. Watching Wexford refuse to accept a neat impossibility is exactly the right note to end on, and it leaves the resolution to the viewer's own wits, which is where Rendell always liked it to live.