High Life

A young boy, out exploring, finds a car that has run off the road and a dead man inside it. The man is Maurice Sims, a chemist, and the cause of death is poisoning. The straightforward part ends there. Sims, it emerges, moved in a circle of middle-class swingers and, by all accounts, had an eye for a number of ladies, which hands the squad rather more suspects than a routine poisoning usually allows.

The investigation fans out through the dead man's life. There is Elizabeth Sims, his widow, played by Jan Waters, and the Lashbys, Norman and Monica, played by Michael Byrne and Joanna David, and a supporting cast of friends and colleagues who all had reasons to keep the chemist's habits out of sight. The swingers' world, with its careful appearances and its after-hours arrangements, gives the inquiry a particular flavour, and the episode is good on the way respectable people start talking freely once they think their own secrets might surface. The dead man's professional life, the part that ought to explain him, turns out to be the least interesting thing about him. Watt and Evans take the lead, with Snow, Dodds, Perry, WPC Arthur and Lincoln in support, and the whole thing settles into the old business of turning over a life until something gives.

Elwyn Jones wrote it, Andrew Morgan directed. Frank Windsor's Watt and David Lloyd Meredith's Evans anchor the detective work, and Jan Waters, Michael Byrne and Joanna David give the private side of the story its weight.

The title promises a good time, and the episode delivers it in a sour sort of way. A respectable chemist, a circle of married couples swapping partners after dark, a murder nobody wants explained too carefully. But the show keeps its feet on the ground: the police work is patient, unglamorous and mostly conducted at the level of who-slept-with-whom and who-lied-about-it. Not the series' showiest hour, though a quietly confident one.