Dead Man's Eleven

Fletcher's Cross is getting ready for its annual cricket match when the local landowner's wife goes for a walk with the dog and never comes back. She is found bludgeoned to death with a cricket bar, and while the victim herself had no apparent enemies, her husband Robert Cavendish is hated by just about everyone. That gives the investigation somewhere to start, even if it does not make it any easier. The village's proudest day has become its darkest one.

Barnaby and Troy walk into a village where the big day has been ruined and nobody is sure whether to be grief-stricken or relieved. The Cavendish family sits at the centre of it all: Robert himself, the unpleasant husband with the expensive wife, along with Jane, Tara and Stephen Cavendish, all connected by money and land, with the kind of resentment that only a sporting rivalry brings to the surface. Cricket, in these parts, is practically a religion, and the captain's wife has been killed right before the sermon. Every person in Fletcher's Cross seems to have something to hide, and the cricket fixture provides a natural gathering point for secrets. The match will go on. It always does.

Anthony Horowitz and Caroline Graham wrote it, Jeremy Silberston directed. John Nettles and Daniel Casey head the cast, with Jane Wymark and Laura Howard supporting. Robert Hardy is Robert Cavendish, Anthony Calf is Stephen, Annabelle Apsion's Jane and Felicity Dean's Tara complete the family, and Penelope Beaumont's Mrs Wilson and Duncan Preston's Colin Cooper fill out the village.

There is something very English about a murder that happens in the middle of the village's proudest day, and the show knows it. The annual match gives the episode a shape and a deadline, and the family resentments give it teeth. Human pettiness has rarely looked so well dressed. And the cricket bar remains the most memorable weapon in the county's arsenal.