Murder Being Once Done: Part Three

The final part of the story brings Wexford's unofficial investigation to its conclusion, still officially on leave and still doing more work than most detectives do on duty. The young woman found murdered in the vault has led him through the adoption business and into a tangle of parental love that has been there from the start, hidden under the false name and the photograph and the two telephone numbers.

The resolution turns on the connections Wexford has been patiently assembling across all three parts. Every file, every interview, every quiet inconsistency in the dead girl's fabricated life adds up to the same answer, and the episode delivers it with the calm authority of a case properly finished. The exhaustion that started the story has become irrelevant; the man is too deep in the puzzle to feel tired, and George Baker plays the final stretch with a kind of grim relish. The hour first aired on the 3rd of November 1991, closing the three-part run that began with Wexford in a sickbed. The story's true subject is adoption and parental love, and the solution grows out of that theme rather than out of the forensic details.

Christopher Ravenscroft's Burden is there for the close, and the ensemble has been dependable throughout: 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 Valerie Whittington's Hannah Peters. Matthew Jacobs and Ruth Rendell wrote it, and John Gorrie directed.

The story closes with the mystery solved and the convalescence officially over, and it leaves a particular satisfaction behind. Wexford was meant to be resting; instead he walked a murder backwards into the arms of the people who loved the victim most. Some cases pick the detective, not the other way round, and this one picked him out of a sickbed.