Habeas Corpus

A wealthy landowner dies, and on the night he is supposed to be found, the body disappears. Little Malton is the village, and a missing corpse turns out to be a better hook than most murders because it makes everyone nervous about what else might surface. Rachel Cuperman, Sally Griffiths and Caroline Graham wrote it, with Alex Pillai directing.

Barnaby and Nelson are left to unpick a death that nobody can quite prove happened the way they said. The Lancasters sit at the centre: Helen Baxendale's Rose and Alastair Mackenzie's Felix, a family with the sort of money that makes people careful. Manjinder Virk's Dr Kam Karimore keeps the medical side honest, and Clive Merrison's Caleb Southwood is the kind of old-timer who knows where the bodies are buried, which is awkward when one of them has gone missing. Navin Chowdhry's Sonny Desai, Emma Cunniffe's Reverend Melissa Ackers and Ciarán McMenamin's Craig Coffley complete a village full of people with reasons to be quiet. Nobody in Little Malton seems surprised by any of it, which is usually the first surprise. The case works backwards, from a reported death to a body that should be there.

The missing body does clever work. Every lie the residents tell is a little easier to spot because the one thing they all agree on, the death itself, is the thing they cannot prove. The episode plays that tension for all it is worth, and the village stays politely horrified from start to finish. A funeral with no guest of honour is a strange business, and the show makes the most of it.

But it is a strong way to open the season, and proof that sometimes the best clue is the one that isn't there. The title promises a body, and the episode spends two hours asking where it went.