Lie of the Land

Con artists work the county's big houses, a woman reports a theft from her mother's home, and Rockliffe's first instinct is that the woman is lying. The middle episode of the run is the one in which the complainant is the suspect, and it has the strongest guest cast of the seven.

The pair at the centre of it are the Cunninghams, travelling confidence tricksters who choose houses where people live alone. Harriet Dawson then reports that five thousand pounds has been taken from her mother's home in Winterbourne, and Rockliffe's view is that she knows more about the theft than she is saying. Around that, the episode has an elusive green van linked to a series of burglaries and a pair of newly married guests whose affection Rockliffe doubts.

The pleasure of the episode is that it starts with a report of a crime and ends up examining the person who made it. That is a more interesting move than a burglary would allow, and it is unusually well fitted to the run's new setting: in a county of large houses and single occupants, the police spend their time working out who belongs where, and the person who reports a loss has a position in that arrangement to protect.

John McNeil wrote this episode and no other for the series. Eric Davidson directed, and the episode's locations are the lanes and the big houses rather than the coast or the farms of the surrounding weeks.

The guest cast is the run's best. Stephanie Cole as Mrs Pickering, Vivian Pickles as Mrs Dawson, Fiona Victory as Harriet Dawson and Valentine Pelka as Mr Cunningham give the hour four parts with something in them, and the drama sits between the two women at the heart of the Dawson household rather than in the burglary. TMDB credits a fifth guest, Tessa Peake-Jones as Mrs Cunningham, whom IMDb does not list, so the trickster pair may be complete in the transmitted episode and only half-credited in the records.

The regular office is at its thinnest here. Both James Aubrey's DI Hoskins and Carole Nimmons' WPS Osborne are absent, which leaves Ian Hogg's Rockliffe working with Ian Brimble's Inspector Yaxley, the uniformed sergeant and the constables. It is the run's most rural configuration, a detective sergeant and a uniformed shift handling a county whose wealthy residents are the ones with something to hide.

Class is the subject. Property and land recur through all seven episodes, and here the show's attention moves up the county's social scale: the victims are people with houses big enough to be worth travelling to, and the con is a social performance rather than a forced entry.

The outcome is not recoverable from any accessible source, like every other episode of this run. What can be said is that the hour is built on a suspicion rather than a certainty, and it is the strongest example in the series of the quiet, watchful manner the show adopted once Rockliffe left London.