The Silent Land

Jeff Bowmaker has a good thing going in Midsomer Magna. He runs spooky ghost tours at night, selling the village's darker side to anyone with a few pounds and a taste for a fright, and business is profitable. Ghost tours and dead librarians are the sort of pairing this series was built for. Then the unpopular village librarian turns up dead, and the ghost tour suddenly has competition in the scare department.

Barnaby and Jones walk into a place where the locals are already half-prepared for horror, which makes everyone harder to read. The dead woman was not popular, which is a polite way of saying half the village had a reason to be glad and the other half had a reason to pretend otherwise. Joyce and Cully are around for the family angle, Dr Bullard and DC Gail Stephens keep the official side moving, and the people in the frame include Ian Kent, Faith Kent and Adam Peach. Much of the episode happens after dark, which suits both the tours and the inquiry. Danny Webb's Bowmaker watches the proceedings with the air of a man who knows exactly how to sell a haunting, and the tourists keep paying even with a murder inquiry running.

Peter Hammond and Caroline Graham wrote it, and Peter Smith directed. John Nettles and Jason Hughes lead, with Laura Howard back as Cully, and strong supporting work from Aden Gillett, Emma Fielding, Rupert Holliday-Evans and Danny Webb.

And there is a fine joke in a man profiting from fake scares in a village with a real corpse, though the episode plays it without winking. The night tours set the mood; the library nobody liked losing gives the case its sting. The show knows that the best hauntings are the ones you can charge admission for, and that the truth is usually darker than the performance.