Tainted Fruit

The episode opens in that particular pocket of Midsomer where the houses are big and the manners impeccable: a local beauty found dead by the pool at her own manor house. The first instinct is to blame tragedy. But the second is to start listing her enemies, and that list turns out to be long. Barnaby and Troy uncover a seedy world of adultery and deceit among the affluent residents, and every motive points to betrayal rather than simple greed.

What follows is the standard Midsomer exercise in polite hypocrisy. Every conversation at the club, every wave over the fence, might be masking something devastating. Polite society gives the killer excellent cover, because nobody in this world asks the questions that would spoil lunch. The community turns out to be a source of mystery in its own right, and the case pulls in figures like Cherrie Balcombe, Lord Hislop, Georgina Canning, Joan Farley and Archie Townsend, each wearing the same pleasant expression and holding back the same amount of truth.

David Hoskins and Caroline Graham wrote it, and Peter Smith directed. The central trio of John Nettles, Daniel Casey and Jane Wymark anchors the whole thing, with Ann Bell as Cherrie Balcombe, Charles Collingwood as Lord Hislop, Eleanor David as Georgina Canning, Ellie Haddington as Joan Farley, Terence Harvey as Archie Townsend, Richard Clothier as the postman and Barry Jackson as Dr George Bullard.

There is a fitting bleakness to the setting. A swimming pool at a manor house should suggest leisure and ease, and instead it is where the body floats face down at the start. The veneer of perfect village life turns out to be very thin, and the show enjoys peeling it back inch by inch. The pool is the giveaway: water you can see straight through, and none of them are.