The Best Man to Die: Part Three

The final part of the story pulls everything back together, and the case that began with a best man dead at a stag party has travelled a long way since. The murders have a theme, and the theme has a name: the dead keep connecting to cheating husbands, loose women and the gangster element, and Wexford has been following that thread through the wreckage of more than one marriage.

The hour resolves the investigation with the patient thoroughness the story has earned. Every witness who lied, every detail that did not fit, every relationship that looked respectable from the outside: they all arrive at the same conclusion, and the bridegroom who joined forces with Wexford at the start is there to see it through. The episode does not hurry. It has three parts of credit in the bank and it spends it properly, letting the final confrontation grow out of the evidence rather than out of a convenient confession. The hour first went out on the 4th of November 1990, bringing a story that had been building weekly since late October to its close. It ends by staying with the faces we have already met, letting the earlier witnesses carry the weight of the resolution.

George Baker's Wexford is at his most methodical, and Christopher Ravenscroft's Burden keeps pace. The supporting cast is strong throughout: Tony Haygarth's Maurice Cullam, Diane Keen's Jenny Ireland, Barbara Leigh-Hunt's Mrs Fanshawe, Julia Ormond's Nora Fanshawe, John Vine's Dr Crane, John Burgess' Dr Crocker, Louie Ramsay's Dora and Deborah Poplett's Sheila. Ruth Rendell wrote it, and Herbert Wise directed.

The ending lands with the quiet authority of a case properly closed. The stag party, the crash, the string of murders: all of it was one story, and the final part is where the connections stop being suspicions and become facts. It is the sort of conclusion that makes you want to go back and watch the first two parts again, just to see the clues you missed.