Room with a View

Lettie Ross is seventy-six, a retired music hall performer, and she lives alone in her flat with her marmalade cat. Looking from her window, she sees what appears to be one person strangling another in the flat opposite, and she reports it. Her daughter and son-in-law do not believe her and neither do the police. The only person prepared to listen is Eddie Shoestring, who is paid to listen, which is the whole premise of the series made into a plot.

Eddie visits the flat where the killing supposedly happened with an estate agent, who notes that the only change to the premises is a missing light cable in the kitchen. The man hired to survey the site denies cutting it. The wife of the last person to view the flat knows nothing of her husband's interest in the property and says he works for Eddie's old computer firm and is on a business trip to Germany. A businessman, Duke Winsor, has an interest in the building. He is unhelpful, and when Eddie returns to the flat he is beaten up by two of Winsor's workers, who warn him to stay out of their employer's affairs. A group of squatters working in line with Winsor's plans puts him off as well.

At Lettie's flat the old woman works out that the light she saw in the opposite flat must have come from a torch. Eddie takes the point further: someone may have been watching from the window she saw the incident through, not through it. The flat below hers belongs to a local concert hall, which lets classical musicians rest there before performances, and the manager tells him the Russian pianist Alexei Lenkov is presently living there. Eddie visits Lenkov after a concert and is asked to leave by the manager, who is then seen driving off in a jeep with Marianne. At Eddie's former computer firm, Marianne's husband is said to be on holiday abroad, but an older worker saw him arriving at a local hotel, and at the hotel Eddie establishes that the man checked in but never opened his suitcase. He drives to Marianne's country house and follows her and the manager to a cliff top, where he wrestles the man to the ground believing he is about to see her murdered.

The truth removes the crime altogether. Marianne's husband had been watching the affair from the flat opposite Lettie's window. When the manager went to investigate, he found the man had hanged himself. What Lettie saw from her window was him cutting the body down. He panicked, carried the body off and threw it from the cliff. The audience is led to expect a strangling and given a hanging that was a suicide, which the episode earns by planting the torch, the cable and the empty suitcase well before it needs them.

Madoline Thomas plays Lettie with enough precision to make her certainty credible and her treatment by her family wounding, and the pair of them working in tandem is more entertaining than Eddie alone. The episode pays her off with a radio interview rather than a rescue, which closes the loop on the phone-in premise. The significant shift between the regulars is that Erica is no longer a lover Eddie happens to share a flat with but a barrister colleague whose advice and contacts he uses. Where the middle sags is in the obstacles: Winsor's thugs and the squatters are two separate barriers to the same clue, and the beating Eddie takes does not change what he knows. The pianist strand exists mainly to put the manager on the board. The episode is also a licensed variation on Rear Window with the roles turned round, since the watcher in the story is the man who died, not the woman who reported the crime. It drew 12.5 million viewers, and the fall from the first series' figures is characteristic of the whole season rather than of this episode.