Beyond the Grave

A slashed painting at a museum is the sort of call that should be straightforward vandalism, the work of a spiteful hand. In Midsomer it never stays that way. Barnaby and Troy arrive to find that the museum is also the scene of a murder, and the episode turns from art crime to the darker kind without pausing for breath.

What makes it distinctive is the weight of local history pressing down on the case. Much of the running time goes to the story of the Battle of Aspern Tallow and Jonathan Lowrie, the wealthy royalist who survived the fighting and walked through the village, pausing only to drink from a well before continuing on to the church. The tale gets told with real enthusiasm, and it matters. But the past here is not decoration. It is evidence. Barnaby has to take the old stories as seriously as the forensic reports, and he does so without complaint, which is one of the quiet pleasures of watching him work.

The episode was written by Douglas Watkinson and Caroline Graham and directed by Moira Armstrong. John Nettles and Daniel Casey lead as Barnaby and Troy, with Jane Wymark and Laura Howard as Joyce and Cully. Around them: Barry Jackson as Dr George Bullard, Malcolm Sinclair as Alan Bradford, Cheryl Campbell as Sandra MacKillop, David Robb as Charles MacKillop, James Laurenson as James Tate, and Prunella Scales as Eleanor Bunsall. That is a cast list worth the ticket price alone.

Midsomer does this better than almost anyone: the sense of place is not backdrop, it is the mechanism of the mystery. A man stopped for a drink at a well three hundred years ago, and the ripple from that moment is still arriving in the present, pulling the investigation towards a murderer who thought the past was safely buried. That is the whole show in one image, really.