Murder Being Once Done: Part Two

Wexford is still on leave and still failing at it. The month's rest prescribed after his collapse has become a month of London visits to Mike Burden, who is working a case that has lodged itself in Wexford's dreams. Officially he is recuperating at home. In practice he keeps turning up where the investigation is, and the investigation keeps letting him in, because nobody involved can pretend he is not useful.

The case at the centre of it is the young woman found murdered in a vault, and the more Wexford looks, the stronger the connections grow to the secretive world of baby adoption businesses. It is Rendell territory in the truest sense: the crime is a death, and the mystery is a life, and the two keep refusing to separate. Every adoption file he opens seems to contain another reason somebody might have wanted that girl dead.

Matthew Jacobs and Ruth Rendell shared the writing, and John Gorrie directed, and the ensemble settles into the story's rhythms. George Baker's Wexford is officially resting and visibly not, Christopher Ravenscroft's Burden is the patient host of an investigation that keeps growing, and the supporting cast does strong work: John Forgeham's Det Insp Baker, Philip Glenister's Brian Gregson, George Sweeney's Sgt Clements, Ian McNeice's Ivan Teal, Louie Ramsay's Dora, Diane Keen's Jenny, John Burgess' Dr Len Crocker and Nigel Gregory's barman.

There is something gently comic about the whole arrangement, a detective on sick leave solving other people's cases by proxy, and something darker underneath it. Wexford's dreams pulled him here for a reason, and the episode lets the reason stay half-hidden. The vault, the adoption business, the false name: they are all pieces of one puzzle, and the middle part is where the pieces start to look like they might actually fit.