The Lie Direct

It's the small hours when PC Snow finds the van, tucked up against the hedge of a forest, and makes the discovery that turns an early shift into a murder inquiry: a woman bludgeoned to death in the back seat. The discovery raises questions about how she got there and who had access to her in that isolated spot, and the team has a lot of ground to cover. Barlow and Watt arrive to a scene with no obvious answers, and the episode settles into the slow business of finding some.

But the title promises lies, and the investigation delivers them in the usual quantity. Witnesses will be imperfect. Evidence will point two ways at once. The truth will have to be pulled out of people who would rather keep it. The episode understands that the lie direct is rarely a single big lie; it is the small one, told early, that sends everyone off in the wrong direction. There is a good, grim atmosphere to the early morning work, helped along by Radar the police dog, who at least knows his job while the humans are still guessing.

Stratford Johns and Frank Windsor head the cast, with Norman Bowler's Det. Insp. Hawkins in support. Terence Rigby plays PC Snow, the man who found the van, and Susan Tebbs is PW Det. Con. Donald. Gay Hamilton appears as Jean Watt, Tony Calvin as Jim Colley, Maureen Norman as Mrs. Elsie Thomas, and Geoffrey Palmer as Professor Brett, in one of those parts that give a glimpse of the comfortable authority he would later make his own in sitcoms.

Elwyn Jones wrote it and Roger Jenkins directed. The result is a properly chilly episode, the kind that remembers murder usually happens in the dark and the cold, and that the first people to arrive are often just a policeman with a torch and a bad feeling. It does not over-explain, and it does not need to.