A Guilty Thing Surprised: Part One

Elizabeth Nightingale goes for her evening walk in the woods around Myfleet Manor and does not come back. She is found murdered, and the case lands with Wexford already wearing a familiar expression, the one that says the next few weeks are going to be uncomfortable. The trouble is the size of the suspect pool. Household staff, a permanent Dutch house guest named Katje Doorn, the gardener, the husband Quentin, and the victim's brother and his wife: everyone who had a reason to be near Elizabeth on that walk is now a person of interest.

Wexford works through them the patient way. He questions everyone with access to the estate, and the deeper he goes, the clearer it becomes that the murder is bound up with the state of the Nightingale marriage. The household looks respectable from the lane, but the version of it that emerges under questioning is quieter, colder and older than that. The truth about Elizabeth's death, he suspects, sits underneath a secret the family has been sitting on for years.

George Baker plays Wexford with his usual mix of irritation and persistence, and Christopher Ravenscroft's Burden is at his elbow. The Manor is well staffed with talent: Michael Jayston as Quentin Nightingale, Catherine Neilson as the dead Elizabeth, Nigel Terry and Karen Meagher as Denys and Georgina Villiers, Ellis van Maarseveen's Katje Doorn, Padraig O'Loinsigh's Sean Lovell, David Swift as Lionel Marriott and Sandra Voe as Mrs Myrtle Cantrip. Clive Exton wrote the script, and Mary McMurray directed.

The episode works as an introduction to a house full of secrets. A murder in a family like this one is rarely the start of the trouble; it is usually the point where the trouble finally shows itself. Wexford knows it, and the slow, careful picking at the Nightingales' polite surface is the best part of the hour.