Down Among the Fearful (2)

The second half of the story opens with Lewis and Hobson examining the body of Vicki Walmsley, and the case keeps unspooling from there. A theft of etorphine is reported at the Garsington Equine Centre, and the drug connects directly to the past: it was used a year earlier on a horse that injured its teenage rider, Joshua Grace. Grace, it turns out, is the brother-in-law of Reuben Beatty, the first murder victim, and the web starts to close around a set of old, ugly events.

Reuben's killer has also murdered his co-researcher at the centre, and suspicion settles naturally on the people who traded in the same occult trade as the dead man: fellow psychic Frank McLean and tarot reader Justine Skinner. Lewis and Hobson work through the relationships at the estate, where everyone seems to be holding something back. The paralysing drug, the horse, the injured rider, the dead researcher: the connections accumulate until the pattern becomes unavoidable.

But the equine centre gives the case its strangest detail, a drug stolen from a horse's medicine cabinet to kill a man. The chain from the riding accident to the murder is long, yet the episode keeps it taut, and the occult suspects add colour without ever carrying the case.

Colin Dexter, Simon Block and Catherine Tregenna wrote it, and Brian Kelly directed. Beatie Edney plays Justine Skinner, Dominic Mafham is Frank McLean, Emily Joyce plays Jane Grace, Catherine Steadman takes Polly Beatty, Adam Wadsworth plays Joshua Grace, Lesley Vickerage is Katherine Dutta, Sanjeev Bhaskar plays Kanan Dutta and Tuppence Middleton appears as Vicki Walmsley. Clare Holman, Laurence Fox and Kevin Whately carry the investigation.

The episode keeps its pace up while the body count rises, and it does the rare thing of making the second part feel necessary rather than padded. The occult trappings give the story colour, but the real engine is the ordinary cruelty underneath. By the end, the psychic's double life has cost more people than anyone counted.