The Debt of Lies

Challis Court is a gated estate for retired police officers, a tight-knit community of people who spent their working lives catching murderers and now live next door to one another. It was supposed to be a quiet reward after years on the job, with neighbours who understood what that meant. When a new arrival is found dead, the residents react as only an audience of former detectives can. They treat it as a personal insult. A murder on their doorstep is an affront to people who made a career of preventing exactly this.

Barnaby pieces the case together quickly enough to reach an unsettling conclusion. The killer is one of them. No outsider slipped past the gates; the evidence points to another ex-police officer living among the retired ranks, and that changes the whole shape of the investigation. These suspects know how interviews work. They know which questions Barnaby will ask and where the gaps in an alibi tend to open. Suspicion spreads through people who once upheld the law themselves, and it is hard to say who finds it more uncomfortable, the watchers or the watched. Barnaby is effectively working with a panel of critics standing behind his shoulder, and he knows it.

Caroline Graham and Nicholas Hicks-Beach wrote it, Gill Wilkinson directed. Neil Dudgeon is John Barnaby and Nick Hendrix is Jamie Winter, with Fiona Dolman's Sarah Barnaby and Annette Badland's Fleur Perkins in the usual orbit. The residents of Challis Court include Tom Conti as Sebastian Cabot, Elizabeth Payne as Ruth Cabot, Sabina Franklyn as Elaine Bennet, Lorne MacFadyen as Lionel Bennet, Diana Yekinni as Matty Bennet and Peter Polycarpou as Giles Franklyn.

It is a contained case, set almost entirely inside one gated community. But the idea underneath it is nasty in a particular way. A shared history of service offers no protection, and secrets follow retired officers into their quiet years just the same.