Master of the Moor: Part One

Stephen Whalby loves the moor. He has spent most of his life on its edge, alone since childhood, and the wild moor is the closest thing he has to a home. Then the murders start. Young women, all with fair hair, are killed on the moor in a string of senseless deaths, and Stephen's response is not fear but fascination. He becomes intrigued. He also becomes, very quickly, the principal suspect.

Colin Firth plays Stephen with the inward quality the part needs, a man who reads as odd because he is simply elsewhere, and the police read oddness as guilt. Det. Insp. Manciple, played by George Costigan, builds his case around the thing that makes Stephen who he is: his passion for the place where the bodies keep appearing. The moor itself becomes the third character in the room, beautiful and unforgiving and full of places a body could rest for years.

The family picture is complicated. Sylvia Syms is Stephen's mother, Robert Urquhart is Dadda Whalby, and Emma Croft's Lyn Whalby is the wife who finds herself married to a suspect. Around them move John Michie's Nick, Rachel Fielding's painter on the moor, Andy Greenhalgh's landlord and Ingrid Lacey's newspaper reporter, eager to turn the deaths into a story. B.J. McLagan plays the young Stephen, and the glimpses of the boy he was hang over everything. The series steps away from Kingsmarkham for this one, and the change of air suits the material, with no Wexford or Burden to lean on.

Trevor Preston wrote it, and Marc Evans directed, for broadcast on the 2nd of September 1994. The episode sets its trap carefully: a lonely man, a series of fair-haired victims, a detective who cannot see past the obvious candidate. The moor keeps its secrets, and Stephen keeps walking its paths, and the hour ends with the suspicion tightening around a man who may be exactly what he seems, or nothing like it.