Means of Evil: Part One

The case opens in an unexpected place: a vegetarian household, suddenly short one member through murder. Wexford, confronted with the crime scene and the family's dietary certainties, finds his mind drifting to a surprisingly practical question: how many kinds of mushrooms are there? It is a lovely little piece of character business, the detective's brain reaching for taxonomy when the horror is too fresh, and it tells you everything about the tone this episode is aiming for.

The investigation unfolds around the Kingman family and their circle. Patrick Malahide's Axel Kingman and Wendy Morgan's Hannah Kingman sit at the centre of it, with Cheryl Campbell's Corrine Last hovering nearby and Dr Crocker, John Burgess, applying the medical eye. The police side is familiar: George Baker's Wexford, Christopher Ravenscroft's Burden, Ken Kitson's D.S. Martin and Colin Campbell's Sgt Willoughby, with Louie Ramsay's Dora and Diane Keen's Jenny keeping the domestic thread alive. Peter Berry wrote it, and Sarah Hellings directed.

The episode is a comfortable sort of procedural, the kind that lets the regulars breathe. The murder gives the machinery a reason to turn, but the pleasure is in watching the cast work: Baker's mild exasperation, Burden's steady competence, the small irritations of a household that has made a philosophy out of what it eats. The mushroom question lingers as a running gag that never quite stops being funny. The household's missing member is Hannah Kingman, played by Wendy Morgan, though the first hour keeps the circumstances of her death open to dispute. That ambiguity is deliberate: the second part will split the detectives cleanly over whether Hannah died by her own hand or someone else's. The episode first aired on the 24th of November 1991.

What the hour sets up, without announcing it, is a division of opinion that will drive the second part. The death in the vegetarian family is not going to be easy to classify, and Wexford's mind, already wandering among fungi, is going to have to decide what kind of case this really is. The taxonomy, it turns out, matters more than he thinks.