Death by Drowning

Old hands say drownings near the Thames are rarely accidents, and this one is not about to prove them wrong. A junior defence minister's missing husband has turned up dead. At the same time, the body of a young girl is pulled from the river. Two deaths arrive together, and the question of accident, suicide or murder hangs over both. And for a minister's household, a missing husband is already a scandal; a dead one is a problem for the state.

The answers are not left to the detectives alone. Highly placed people want the case closed quickly, which in practice means closed in a particular direction, and the pressure seeps into every interview and every file. The husband's connections make the case political before it is forensic, and Special Branch are reminded, gently but often, that some verdicts are more welcome than others. Jeremy Wolfram, Mrs. Dolland, Commander Knight and Miss Mitchell circle the investigation, each of them pushing it their own way.

John Kershaw wrote it, Dennis Vance directed. George Sewell is Craven, Patrick Mower is Haggerty, Roger Rowland is North. Gwen Watford plays Mrs. Dolland, Richard Leech is Commander Knight, Doreen Mantle is Miss Mitchell, and Artro Morris is Jeremy Wolfram. Mantle would later spend years opposite Richard Wilson in One Foot in the Grave; here she is all quiet official menace, the sort of civil servant who gets her way without raising her voice.

The episode leans on the blur between a terrible mistake and something worse. Evidence accumulates, officials lean, and the truth stays slippery for a satisfyingly long time. The title gives part of the game away, but the pleasure is in watching the team earn the answer the hard way, one witness at a time, while the people upstairs grow louder about wanting it now. For a show built on spycraft, it is a nicely domestic sort of horror: the danger arrives not in a dead drop but in the river, and the questions it raises are the ones nobody in Whitehall wants asked.