Game Pie

Pie in the Sky is short of a week's takings, so Henry takes catering work outside the restaurant and supplies the food at a pheasant shoot on a country estate belonging to his friend Alistair, Lord Pilbury. Fisher is among the guests, along with other senior officers, which is the arrangement that turns a catering job into a police case.

During the shoot Fisher fires at a low-flying bird. A member of the estate staff, Jim Watson, is shot and killed, and the shot appears to be Fisher's. Fisher's position is politically exposed: a new Chief Constable, Braithwaite, is in post and Fisher, who wants promotion, cannot afford to be a suspect. Crabbe is effectively ordered to investigate his own boss. Fisher, believing he has killed a man, goes on a drinking spree and ends up collapsed on Henry's couch at the restaurant.

The death is not an accident and not Fisher's shot. The investigation resolves into a crime of passion: a love triangle, a jealous husband and a cover-up. The shooting was arranged to look like a shooting accident in order to conceal the killing. Crabbe works out that the fatal shot did not come from Fisher's gun and that the death was deliberate, and the estate party's accounts of the afternoon do not fit. Fisher is cleared and the killer is established among the shooting party, with the affair as the motive.

Malcolm Sinclair carries the episode. The series usually keeps Fisher at one remove, using him as an institutional obstacle; here he is the frightened man at the centre of a death enquiry, drunk on Crabbe's sofa and dependent on the subordinate he has been blackmailing. Sinclair plays the collapse as self-indulgence, which keeps the comedy and stops the character becoming sympathetic. Crabbe is given the role of the only person who can save Fisher, and the episode uses his cooking as the reason he is present at all: without the catering he has no standing at the shoot.

This is a country-house mystery: a closed circle of guests, a death during a shoot, and a set of alibis that have to be broken one by one. The show is usually a comedy-drama about a town; here it plays the classic English form straight, with Fisher as the principal suspect. The theme is the difference between a shooting accident and a shooting, and the way a group of people will close ranks to keep a death looking like the first thing. Class sits under the episode, since Crabbe the caterer is the only person at the shoot with no interest in protecting the reputation of the party.

It is the only episode in which Crabbe investigates Fisher's own conduct, and the restaurant strand is used as access rather than as a parallel problem: he is at the crime because he is being paid to cook at it. DVD Talk treats the episode as the best illustration of the series' blend of crime and food, while registering that the machinery of the solution is familiar. Braithwaite's arrival also starts the institutional shift that runs through the rest of the series.