Old School Ties

An ambitious Oxford student is found dead in her hotel room. The circumstances are not simple: she had invited a reformed computer hacker to speak at the union, a man who had turned a criminal past into a best-selling celebrity career. When that celebrated figure turns up dead as well, the case stops looking like bad luck and starts looking like a plan. Lewis and Hathaway are left to pick through the wreckage of a clever, messy evening.

The investigation pulls them through the university's social life, where everyone connected to the dead woman or the lecturer seems to hold one small piece of a fragmented story. Nicky Turnbull, Professor Weller, David Harvey, Caroline Morton: they circle the truth without ever quite landing on it. The episode enjoys the collegiate atmosphere, all ancient halls and modern secrets, and the two detectives do their usual patient work of letting people talk themselves into corners.

But the union lecture was meant to be a triumph; it turned out to be a trap. The celebrity guest traded on a reformed past and was undone by a present he could not control, and the student who invited him may have been bait or just another victim. Lewis and Hathaway have to decide which.

Colin Dexter and Alan Plater wrote it, with Sarah Harding directing. Owen Teale plays Nicky Turnbull, Don Gallagher is Professor Weller, James Russell takes David Harvey, Frances Albery plays Jo Gilchrist, Emma Campbell-Webster is Caroline Morton, Tom Harper plays Stephen Gilchrist and Stuart Milligan takes the role of Webster. Kevin Whately and Laurence Fox lead as Lewis and Hathaway, with Rebecca Front's Chief Superintendent Innocent keeping an eye on the pair.

There is a particular pleasure in watching this show work a murder inside the university's walls. The mystery here is competently built and politely ruthless, and the setting does half the work. Modern secrets, it turns out, surface just as easily in the oldest buildings in England.