Strangler's Wood

Strangler's Wood lives up to its name again. The nude body of Carla Constanza, the face of Brazil's leading cigarette brand for Monarch Tobacco, is found strangled there, and the alarm bells go off immediately. Nine years ago a killer worked this wood, and three identical unsolved murders of young women were never explained. Everyone hoped he was gone, and the village has spent the intervening years pretending the whole business was a bad dream. It is beginning to look as though he was only resting.

Barnaby and Troy have to reopen the old wounds along with the new case. The earlier deaths haunt the village, and the investigation pushes them into the lives of people who have spent eight years trying to put the whole business behind them. Leonard Pike and his wife Dorothea, the Meakhams, Liz Frances and Bill Mitchell: all of them have some connection to the past, and none is in a hurry to admit it. The forest keeps its secrets in the way forests do, and the bodies keep turning up in the same patch of it. For Barnaby, the hardest part is that the old case was never properly closed.

Anthony Horowitz and Caroline Graham wrote it, with Jeremy Silberston directing. John Nettles and Daniel Casey are Barnaby and Troy, Jane Wymark and Laura Howard the Barnaby household, and the suspects include Peter Eyre's Leonard Pike, Kathleen Byron's Dorothea, Frank Windsor's George Meakham, Anne Stallybrass' Emily, Trudie Styler's Liz Frances and Jeremy Clyde's Bill Mitchell.

The wood is more than scenery here. It is an active part of the story, a place where the county's dark history collects, and Barnaby walking through it feels like a man stepping into the past. The serial killer element gives the episode a chill the usual village murder lacks; the old murders give it its weight, and the new one gives it its urgency. And the resolution has to untangle nine years' worth of fear before it can say who the killer is.