Nemesis (1)

The news arrives the way bad news usually arrives for Miss Marple: quietly, and with an errand attached. Her friend Jason Rafiel has died, and his will contains a request that she take a coach tour. Not for the scenery. Rafiel was a businessman to the last, and the tour is a job of work, a way of sending her after a mystery that unsettled him to the end. The wording of the request is very Rafiel: no explanations, just instructions.

It is, in effect, a mission from beyond the grave: clear the name of a dead man's son. The trail leads Miss Marple to Verity Hunt, a girl who is also dead, and to a family of strange sisters who hover around the case like figures from a gothic novel. And the deeper she goes, the clearer it becomes that the motive here is not the usual run of greed or jealousy. Love, as well as hate, can be a reason for murder.

Joan Hickson carries the episode alone in the credits, which suits the material. This is Marple on her own, with no familiar faces to lean on and only Rafiel's posthumous instructions for company. She is a long way from the routines that usually feed her deductions, which is exactly what makes it interesting. Agatha Christie wrote it, and the episode was first shown on 8 February 1987; no director is credited in the records.

The coach tour setting is a gift. A group of strangers trapped on a bus in the English countryside is a pressure cooker with a timetable, and the secrets come out in small, telling doses. The gothic undertones are stronger than usual here, and they suit Miss Marple surprisingly well. It gives the story momentum without a single police station in sight.

Part one ends with the pieces on the board and the questions stacking up. The answers, presumably, are somewhere on the itinerary.