Some Lie and Some Die: Part One

The Kingsmarkham rock festival is in full swing, the kind of sunny, noisy day out that fills the local paper with pictures of mud and smiling teenagers. Then the mood collapses. The disfigured body of a local girl, thought to have been living in London, is found in a nearby quarry. She was a girl who had gone to the bad, according to the town's quieter voices, and her death lands with Wexford in the middle of a festival that suddenly does not feel like a party at all.

The enquiry soon narrows onto a link between the dead girl and Zeno Vedast, a charismatic singer with the rock scene written all over him. Peter Capaldi plays him, which tells you everything about how magnetic the part needs to be, and Wexford has to work out how a young woman from Kingsmarkham came to be connected to the enigmatic musician's world. The festival's chaos and the stillness of the quarry refuse to belong to the same story, and that gap is where the case lives.

George Baker's Wexford works the crowd with his usual patience, and Christopher Ravenscroft's Burden is at his side. The supporting cast is a pleasure: Diane Keen's Jenny Ireland, David Lyon's Leonard Dunsand, Susie Ann Watkins' Nell Tate, Joseph Long's Godfrey Tate, Dave Hill's Det Chief Constable Freeborn and Gemma Jones as Mrs Peveril. Louie Ramsay's Dora completes the home front. Matthew Jacobs wrote it, and Sandy Johnson directed.

The episode sets up its mystery with a lovely sense of scale: a murder in a town full of people, a victim with a secret life, a star with something to hide. Tragedy intruding on a bank-holiday crowd is an old trick, but it works, and the contrast between the music and the body in the quarry carries the whole first part.