The Secret House of Death: Part One

Susan Townsend goes to see her reclusive next-door neighbour and finds him hacked to death. It is the kind of discovery that ends most people's curiosity about their neighbours, but Susan's troubles are only beginning. When another body turns up on the neighbour's property, Susan gets mixed up in a tale of mayhem and murder, and the killer, whoever they are, adds her name to a list of future victims.

The episode belongs to Amanda Redman, whose Susan is a lonely divorcée suddenly at the centre of a horror she did not ask for. The police presence is lean and local: Ian Thompson's Det Insp Ulph and Nicola Redmond's Det Sgt Mary Janes work the case with Robert Burbage's pathologist supplying the grisly details. Around Susan move Adam Welsh's Paul Townsend, Amanda Royle's Dawn, Sally Kinghorn's Rebecca, Owen Teale's Bob North, Sarah Parks' Louise North and Jonathan Linsley's Carl Heller, each of them carrying a piece of the neighbourhood's secrets.

The research notes add a grim dimension: Louise North is connected to a suicide pact involving her wife and a lover, and the neat domestic surface of the street is doing a great deal of work. John Harvey wrote it, and Jim Goddard directed, for broadcast on the 8th of March 1996, with the conclusion set to follow a week later, on the 15th. It is one of the series' standalone adaptations, with no Wexford anywhere in the cast, the kind of hour where the show sets aside Kingsmarkham entirely. The whole affair stays on one ordinary street, and the title's secret house is never far from view.

The hour works because it refuses to let the domesticity stay domestic. A reclusive neighbour, a hacked body, a second corpse, and a woman who just happened to knock on the wrong door: the killer's list has Susan's name on it, and the episode ends with the danger closing in around her. The secrets of the street are surfacing one body at a time.