The Speaker of Mandarin: Part Two

Wexford is back in England, and the nightmare has followed him. His vivid dream, the one that troubled him among his fellow travellers in China, has been realised: one of the people he toured with has been shot dead. The episode opens with the gap between what he saw in his sleep and what has now happened on a Kingsmarkham doorstep, and the closing of that gap is deeply uncomfortable for a man who does not believe in premonitions.

The hour is built on that collision between the personal and the procedural. What Wexford experienced abroad felt like an internal matter, a strange psychological episode to be filed away and forgotten. Now it has become a concrete crime, and the investigation has to absorb the fact that the detective at its centre saw it coming without knowing what he was seeing. Trevor Preston and Ruth Rendell share the writing credit, and Herbert Wise directs, and the tone stays exactly where it should: eerie without ever tipping into the supernatural. Broadcast on the 4th of October 1992, it is the middle chapter of a three-parter, and the hour uses that position to deepen the dread with every new detail.

The cast list is a lean one this time, George Baker's Wexford and Christopher Ravenscroft's Burden carrying the hour between them, which suits the material. This is an episode about one man's mind as much as about a murder, and the spareness keeps the focus where it belongs.

The murder forces Wexford to weigh his own memory against the facts. He knows the dead woman, knew her on a tour bus on the other side of the world, and the knowledge gives the case a texture ordinary police work lacks. The episode ends with the investigation properly underway and Wexford carrying the unsettling certainty that his dream was not just a dream, and that the rest of the tour party should be very worried.