The Best Man to Die: Part Two

Part two digs deeper into the string of killings that began with Charlie Hatton's death at the stag party. What looked like a local tragedy has become a pattern, and the pattern has a shape: the victims keep connecting to cheating husbands, loose women and the gangster world that runs underneath the village's respectable surface. Wexford works alongside the bridegroom, and the investigation keeps widening, pulling in people who know each other far too well.

The village setting turns out to be the point. These are murders among people who are intimate with one another's secrets, and the episode enjoys watching Wexford pick through relationships that have gone sour in the most complicated ways. Every interview leads to another name, every name to another grudge. The alliance between Wexford and the bridegroom is the engine of the hour. Grief gives the groom a reason to push where the police must tread carefully, and the episode makes good use of that awkward partnership. The story first aired on the 28th of October 1990, midway through the fourth series. The case is less about finding a stranger with a weapon than about untangling a web of people who have done one another damage and called it living.

The cast brings real weight to the tangled business. Tony Haygarth's Maurice Cullam is new to the frame, John Vine's Dr Crane and John Burgess' Dr Crocker lend the medical side, and Barbara Leigh-Hunt's Mrs Fanshawe glowers in the background with Julia Ormond's Nora Fanshawe alongside her. Clara Salaman's Nurse Rose, Ken Kitson's D.S. Martin and Louie Ramsay's Dora complete the picture with George Baker and Christopher Ravenscroft at the centre. Ruth Rendell wrote the script, and Herbert Wise directed.

The middle part of a three-part story has a hard job: it must deepen the mystery without exhausting it. This one manages by making the community itself the suspect. The more Wexford learns about the people around the dead man, the more plausible every one of them becomes, and the hour ends with the list of possibilities growing instead of shrinking.