Mrs McGinty's Dead

Mrs McGinty was a village charwoman, the sort of woman who scrubbed other people's floors and passed through life unnoticed, and somebody killed her in her own home. The police had a suspect straight away: her lodger, James Bentley. The case looked finished before it started. But one officer involved in it was not convinced. Bentley was the wrong man, he thought, and when a policeman is unsure, he sends for Poirot.

What Poirot has to work with is almost nothing: a pair of photographs that belonged to the dead woman, the only tangible clues the case offers. From those two pictures he works his way through the village and the people attached to it, testing the stories of James Bentley, the District Judge, George, Maude, Maureen Summerhayes, Major Summerhayes, Dr Rendell and Bessie Burch. Spence, the officer who called him in, watches the whole process with the weary patience of a man who has seen too many easy convictions. Everyone in a small community keeps something back. That is where the answer sits, in the small evasions.

Ashley Pearce directs from a script by Agatha Christie and Nick Dear. David Suchet is Poirot; Joe Absolom plays James Bentley, with Simon Molloy as the District Judge, Richard Hope as Spence, David Yelland as George, Sarah Smart as Maude, Raquel Cassidy as Maureen Summerhayes, Richard Dillane as Major Summerhayes, Simon Shepherd as Dr Rendell and Emma Amos as Bessie Burch.

The pleasure of the episode is in its smallness. No grand conspiracy, no international intrigue: a dead charwoman, two photographs and a village's worth of evasions. Poirot has solved murders in grand houses and on trains, but some of his best work happens in cottages, among people who would never think of themselves as interesting enough to kill for. There is a satisfying finality to the way those photographs, so ordinary at first, end up carrying the whole case.