The Speaker of Mandarin: Part One

The case starts on the other side of the world. Wexford is in China on a study tour of historic sites, and the trip unsettles him in ways he cannot explain. To his own amazement he has psychic experiences, including a vision of the body of a Chinese nobleman dead for two thousand years. The tour party is made up of strangers, and he finds them tense and claustrophobic company. Then, during the trip, a young Chinese student drowns.

Back in England the strangeness follows him home. Wexford is called to a murder scene, and the dead woman, shot, turns out to be one of the people he toured China with. There is no obvious motive, and the case has a shape he recognises: the answer must lie among his fellow holidaymakers. He interrogates them all and finds hidden greed, treachery, theft and adultery, the usual luggage of a group of Britons abroad.

The knot is tied tight around the Knightons. Norman Rodway's Adam Knighton is a former barrister, and Denyse Alexander's Adela is his wife, and the research notes are diplomatic about their marriage: not the most loving of couples. Mrs Knighton lived near Kingsmarkham and has been murdered in what looks like a robbery. Burden favours an ex-con with a grudge against Mr Knighton, but his leads come up empty. Wexford is convinced the death is bound up with whatever happened in China.

The cast is a pleasure: Virginia McKenna's Milborough Lang, Patrick Drury's Chief Supt Howard Fortune, Annette Crosbie's Irene Bell, Kay Tong Lim's Sung Lao Zhong, Michael Carter's Lewis Fanning and Marjorie Yates' Hilda Avery. Trevor Preston wrote it, and Herbert Wise directed. The episode ends with a detective holding a handful of suspects and a memory of a drowning, and the sense that the holiday photographs are going to take a lot of explaining.