Devils on Horseback - Part 2

Liz Bishop explains the banknotes as winnings from a bet and Crabbe releases her. He notes that Jerry Lawless also had a healthy bank balance and concludes that Jerry was trading inside racing information for cash. Tony Bishop apologises to Crabbe but at the same time tries again to push Bob into accepting the takeover, which keeps the family quarrel in view even as Tony makes his peace over the murder.

Henry's mystery man is identified: he is a private detective working for the Jockey Club. Tony Bishop has been fixing races and the Jockey Club hired the detective to get proof. That gives Crabbe the pattern he thinks he is looking at: Tony got Jerry Lawless to nobble his horses and Tony killed Ben Tucker when Ben found out.

Crabbe's reconstruction has the right motive and the wrong suspect. Tony Bishop was indeed fixing races and did have a reason to want the matter kept quiet, but he is not the killer. Margaret literally stumbles on the real killer and has a close call with them before the case is closed. The production's own synopsis frames the episode as Crabbe following confusing trails and Margaret getting too close to solving the case for comfort.

The racing-information strand and the murder strand therefore turn out to be two different things running through the same yard: race-fixing for money and murder to keep the fixing quiet, committed by different people. Crabbe's error is to assume they are the same person. The takeover of Bishop's Cider is left in the air as a commercial matter rather than resolved as a crime. No source consulted names the person Margaret confronts, and this article does not supply a name. In the restaurant strand Nicola is annoyed when a spoilt school friend of hers appears to be making a play for Gary; the friend is trying to poach him for her own restaurant and the attempt fails.

Margaret Crabbe has been a supporting figure in the case strands of most episodes, and here she becomes the person the plot turns on. She keeps the books, she disapproves of the cost of good ingredients and she contributes a running scepticism about whether any of it makes money, and in this episode she is the one who finds the answer. Steed plays the discovery as ordinary competence rather than as a set piece, and the close call the synopsis mentions is the only point in the two-parter where a regular character from the restaurant side is genuinely in danger.

Malcolm Storry's Bob Bishop and Guy Oliver-Watts' Tony carry the family disagreement through to the end without either being exposed as a murderer, which is the episode's more interesting choice: the takeover remains a business decision between two brothers. The two-part story resolves into a study of two kinds of dishonesty rather than a single villain, and the theme is not the crime but the cost of the assumption, with a family business nearly sold, a daughter accused and a detective's working hypothesis proved wrong in the last act. The wrong-suspect structure is announced by the production's own synopsis rather than concealed, so the twist is not much of a twist, but the split between the motive and the murderer is a more honest construction than a story in which one villain accounts for everything.