Sleeping Murder (1)

A young wife moves into a house that feels wrong in ways she cannot explain. She believes it is haunted, and in a sense it is: the memory that comes back to her is of a murder she witnessed there as a child, twenty years ago, the killing of her stepmother Helen Kennedy. Houses do not forget, and neither, it turns out, does she.

Miss Marple is brought in to help the newlyweds settle, and her advice is the sensible, professional kind: leave Sleeping Murder be. Everyone involved, including the woman's own instincts, says the same. But curiosity is a stronger force in Miss Marple than caution, and she keeps digging. The digging wakes something. There is a murderer in this story who has stayed quiet for two decades, and a quiet murderer is a dangerous one.

The episode was written by Agatha Christie and first shown on 11 January 1987, opening the second run of the series. No director is credited in the records, which is a shame, because the atmosphere is the whole point: the house itself is the best suspect, a building where the wallpaper knows more than the people do. The story leans into memory and what it does to people, and the house is the perfect setting for that kind of haunting.

Joan Hickson carries it as Miss Marple, which is to say she does the thing she always did: looks at the furniture, listens to the silences. The truth arrives in its own time.

What makes the story work is how steadily it climbs from polite conversation and misplaced fear to genuine danger and criminal intent. It ends with a killer who has had twenty years to rehearse. Marple's kind of observation is a quiet weapon, but it is a weapon, and this episode never lets you forget it. And the first half ends on a note that makes you grateful the second part is waiting.