The Animal Within

Faith Alexander comes to Midsomer Deverell to meet her long-lost uncle Rex Masters and finds instead that he has disappeared, having told everyone she was killed in a plane crash. It is an odd sort of welcome: she is dead, apparently, and her wealthy uncle is missing. Then Rex's body turns up in the weir, and his circle of friends produce a series of wills, each one claiming the inheritance for itself. The ensuing battle of wills exposes plenty of motives, and for Barnaby and DS Ben Jones they have essentially queued up of their own accord. The wills are the giveaway, since nobody produces a document like that unless the money has been on their mind for a while. The dead uncle, for his part, has arranged matters so that everyone he knew had a reason to want him gone.

The investigation moves through the usual territory, with Joyce Barnaby and Dr George Bullard keeping the home front steady. Faith Alexander is played by Lisa Eichhorn, and around her gather Miles King, played by David Troughton, Janet Bailey, played by Emily Woof, and Eileen and Richard Carnack, in the hands of Linda Bassett and Malcolm Stoddard. Roger Bingham appears as a taxi driver. But the estate is a place where everyone watches everyone else, and the secrets pile up quickly.

David Hoskins and Caroline Graham wrote the episode, and Renny Rye directed. The set-up is one of the show's favourites, the disputed inheritance, and it is handled with proper enthusiasm for the genre.

The pleasure here is in watching a family of claimants circle a fortune while pretending to grieve. Nobody is quite who they seem, and Faith's status as the surprise niece, alive after all, upsets every plan in the room. Money does not make people interesting in Midsomer, but it does make them honest about their motives, and that is all the evidence Barnaby needs.