The Truth Will Out

A motorway by-pass is being pushed through the countryside, and the men building it are staying at a country hotel. Crabbe is sent to the hotel, officially to look into a theft from one of the guests. He arrives already inclined to dislike the place, and the inspection he makes of its kitchen confirms his worst suspicions: the food is bought in, the standards are low, and the man running it is making money by pretending otherwise.

The hotel's kitchen is the episode's central object. Crabbe does not simply disapprove; he measures the place against what a kitchen ought to be, and the measurement is the investigation. The guests are being overcharged for food that is not what the menu claims, and the theft that brought him there turns out to sit inside a wider set of arrangements about what is being sold to whom.

The offence is fraud rather than violence, which is where the series is most comfortable. Nobody dies, the stakes are the reputation of a business and the money of people who trusted a printed menu, and the episode's comedy comes from putting a working cook into a kitchen run on shortcuts and letting him be professionally offended.

Margaret's contribution runs alongside. The restaurant's finances are the standing problem, and her view that her husband's insistence on good ingredients is a route to insolvency is stated plainly. The episode uses the by-pass hotel as the counter-argument to Pie in the Sky: a kitchen that cuts every corner can be profitable, and the series is honest enough to let that be true.

The solution is established through Crabbe's judgement of the food rather than through any forensic finding. What he notices about the kitchen is what exposes the fraud, and the case closes because a chef knows what he is looking at when he sees a plate of food that has been bought rather than cooked.

The episode established the series' template for the quieter instalments: a crime inside the food trade, a case that a policeman would not ordinarily be assigned and a restaurant in the background making its own demands. It is a small story told with a clear sense of what the programme is about, which is the standard the rest of the first series works to.

As the first episode to put the restaurant's own standards directly up against another kitchen's, it is the clearest early statement of the argument the whole series makes about food, and it does so without a single body on screen.