The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax

Watson, on holiday in the Lake District, meets Lady Frances Carfax, a titled lady of independent habits who is being haunted, she says, by the ghost of a horseman. Holmes, intrigued, decides to join him. By the time he arrives, Lady Frances has vanished without trace, and the ghost has suddenly become the least of her problems.

The trail leads Holmes and Watson to a confidence trickster called Albert Shlessinger, a man whose charm is a business asset, and to the unsettling suspicion that Lady Frances, a woman of means travelling alone, has fallen into his orbit for good. The mystery of the horseman's ghost hovers over the whole affair without ever being fully explained, which is probably for the best, and Holmes, who becomes very curious about it, seems almost grateful for that. The story moves with her, from the Lakes to the city and across the water, and the episode enjoys the change of scenery as much as the mystery.

John Madden directed, from T.R. Bowen and Conan Doyle. Cheryl Campbell gives Lady Frances a brisk, unbothered dignity that makes her peril all the sharper, and Julian Curry's Shlessinger is all unctuous warmth with steel underneath, the sort of man you want to warn people about. And Jack Klaff's Philip Green is the story's conscience, chasing across Europe on an old devotion, with Mary Cunningham, Michael Jayston, Anthony Benson and Rosalie Williams in support.

It is a chase story, really, and the episode enjoys the running. The climax, with a coffin and a race against time, is one of the great ones, and the rescue comes from an act of plain stubbornness. The ghost, in the end, only points the way, which is more than most ghosts manage. It is not the deepest case in the book, but it is one of the most entertaining, and Cheryl Campbell makes the lady worth the journey.