A Matter of Taste

Two scams in the wine trade run through this episode, and the restaurant is the instrument that solves them. Ernest Drummond's wine warehouse is ram-raided, and Crabbe investigates. In the parallel strand, Margaret acts as caretaker for another wine importer, George Porter, who is married to her old school friend Rosie, after George has been run over and hospitalised.

George Porter once worked for Drummond, and Margaret, running his business while he recovers, finds inconsistencies in the accounts. Her accountancy is the method: she is not looking for a criminal, she is doing a job properly, and the job produces the fraud. The two wine scams are connected through George's employment history and through the people involved.

The restaurant has an interest of its own in the case. A rival restaurateur, one of the men caught up in the wine fraud, had earlier sent an officious health inspector to Pie in the Sky in an attempt to close it down. Margaret's discovery of the scam catches him too, and the Crabbes' restaurant is the beneficiary of the resolution: the man who tried to close them is exposed by the case they solve.

The solution comes through Margaret's work at Porter's business rather than through police investigation alone. George Porter and several respectable local figures are implicated, among them the rival restaurateur. The published sources establish the shape of the outcome but not the mechanism of the fraud in detail, and this article stops at what they support.

The casting is the most notable of the first series after the abduction episode. Pete Postlethwaite plays Kevin Tasker, then a stage and screen actor who had been nominated for an Academy Award the previous year; Julian Fellowes plays Councillor Ernest Drummond, then an actor and writer early in a career that would later produce Downton Abbey. Both are small parts in a large guest company, and the billing does not place them first.

Margaret is the lead here, and this is the fullest development of her character in the first series. She runs a business for a friend, spots what the owner is doing and finds the connection between the wine trade's respectable surface and its fraud. Her skills as an accountant are used as detective method rather than as a running joke about the balance sheet, and the episode reaches its answer through her rather than through her husband. The two halves of the case close because both halves of the marriage are working, and it is the clearest first-series example of the programme's interest in Margaret as a person with a profession.