Down Among the Dead Men

Martin Barrett is an expert blackmailer, which is to say a man with a skill that makes enemies professionally and stores them carefully. When he turns up dead, Barnaby and DC Ben Jones find themselves with the opposite of the usual problem: instead of a shortage of suspects, they have a queue of people with excellent reasons and perfectly rehearsed alibis. The puzzle is which of them finally decided to pay the bill. Every one of them looks the detectives in the eye and tells the same lie with a different smile.

But the case takes the pair through the victim's address book, which reads like a guided tour of local embarrassment. Hayley Redfern, Jack Fothergill, Ruby Wilmott and Richard Florian all have something they would rather not have explained to the wider world, and all of them are relieved, in the way only the guilty can be, that Barrett will not be saying anything else. Dr George Bullard does the medical work, and Joyce and Cully keep the domestic side present while the mood in the village turns wary.

Douglas Watkinson and Caroline Graham wrote it, Renny Rye directed. John Nettles is Barnaby, Jason Hughes is Jones, and the guest cast does steady work: Grant Masters as Martin Barrett, Charlotte Emmerson as Hayley Redfern, Sam Kelly as Jack Fothergill, Julia McKenzie as Ruby Wilmott and Rob Edwards as Richard Florian, with Barry Jackson, Jane Wymark and Laura Howard in support.

There is a particular satisfaction in watching a blackmail victim discover that their secret was never as safe as they thought. Midsomer has always understood that a village runs on what people do not say to each other, and a man who made a living out of listening to those silences was always going to end up in a ditch eventually. The only mystery is who got there first. There is a reason blackmail plots endure: everyone has something they would pay to bury.