Raise the Hispanic

Amanda Peagram, a local landowner's daughter, is engaged to Roger Hall, a man who continues to play the field right up to the altar. On the instructions of Amanda's father, Lovejoy has been furnishing a house with antiques for the couple. Amanda is not impressed with any of it, and at the wedding Lovejoy overhears a row between Roger and Amanda's father.

Then Roger disappears. Lovejoy finds his body hidden in a suit of armour, and when the police arrive, the body is nowhere to be found. Nobody believes him, and Roger is treated as a missing person. Lovejoy insists the man is dead, but he cannot produce the corpse, so he decides to investigate the murder himself, at Amanda's request. The roots of the thing go back a quarter of a century, to an accidental death and a long-running blackmail, and the wedding was only ever the tip of it. Amanda is the one person who wants the truth out, while everyone else would rather the old secret stayed buried.

Ian La Frenais, Jonathan Gash and Douglas Watkinson wrote it, Bill Hays directed, and it aired on 3 March 1991. Ian McShane is Lovejoy, Dudley Sutton is Tinker Dill, and Chris Jury is Eric Catchpole. Frank Windsor plays Ralph Peagram, Sylvestra Le Touzel is Amanda Peagram, Robert Gwilym is Roger Hall, Catherine Schell is Francis Beauchamp, Michael Medwin is Bill Fredericks, Tony Selby is Sgt. Hartley, and Bryan Pringle is Malcolm Tandy. Medwin, one of the most familiar faces in British film and television, gives the supporting cast some proper weight.

The pleasure here is in the architecture of the mystery. Old grudges, stately homes, a vanishing corpse and a suit of armour doing duty as a coffin: the episode keeps its secrets folded away until it is ready, and the reveal is worth the wait. Lovejoy's insistence that he saw a body nobody else can find is one of his finer stubborn streaks.