What Lies Tangled (1)

An idyllic Oxford summer's day, the kind the tourist boards photograph, is torn apart by a parcel bomb. The suddenness of the violence against that setting is the point of the episode's opening, and Lewis and Hathaway are called in to pick through the wreckage of a perfect afternoon. The question is who planted the bomb, and what it was designed to expose.

The investigation moves through the lives of the people connected to the explosion. Sarah Alderwood, David Capstone, Elizabeth Capstone: they orbit the event, each with their own version of what happened and their own reasons for holding something back. The episode spreads the suspicion carefully, suggesting a network of local secrets that the blast has only begun to disturb. Lewis and Hathaway have to work out which of the survivors knows more than they are saying.

But the bomb throws the whole city off balance, and the episode is good on the aftermath, the witnesses who cannot settle and the anger looking for somewhere to land. Lewis and Hathaway work the shock as much as the evidence, and a parcel bomb is always a message, which means the sender is watching to see if it was understood.

Colin Dexter and Nicholas Hicks-Beach wrote it, and David Drury directed. Mali Harries plays Sarah Alderwood, Oliver Lansley is David Capstone, Zoë Tapper plays Elizabeth Capstone, David Warner takes Donald Lockston, Peter De Jersey plays Andrew Dimmock, Tristam Summers is Adam Capstone, Ian Puleston-Davies plays Frank Guitteau and Emerald O'Hanrahan takes Kate McMurdoch. Kevin Whately and Laurence Fox lead the investigation.

There is a particular nastiness in a bomb on a summer day, the ordinary setting making the crime feel like a personal attack on the city itself. The episode uses that contrast well, the sunshine and the shrapnel sharing the same frames. Somebody wanted the peace broken, and the detectives have to find out what the blast was meant to announce.