Shake Hands Forever: Part One

Robert Hathall brings his mother home for a visit, and she is the one who finds her daughter-in-law Angela murdered. It is a horrible way to start an episode, and it sets the tone for everything that follows. Wexford is puzzled and more than a little annoyed by the attitude of both Hathall and his mother, and the physical evidence at the scene refuses to behave itself. There is no motive, no suspect, and no obvious way in.

The investigation starts to drift toward a theory that makes everyone uncomfortable: that Angela picked up a stranger, and that the stranger killed her. The line Wexford follows on the strength of it costs him. His colleagues, Mike Burden among them, start to pull away, and even Dora, his own wife, finds herself alienated by where his thinking is taking him. Wexford has been wrong before, but he has rarely been this alone while being wrong.

Tom Wilkinson plays Robert Hathall with the unreadable composure the part demands, and Margery Mason's Mrs Hathall is a study in polite steel. Around them, Patrick Drury's Chief Supt Howard Fortune, Michael Byrne's DCC Charles Griswold and Fred Pearson's Chief Insp Jack 'Brock' Lovat crowd the enquiry with officialdom, while June Ritchie's Nancy Lake hovers on the edges. Louie Ramsay's Dora Wexford and Geoffrey Beevers' Mr Aveney complete the roll call. Clive Exton wrote it, Don Leaver directed, and it went out on the 23rd of September 1988.

The hour is about Wexford trusting his own judgment while the room fills with doubters. It is a domestic tragedy that refuses to stay domestic, and watching Baker hold the centre while the case falls apart around him is worth the price of admission. The mystery has no shape yet, and the episode is content to leave it that way for now.