Devils on Horseback - Part 1

Henry and Margaret Crabbe spend a day at the races as guests of Margaret's new client, Bob Bishop, who owns Bishop's Cider Mill. Margaret has been brought in to audit the books because the cider business has received a takeover offer. Bob's brother Tony runs Larkhill Stables, which are failing, and Tony wants to sell his half of the cider company and put the proceeds into the stables. Bob does not want to sell, being reluctant to see a family business swallowed by an impersonal conglomerate.

The day sours. A stable lad named Ben Tucker is found dead in a horse-box and Crabbe, present as a guest rather than as an officer, begins to look into it. Tony Bishop is curt and unhelpful when Crabbe comes to the stables to investigate, and a mysterious man is shadowing him. Among the day's other figures are a female jockey, Jude O'Brien, and another stable lad, Jerry Lawless, with whom Ben had argued on the night he died.

The argument turns out to have been over Jude O'Brien. Jerry Lawless is then also murdered, and Bob's daughter Liz, also a jockey, is found in that caravan with a bag full of banknotes. Two deaths in a small racing community, a family business being pulled two ways and money in the hands of the wrong person: the episode's job is to establish all of these strands without resolving which of them leads anywhere.

The story stops on the discovery of the banknotes. The reasoning about what the money means, the identity of the man shadowing Crabbe and the arrest all belong to the second part. A viewer watching this instalment alone would know that two people connected with the yard are dead, that a stable lad was arguing over a jockey and that the owner's daughter has unexplained cash, but not what any of it adds up to.

The episode's structural interest is the reversal of the marriage's usual division of labour. Margaret is the one with the professional relationship to the Bishops, since she is their accountant, and it is her client, her audit and her introduction that put the couple at the races at all. Crabbe is the guest, and the investigator who arrives at the stables is tagging on to his wife's job. That inversion becomes the plot's mechanism in the second part, where it is Margaret who gets close to the answer.

Malcolm Storry and Guy Oliver-Watts play the two Bishop brothers as a genuine business disagreement rather than a villainy, which is the episode's quiet strength: the family argument over whether to sell is drawn from ordinary commercial life rather than from a crime. Amelia Curtis's Liz is introduced as a competent jockey and then compromised by where she is found.

This is the series' first sustained two-part story, and the extra length is used for a wider social picture than a fifty-minute episode allows: a family firm, a racing yard, a village and its rivalries. The crime is a murder in a horse-box, which is the series at its mildest, and the world the murder disturbs is a working one of owners, jockeys and lads. The food-and-crime pairing is unusually thin here, because the Crabbes are away from the kitchen for the day, and the reviewers who found the mystery slow are responding to a real problem: an opener that has to introduce a company, a yard, a family, a race meeting and six suspects in fifty minutes has no room to develop the suspects. Mr E Reviews judged the plot not as crisply developed as it could be while praising the extended length, and Keeley Hawes' early appearance as Stella Jackson dates the episode precisely.