Destroying Angel

Everything in this one turns on a missed appointment. A hotel owner dies, and the manager of the establishment misses the reading of the will, the document that would have named him part-owner of the place. Whether he slept in or was deliberately kept away is the question Barnaby and Troy spend the episode answering. The whole thing is a very Midsomer way to start a murder inquiry: an empty chair at a solicitor's office instead of a body in the ornamental lake.

The setting gives the case its shape. Hotels collect staff and guests with tangled histories, and this one has plenty of both. The death looks financial at first glance. But the personal connections keep getting in the way, as they always do. The staff all have opinions about the dead man, the guests all have reasons for being at the hotel, and the will itself becomes the most discussed piece of paper in the county. Joyce Barnaby offers her usual domestic counterweight to the proceedings, and the lives of Annie and Ben get pulled into the orbit of the inquiry whether they like it or not.

David Hoskins and Caroline Graham wrote it, with David Tucker directing. The cast runs from John Nettles and Daniel Casey through Jane Wymark to a supporting line-up that includes Adie Allen as Annie, Glen Berry as Ben, Samantha Bond as Suzanna Chambers, Philip Bowen as Gregory Chambers, Jonathan Coy as Kenneth Gooders and Niamh Daly as Denise Daly, with Nigel Betts as a sergeant.

It is remarkable what the show can do with a piece of paper. A will that went unread, a signature never witnessed: these small, dry facts carry the whole weight of the drama, and somehow it works every time. In Midsomer, a man can be undone by the one meeting he chose not to attend.