Hickory Dickory Dock

The trouble at a London student hostel begins small. Small things go missing, the usual petty misery of shared living, and nobody takes much notice. Then the thefts stop being petty, and the murders start. By the time Poirot is called in, the hostel has gone from a place of squabbles to a place of fear.

The escalation is the mystery. A thief who starts with small change does not usually graduate to murder without a reason, and Poirot's job is to find the thread that runs from the first missing object to the last body. The hostel gives him a cast of students with full lives and half-kept secrets, and the investigation has to move through a crowd of people who all know each other and would rather not talk. What looks like a crime wave to the police looks like a pattern to Poirot, and patterns are his territory.

Agatha Christie and Anthony Horowitz wrote it, Andrew Grieve directed, and it went out on 12 February 1995. David Suchet is Poirot, Philip Jackson is Japp and Pauline Moran is Miss Lemon. The students are Paris Jefferson as Sally Finch, Jonathan Firth as Nigel Chapman, Damian Lewis as Leonard Bateson, Gilbert Martin as Colin McNabb, Elinor Morriston as Valerie Hobhouse, Polly Kemp as Patricia Lane and Jessica Lloyd as Celia Austin. And Damian Lewis, whose Band of Brothers fame was still a decade off, is a student here, and he makes the most of it.

It is a darker entry than the seaside capers, and the hostel setting gives it a cramped, modern feel that suits the story. The rhyme of the title runs through it like a nursery warning, and the episode is a reminder that the small dishonesty is the one to watch. People notice the big crimes. The little ones are the ones they wave away, and that is where the whole thing starts.