The One That Got Away

Bill Pritchard is an old friend of Crabbe's and the supplier of the trout that Pie in the Sky serves. He has a new fiancee, Jean, whom Margaret does not like, and he has just accepted a lucrative takeover offer from a chain fishery. Then Jean disappears, her car is found abandoned, and there is no body.

DI Browning of the local force is certain Bill murdered her and is prepared to say so before a body is found. The case against him hardens when ashes in Bill's own smokehouse are found to contain traces of human remains. Bill's business, which is what makes the detail so damaging, becomes the evidence against him. He then breaks down and confesses that he may have killed Jean while drunk, which is the point at which a normal investigation would close.

Crabbe and Margaret do not accept it. The takeover is the thread they pull. A chain fishery buying Bill's business would gain the fishing rights, the smokehouse and the goodwill, and the appearance of a murder committed in the smokehouse is exactly what would transfer the asset. The confession is false, and the audience knows what the police do not: that the suspect's own admission is the strongest evidence of a frame rather than of a crime.

The frame fails and Bill is cleared. The sources describe the plot to frame him and to take the profits from the subsequent sale of his business but do not name the person responsible, and this article does not name a culprit the sources do not give. Jean's relationship to Ronnie Barratt, credited separately with the same surname, and Vicky Pritchard's relationship to Bill are likewise not established, and both are recorded in the billing as credited.

Margaret is given more to do than in most of the season. Her dislike of Jean is established early and is separate from any belief about the murder; her reason for investigating is that Bill is a supplier and a friend and that closing the case would be wrong. The episode lets the marriage work as a partnership in the investigation rather than only as a running argument about profit, and it uses her accountancy as the investigative instrument, which is one of the few times the series uses her profession rather than her marriage as the reason she is involved.

The title is a fish pun and a fishing joke, and the episode's climax is a trap, so the pun and the method are the same. It is the season's first episode built on a confession that is false, its theme is what people will do to acquire a business, and the crime is one of commerce rather than passion. Mr E's review of the Series 2 release singled it out as one of the two episodes where the series tied the plot directly to Crabbe as a chef rather than as a police officer, which is the same note made about the previous episode.