Talking to the Dead

The episode begins with a haunted forest, which in Midsomer is rarely just a story. Two couples have disappeared without a trace, a gang of antiquity thieves is working the area, and Barnaby has to find the connection before anyone else vanishes. The folklore is laid on thick, and the show is honest about it: the woods are supposedly haunted, and somebody is very happy for everyone to keep thinking so. Barnaby has never had much time for ghosts, but he has a great deal of time for the people who use them. Local superstition, as ever in the county, turns out to be a very convenient screen for very ordinary crime. The disappearances are clean enough to look supernatural, which is exactly the problem; people do not vanish like that without help.

The case spreads across the county. Jeroen Krabbé's Cyrus LeVanu and Paul Jesson's Lynton Pargeter are the chief suspects, with Anton Lesser's Reverend Wallace Stone and Victoria Wicks's Sarah Stone mixing the spiritual and the secular, and Bill Ward's Sam Nelms adding muscle. Barry Jackson's Dr Bullard examines the bodies, Kirsty Dillon's WPC Gail Stephens and Jason Hughes's Ben Jones do the running around, and Jane Wymark's Joyce keeps Barnaby properly fed between crime scenes. The vanished couples were ordinary people going about ordinary days, and their absence feels worse for it.

David Harsent and Caroline Graham wrote it, Sarah Hellings directed. The plot juggles the folklore, the disappearances and the stolen antiquities without dropping any of them, which is harder than it looks. The three strands take their time coming together, and the patience is rewarded.

The haunted forest turns out to have a very practical explanation, as these things tend to in Midsomer. But the episode is clever enough to keep the mystery of the woods intact until the end. Some mysteries are best when the explanation arrives just late enough.