Talking to Strange Men

This one is a Rendell novel with no Wexford in sight, and it does not need him. John Creevey has separated from his wife Jennifer, and his thoughts are still fixed on her and on Peter Mullin, the new man in her life. Underneath that fresh wound is an older one: years ago his sister Cherry was murdered, and her fiancé, Mark Simms, now John's best friend, was the prime suspect. When the police reopen the case and suspicion lands on Simms again, John starts to doubt the man he trusts most.

The story then takes a strange, almost comic turn that curdles into something much darker. John discovers a series of coded messages hidden beneath a railway bridge and throws himself into deciphering them, partly out of genuine fascination and partly to keep his mind off Jennifer. He convinces himself the codes belong to a gang of terrorists. They are actually the work of schoolboys at rival public schools, playing at being spies.

But John has stopped seeing straight. To punish Peter Mullin for breaking up his marriage, and for wrongly suggesting John might have killed Cherry, he plants a coded message for the supposed terrorists, ordering them to eliminate Peter. The planted message sets in motion a chilling meeting between Mullin and one of the schoolboys, Charles Mabledene, and what emerges reveals profoundly unsavoury things about Mullin's feelings towards young boys.

Julian Bond wrote it, and John Gorrie directed, with John Duttine's John, Mel Martin's Jennifer, Ralph Brown's Mullin, Miles Anderson's Mark Simms, Nicholas Haley's Mungo Cameron, Adrian Ross Magenty's Angus Cameron, Elspeth Charlton's Dr Lucy Cameron, Basil Moss' Dr Fergus Cameron, Harmage Singh Kalirai's Sikh and Trevor Cooper's DCI Fordwych. It is a careful study in how grief and betrayal can dress themselves up as an investigation, and how a game of schoolboy espionage can brush against real evil.