The Priory School

A ten-year-old boy has vanished from a prep school, and his father is a duke, which means the case arrives at Baker Street with a great deal of noise attached. Dr Huxtable, the headmaster, brings the news personally. Lord Arthur Saltire, the only son of the Duke of Holdernesse, has disappeared from the Priory School. The Duke is powerful and publicity-shy, and a kidnapping of this sort is exactly the news he cannot afford.

Holmes goes up to the school and finds the ground more complicated than a simple abduction. Another teacher has gone missing too, and the two disappearances turn out to be tied to an old mystery, and the connection is the heart of the case. The countryside setting suits the show well. The episode is at its best once Holmes reaches the school and starts treating the whole affair as a problem to be solved on the ground. Alan Howard's Duke is proud and withholding, the kind of man who pays for help and resents needing it, and Christopher Benjamin's Dr Huxtable is the worried professional holding the school together. Nicholas Gecks, Michael Bertenshaw, Jack Carr, Brenda Elder and Rosalie Williams fill out the edges.

John Madden directs, with the script credited to Arthur Conan Doyle, John Hawkesworth and T.R. Bowen.

There is a sadness at the centre of this one that the series does not usually reach for. The Duke's household is a tangle of old resentments, and the boy at the heart of it is a pawn in a game he does not understand. There is a whole school of suspects, and Holmes works through them the way he works through everything, one fact at a time. Holmes solves the mystery, because that is what he does. But the resolution leaves a sour taste, and the episode is honest enough to let it linger. Not every case ends with everyone satisfied, and this one is proof.