Dead Right

Faith Revelle is a psychic medium appearing at the Middleton Theatre. She has been receiving hate mail daily and asks the police for help. Freddy Fisher, who consulted her once in the past on a case, wants the matter handled quietly and without publicity, and he assigns Crabbe and Sergeant Cambridge to guard her. Someone has already told the press, which is the first indication that the letters may be a publicity exercise rather than a threat.

Crabbe is sceptical from the outset. He accuses Revelle of sending the letters to herself to publicise her forthcoming book, and the investigation proceeds on the assumption that the complainant is the author of her own complaint. Margaret's presence in the episode is through the restaurant, where the arrangements for Revelle's engagement and the press interest in the case create the restaurant problem: a booking, a reputation and a publicist circling a customer.

The case turns when Revelle, rather than being exposed as a fraud, produces information she could not have obtained by ordinary means. A local girl has died recently, and Revelle's account of what happened to her is accurate in detail Crabbe cannot account for. Her information leads to the clearing up of that case, and the hate mail is connected to it rather than to publicity.

Revelle is entirely innocent of sending the letters herself and Crabbe's cynicism is wrong, which is the second time in five episodes that his judgement of a person has had to be revised. The episode ends with the police case solved through the assistance of the person he had dismissed. The sources describe the vision and the clearing up of the girl's death but do not state the mechanism linking the threatening letters to that death, and neither the dead girl's name nor that link is given here. The picnic scene by the River Thames at Bisham in the churchyard is where the episode's two principals reach their understanding.

Selina Cadell's Revelle is the performance the episode rests on. She has to be plausible enough as a medium for the audience to believe her at the end and theatrical enough as a public figure that Crabbe's contempt is reasonable at the start, and the part is written so both readings are available for most of the running time.

The title is a food pun and also states the episode's subject, the question of whether the psychic is correct. It is the season's one sustained engagement with a subject outside crime and food, and it does so sceptically without being dismissive: Crabbe's rationalism is tested by a case it cannot explain, and the episode resolves it by having Revelle be right about the information while claiming nothing about how she has it. That is an unusual position for a police series of the period and it is the episode's most distinctive feature. It is also the only Series 2 episode written by a woman, and the only one that puts a woman at the centre of a case as something other than a victim or a suspect.