The Best Man to Die: Part One

On the eve of a wedding, the best man is murdered at the stag party. At roughly the same time, a serious car crash leaves two victims needing hospital care. Wexford refuses to believe the two events are unrelated, and the episode is built on his conviction that a party and a pile-up on the same night cannot be coincidence. It is a hunch with nothing behind it yet, and he carries it anyway. The crash victims stay in the background of the hour, but the script keeps returning to them as the connection Wexford insists on refuses to prove itself.

The case takes a stranger turn when Wexford joins forces with the bridegroom himself. The dead best man, Charlie Hatton, turns out to be only the first in what looks like a string of murders, killings that seem to circle the same themes: cheating husbands, loose women, gangsters. What began as a wedding gone wrong is opening onto a much grimmer picture of the town's hidden transactions, and Wexford is being dragged through it one body at a time.

The cast is strong from the top down. George Baker and Christopher Ravenscroft lead, and they are joined by Barbara Leigh-Hunt's Mrs Fanshawe, Jonathan Barlow's Jack Pertwee, John Cater's Mr Pertwee, Clara Salaman's Nurse Rose, John Vine's Dr Crane, Stephen Boxer's Jolyon Vigo and Richard Graham's Charlie Hatton, with Deborah Poplett's Sheila Wexford keeping the family thread visible. John Brown wrote it, and Herbert Wise directed. The hour went out in October 1990 as the opening of the story.

The episode works because it refuses to let the celebration stay celebratory. A stag night, a bridegroom, a best man: all the furniture of a happy occasion, rearranged into a crime scene. Wexford's instinct that the crash and the killing belong together gives the story its spine, and the hour ends with the connection still unproven but irresistible, which is exactly where a first part should leave you.