Dead Letters

Sergeant Scott is off sick, and the desk at Causton is being minded by DC Ben Jones, which shifts the whole tone of the office. Jones is keen, but he has not yet learned Barnaby's trick of waiting. But then the murders start, and they keep circling back to the death of a beauty queen several years earlier. Old grief, it turns out, has a long reach, and the village has been sitting on its version of events ever since.

Barnaby and Jones work backwards through a case most people had stopped thinking about, talking to the families and friends who were left behind. Ursula Gooding and Alistair Gooding carry the weight of the old tragedy, Marion Slade and her husband add their own angles, John Starkey seems to know more than he says, and Rob Pride and Vicki fill in the edges of a story that nobody agrees on. Dr George Bullard supplies the medical background, and Joyce is around to keep Barnaby tethered to normal life while he chases a decade-old thread.

Peter Hammond and Caroline Graham wrote it, Renny Rye directed. The cast is a strong one: Elizabeth Spriggs as Ursula Gooding, Richard Cant as Alistair Gooding, Claire Askam as Marion Slade, David Bamber as John Starkey, Tom Bennett as Rob Pride and Jenny Jackson as Vicki, with John Nettles and Jason Hughes heading the investigation and Barry Jackson and Jane Wymark in support.

The beauty queen angle gives the story its shape, but the real subject is how a village carries a death it never properly closed. Everyone involved has spent years holding the same story up at the same angle, and the murders are what happen when the story starts to slip. Letters, it turns out, do not die with their writers. It is a quiet, careful episode, and all the better for refusing to shout.