A New Lease of Death: Part One

Wexford's first successful murder case comes back to haunt him, and it comes back with a vicar attached. A local clergyman, anxious about something in the old file, wants a thirty-year-old case reopened: Harry Painter, hanged for the axe-murder of an elderly woman. The trouble is that Wexford was the young detective sergeant who helped put Painter away, and the question the episode keeps pressing on him is the worst one a detective can hear. Was the man hanged on his evidence actually innocent?

The story is built on that slow, uncomfortable possibility. Reopening the case means examining decades-old evidence with fresh eyes, and it means Wexford confronting his own early career as a thing he might have got wrong. He was present at the original investigation, young and keen and sure of himself, and the man he helped convict went to the gallows. The episode does not let him off the hook, and George Baker plays the unease beautifully, a confident man being asked to distrust the foundations of his own legend.

The cast around him is strong. Peter Egan's Rev Henry Archery stirs the pot, Sharon Maughan's Imogen Ide, Denis Lill's Roger Primero, Suzanna Hamilton's Elizabeth Crilling and Dorothy Tutin's Mrs Crilling fill the old case with new faces, and Maggie Jones' Alice Flower, Louie Ramsay's Dora and Diane Keen's Jenny Burden complete the roll call. Christopher Ravenscroft's Burden watches his boss's past with professional sympathy. Peter Berry wrote it, and Herbert Wise directed.

The hour works because the stakes are historical and personal at once. A man was hanged. A career was built. If the wrong man died, everything Wexford believes about his own judgment comes with a question mark. The episode ends with the case reopened and the detective standing at the edge of an answer he may not want.