The Problem of Thor Bridge

Maria Gibson, the wife of the gold-mining millionaire J. Neil Gibson, is found shot dead at the country house near Thor Bridge. The evidence points one way, at the governess: Grace Dunbar is charged with the murder, and the case against her is the sort juries like. Then Gibson himself asks Holmes to find the real killer, which would also, conveniently, clear the governess's name. Holmes wonders, and so does the viewer, whether Gibson is a kindly employer or a man with something to hide.

The answer takes the case in a direction that has nothing to do with the obvious one. The governess is innocent, and the staging of the crime is the clue: a shooting made to look like one thing that was really another, and a woman clever enough to arrange it. Holmes works it out the way he works out everything, by refusing to believe what the scene is trying to sell him, and the truth, when it comes, is sadder than the accusation.

Michael A. Simpson directed, from Jeremy Paul and Conan Doyle. Daniel Massey's Gibson is a proper American tycoon, all blunt force and buried feeling, and Catherine Russell's Grace Dunbar is the quiet centre of the piece, accused and steady. Celia Gregory's Maria Gibson is dead before the story starts and still manages to matter. Niven Boyd, Andrew Wilde, Stephen Howard, Philip Bretherton and Dean Magri fill out the household and the law.

The solution hinges on a bridge, a piece of rope, and a pistol that finished its work at the bottom of the water. It is one of the later stories and one of the cleverest, and this version lets the mechanism breathe. And the truth, when it finally surfaces, does no one any favours, least of all the woman who built it.