The Abbey Grange

Holmes is called to a manor house where Sir Eustace Brackenstall, a country lord with a reputation for bullying, has been killed with a fireplace poker. His wife, Lady Mary, is found bruised and battered, and her story is that a gang of men broke in, tied her up and did for her husband. Inspector Hopkins is ready to close the file. But on Holmes's arrival the case looks a little too solved, and the unease is immediate.

He goes back to the scene, and the tidy story starts to come apart. The bruises on Lady Mary's wrists, the way the room has been arranged: details that do not quite line up. Watson, meanwhile, has heard the local gossip about Lady Mary and a sea captain from a long voyage, and he is curious to know more. But that curiosity turns out to be the whole point. The truth, when it surfaces, is a good deal more sympathetic than the official version, and Holmes does something he rarely does: he decides what justice actually requires, and arranges for it to happen.

T.R. Bowen, John Hawkesworth and Conan Doyle wrote it, Peter Hammond directed. Paul Williamson's Inspector Hopkins does the official thinking, Conrad Phillips bellows as Sir Eustace, Anne-Louise Lambert's Lady Mary carries the story on a bruised face, and Oliver Tobias makes Captain Croker exactly the sort of man a lady might be reckless about. Zulema Dene's Theresa Wright, Nicolas Chagrin's Mr Viviani and Johanna Briggs's Mrs Burbage fill the house.

The ending is the reason to watch. Holmes solves the case and then declines to hand the culprit over, on the grounds that the dead man had it coming, and even Watson is startled. It is the sort of moral judgement the stories only occasionally allow him, and Brett plays it with perfect, quiet conviction.