The Veiled One

The Veiled One hands the spotlight to Mike Burden, and it is not a comfortable place to stand. A murder case has produced two witnesses who make police work harder rather than easier: a strange young man and his creepy mother. The boy has taken a shine to Burden, and his hero worship of the detective escalates alarmingly as the investigation goes on, hampering the enquiry and making everyone around him uneasy.

The episode is a study in how the people who claim to want to help can be the most disruptive of all. Burden needs reliable testimony and instead gets adoration, and the young man's devotion keeps turning up in the wrong places at the wrong times. The case itself has to be worked around the witnesses, and the atmosphere turns properly unsettling, the sort of quiet dread that Rendell's stories do so well without ever raising its voice. The boy's devotion grows in small, believable steps, and the effect is worse for being believable.

Christopher Ravenscroft carries the hour on his shoulders, and George Baker's Wexford hovers in support. The witness family is well served: Ian Fitzgibbon's Clifford Sanders is the unsettling young man, Paola Dionisotti's Dorothy Sanders the mother with the wrong kind of influence, with Camille Coduri as Lesley Arbel, Hugh Lloyd's Ralph Robson, Simon Chandler's Reese and Tony Vogel's Roy Carroll around the edges. Louie Ramsay's Dora and Deborah Poplett's Sheila Wexford keep the home front present. Trevor Preston wrote it, and Mary McMurray directed. The hour aired in December 1989, a standalone mystery without part numbers.

There is a particular kind of discomfort this show does better than most, the sense that the danger is not the crime but the people circling it. The Veiled One is that episode. Burden's witness worships him, and the hour makes you wonder whether that is a compliment or a threat, right up to the end.