The Dream

A famous pie manufacturer with a fortune and a guilty conscience visits Poirot and describes a recurring dream in which he shoots himself in his study. The industrialist is a man used to being listened to, and Poirot listens. He warns him to be careful. The next day the man is found dead in his study, shot, in circumstances matching the dream in every particular. A suicide that looks like the fulfilment of a prophecy. Poirot does not believe in prophecy. The dream is reported in such detail that it reads like a script, which Poirot finds telling.

If the dream was a warning, then someone else did the shooting, and the dream itself becomes the perfect alibi. The case is a gift for the show because the impossible is where the story begins, and the explanation has to be better than magic. Poirot picks at the household: Joanna Farley, Mrs Farley, Hugo Cornworthy, Herbert Chudley, Mr Tremlett and Dr Stillingfleet. Everybody had access to the study, and one of them had every reason to let a nightmare do the dirty work.

Clive Exton and Agatha Christie wrote it, Edward Bennett directed. Alan Howard takes the double part of Benedict Farley and Hugo Cornworthy, Joely Richardson plays Joanna Farley, Mary Tamm is Mrs Farley, Martin Wenner plays Herbert Chudley, Christopher Saul is Mr Tremlett and Paul Lacoux plays Dr Stillingfleet. It went out on 19 March 1989, closing the first series. David Suchet, Hugh Fraser, Philip Jackson and Pauline Moran fill the regular places.

There is something properly unsettling about a murder that arrives dressed as a prophecy. The episode plays it straight, lets the creepiness build, and then hands the whole thing back to the little grey cells. Nobody in the Farley house can afford to take the dream at face value, least of all the dreamer. Dreams may not lie. The people who report them do.