At Bertram's Hotel (2)

Part two opens with Canon Pennyfather back at Bertram's, which is more than anyone could have guaranteed a few days earlier. He is back, but he cannot explain where he has been, and his own account of events keeps sliding away from him. He is a man of the cloth, and the idea would be absurd if the story were not so insistent on it. The question hanging over the episode is a corker: could the absent-minded clergyman have been on The Irish Mail Train, robbing it?

But it seems impossible, which in a Christie story is usually the point at which you should start taking it seriously. Miss Marple, naturally, takes it all seriously from the start, and the second half of the story is her quietly gathering the loose threads everyone else has dropped. The hotel that seemed so restful in part one is now a place where nobody's story quite matches, and the penny drops, as these things do, in the tea room.

The episode went out on 25 January 1987, written by Agatha Christie, with no director credited in the records. The second part is where the threads come together, and it does the job with the hotel's own brand of courtesy. Joan Hickson carries the resolution, and it is worth saying again how well she wears the role; the solution arrives without any fuss, the way a sensible person would clear up a misunderstanding about the milk jug.

There is a comforting certainty to these stories, the knowledge that no secret survives careful observation, and this one delivers it in a grand London setting full of people who would be horrified to be suspected of anything. Even an escape attempt on a mail train cannot keep order from being restored to the tea room. Miss Marple concludes her stay, and the hotel, for all its secrets, sees her off politely. And the waiters never once raise an eyebrow.