Some Lie and Some Die: Part Two

The murder enquiry grinds on, and Wexford's mind is not entirely on it. Dora has gone on holiday without telling him, and the question of how his wife could simply vanish into a suitcase is nagging at him harder than any suspect. It is a lovely domestic detail, the sort Rendell planted deliberately: a man whose job is solving disappearances, blindsided by one in his own kitchen. The case he is half neglecting began with a body found near a rock concert, and the noise of that world never quite leaves the frame.

Burden is carrying his own weight. Still recovering from the loss of his wife, he has started to fall for his daughter's history teacher, and the new feeling is doing him good. Then the case starts giving Wexford genuine headaches, and the breakthrough arrives from an unexpected corner: Burden mixes up his daughter with his late wife in conversation, and the slip gives Wexford the exact nudge he needs. A man's grief, it turns out, is better evidence than half the files on the desk.

The episode leans on its regulars and they deliver. George Baker's Wexford is wonderfully exasperated, Christopher Ravenscroft's Burden is raw and hopeful at once, and Louie Ramsay's absent Dora manages to loom over the whole hour. Peter Capaldi's Zeno Vedast, David Lyon's Leonard Dunsand, Diane Keen's Jenny Ireland and Gemma Jones' Mrs Peveril keep the murder case ticking over. Matthew Jacobs and Ruth Rendell shared the writing, and Sandy Johnson directed. The hour went out in October 1990 as the middle part of the story.

What sticks is how personal everything has become. The dead girl in the quarry, the grieving inspector, the wife on holiday: three separate mysteries, and the episode trusts that the smallest of them might be the key to the biggest. The episode keeps all three threads running at once, which is harder to write than it looks. Burden's confusion does the work of a dozen forensic reports.