The Ramblin' Boy (1)

An embalmed body is found dumped by an isolated farm track, which is unusual twice over: the body is prepared for burial and abandoned instead. The local GP, Dr Matt Whitby, confirms the gentleman died of cancer, and funeral director Brian Miller makes the identification. Everything is in order, except that none of it should be lying by a country road. Then the crematorium confirms that a body was burned, and Lewis is left wondering who was really in the coffin.

The mystery turns on the rituals of death, on what is supposed to happen to a body and what actually happened to this one. Lewis has to think his way around the funeral industry itself, where paperwork and procedure have covered a substitution that somebody went to a great deal of trouble to arrange. The dead man's identity is established, and that only makes the question worse.

But the mortuary and crematorium sequences are handled with the quiet dignity the subject deserves, no ghoulishness, just the paperwork of death laid out for inspection. This is a procedural episode in the truest sense, and the show trusts the details to be enough.

Colin Dexter and Lucy Gannon wrote it, and Dan Reed directed. Simon Wilson plays Dr Matt Whitby, Tom Brooke is Brian Miller, Lia Williams plays Emma Barnes, Mark Powley takes Jack Cornish, Peter Davison plays Peter Faulkner, Camilla Power is Tara Faulkner, Harriet Ballard plays Ruth Wilson, Taron Egerton takes Liam Jay, Nicholas McGaughey plays Johnny Jay and Jessica Harris appears as Beverley Miller.

The premise is one of the show's quietest and most peculiar, a crime built entirely around the arrangements we make for the dead. There is no bloody scene, no dramatic confrontation, just a paper trail that does not add up. The episode trusts the strangeness of the setup, and the answer, when it comes, is worth the wait.