Expiation

A housewife is found hanging in her own home, and the first verdict is suicide. Lewis and Hathaway are not convinced, and neither, it soon appears, is anyone else involved. The case keeps circling two couples who have been friends for years, the Mallorys and the Haywards, and the more the detectives look at those four lives, the less like an accident the hanging looks.

What unfolds is a story about old friendships and the debts that accumulate inside them. Rachel and Anna Mallory, Hugh and Izzie; David and Louise Hayward and their son Lucas: the families are knitted together in ways that make the investigation personal for everyone in the room. Lewis has a nose for the moment when a polite household is really a stand-off, and this episode gives him two of them. The suicide verdict turns out to be a curtain drawn across something much older.

But the drama lives in what the characters do not say over dinner, in the way two couples who have known each other for years suddenly cannot meet each other's eyes. There are no chases and very little shouting. Lewis reads that silence the way other men read a map.

Colin Dexter and Guy Andrews wrote the script, and Dan Reed directed. James Wilby plays Hugh Mallory, with Emma Croft as Rachel, Eva Sayer as Anna and Julia Joyce as Izzie. Vincent Regan is David Hayward, Lucy Robinson plays Louise, Jonathan McCausland takes Lucas, Adam Parkinson plays Michael Hayward and Pip Torrens is Malcolm Croft. Ben Peel appears as a student, keeping the academic backdrop honest.

Domestic crime suits this show well. There is no grand conspiracy here, just two families and the things they have agreed not to say to each other, and the murder grows out of that silence. The episode lets the reveal land without fuss, and the final image of the case is quieter and sadder than the body in the hallway suggested.