Faithful unto Death

When the wife of a wealthy local businessman vanishes, Fawcett Green turns out to be full of people who would rather she stayed missing. The disappearance drags Barnaby into a knot of financial rows and romantic history that reaches back years, and the village's good manners start to look like a way of not saying what everyone knows. The missing woman belongs to a household everyone watches and nobody discusses, and for a while it is genuinely unclear whether a crime has been committed at all, which is exactly how the village likes it.

Nothing here is quite what it seems. Nigel and Doreen Anderson, Elfrida Molfrey, Bunny Dawlish and Sarah Lawton all have their part in it, and they fit together in ways the polite surface conceals. Fawcett Green keeps its money problems and its old romances in the same drawer, and Barnaby has to open it, working out which secrets are being kept in the name of community and which ones are protecting a killer. The answer turns on the oldest motives in the book. Money and affection. In that order, usually.

Douglas Watkinson and Caroline Graham wrote it, Baz Taylor directed. John Nettles and Daniel Casey anchor the investigation as Barnaby and Sergeant Troy, with Jane Wymark and Laura Howard as Joyce and Cully, and Barry Jackson's Dr Bullard in support. Around them: Paul Brooke's Nigel Anderson, Rosalind Ayres' Doreen, Eleanor Summerfield's Elfrida Molfrey, Peter Jones' Bunny Dawlish and Tessa Peake-Jones' Sarah Lawton.

The pleasure of the episode is watching Barnaby prise politeness apart, layer by layer, until the truth stops hiding. Behind the beautiful stone walls of Fawcett Green, the ordinary people are anything but, and the solution, when it arrives, has been sitting in front of everyone the whole time. And that is exactly why we keep watching.