A Sleeping Life: Part One

The body of a middle-aged woman is found in a hedge, and for once the problem is not who killed her but who she was. There are no clues to her identity at all, and the enquiry has to start from nothing. The dead woman turns out to be Rhoda Comfrey, fatally stabbed, and the case that follows is anything but straightforward.

Wexford is, to be honest, not sorry to be called away from home. His older daughter's domestic problems have been grinding him down, and a sudden death in a hedge starts to look almost like a holiday by comparison. The investigation takes him and Burden to London, and the further they go the clearer it becomes that Rhoda Comfrey's life was not the quiet, simple thing her body suggested. The woman had layers, and the episode enjoys peeling them back one careful interview at a time. The presence of Olivier Pierre as Commissaire Laquin in this first part is a quiet promise of the French thread to come.

The cast is a treat. Imelda Staunton turns up as Polly Flinders, which is the sort of casting that tells you this show knew what it was doing, and Louie Ramsay's Dora, Dave Hill's Dep Chief Constable Freeborn, Mamta Kash's Malina Patel, Patrick Drury's Chief Supt Howard Fortune, William Simons' Det Insp Michael Baker and Olivier Pierre's Commissaire Pierre Laquin all get a turn. Charon Bourke appears as Sylvia Fairfax. Roger Marshall wrote the script, and Bill Hays directed. The hour opened the story in November 1989, and the script keeps the dead woman's silence at the centre of everything.

The episode has a lovely central irony: a woman whose life was so quiet that she could be murdered and remain unidentified, whose silence turns out to be the most interesting thing about her. Wexford keeps digging because there is nothing else to do, and the hedge gives up its secrets slowly. It is patient, well-made television, the kind that trusts its audience to stay interested in a woman nobody could name.