The Night of the Stag

For once the disappearance is official business rather than village business. A government inspector goes missing, and the village's first instinct is to blame the men running the local bootlegging trade. The instinct looks reasonable right up until the inspector turns up dead, at which point everyone involved starts behaving as if they had never met him, or each other.

The product in question is the homemade kind. And the tax man is the sort of visitor nobody wants to see twice. Half the village drinks the stuff, and all of it is shocked to hear it's illegal. Barnaby and Jones spend the episode untangling who sold what to whom, which in a place like this means listening to a great many people deny knowing anything about anything. The silence around the inspector's movements is louder than any denial, and Jones takes notes at a rate that suggests he's heard this kind of thing before. Sarah Barnaby and Kate Wilding hover around the edges of the mess, mostly to keep the home front warm.

Warren Clarke's Samuel Quested presides over the household at the centre of the suspicions, with Francis Magee's Smudgepot, a name that earns its keep, Ian Peck's Wilberforce and Bernard Lloyd's Byron Street supplying the local colour. The clergy get a look in too, via Greg Hicks's Reverend Norman Grigor and Beatrice Comins's Evelyn Grigor. Neil Dudgeon's Barnaby and Jason Hughes's Jones do the legwork, with Fiona Dolman and Tamzin Malleson as Sarah and Kate. Nicholas Martin and Caroline Graham wrote it, Simon Langton directed.

It's a solid, drink-stained hour of television, built on the reliable idea that a village will protect its quiet vices right up until one of them stops being quiet. Barnaby gets his man, the stills get their comeuppance, and the pub keeps its secrets, more or less.