Down Among the Fearful (1)

A psychic called Randolph James is found dead in his consulting rooms, murdered, which is the kind of headline that writes itself. The autopsy and the paperwork tell a stranger story: Randolph James never existed. The dead man is Reuben Beatty, a psychological researcher from the University of Oxford's Department of Psychology, living under a false name and a false calling. He was injected with etorphine, a paralysing agent, and left in an office that belonged to his own invention.

Lewis and Hathaway have to unpick a double life before they can unpick the murder. Beatty was a psychological researcher pretending to read futures, and the reason matters as much as the method. The investigation moves between the psychology department and the consulting room, collecting the testimony of people who knew one version of the man or the other. Polly Beatty, the Fox twins playing Sarah, Justine Skinner, Vicki Walmsley and Professor Andrew Crane all hold pieces of the puzzle, and none of them quite fit together.

But the episode's best trick is keeping the fraud alive in the audience's mind: every scene in the consulting rooms carries the double meaning of a man performing belief. The psychology department's researchers, by contrast, are painfully sincere, which is its own kind of performance.

Colin Dexter, Simon Block and Catherine Tregenna wrote it, and Brian Kelly directed. Edwin Thomas plays Reuben Beatty, Catherine Steadman is Polly Beatty, Beatie Edney plays Justine Skinner, Tuppence Middleton takes Vicki Walmsley, Neil Stuke plays Professor Andrew Crane and Marty Cruickshank appears as a Woman Interviewee. Kevin Whately and Laurence Fox lead.

The premise is one of the show's best, a fraud so complete that it takes a murder to expose it. And the episode is honest about the deception at the centre: a man who spent his working life studying belief, hiding inside a profession built on it. The case closes, but the questions about who Reuben Beatty really was take longer to answer.