Shoscombe Old Place

Sir Robert Norberton is a racehorse owner in trouble. His debts are enormous, his behaviour has turned strange, and he has put a fortune, much of it borrowed, on his horse Shoscombe Prince to win the race that would save him. His trainer, John Mason, is worried enough to consult Holmes: he thinks Sir Robert has gone mad. Then one of the many creditors disappears, and human bone is found in the furnace at the stables, and the matter stops being about money. Which is a relief, because a puzzle about money alone would not hold Holmes for an afternoon.

Holmes and Watson go to Shoscombe Old Place, and what they find there is a family secret buried in the foundations. The household is a strange one, all locked doors and frightened servants. And the more Holmes pokes, the stranger it gets. The lady of the house is never quite seen, and the bones in the furnace turn out to be old bones. The real crime is not the one everyone is looking for. The secrets here are the old kind, the ones families spend generations pretending not to know.

Patrick Lau directed, from Gary Hopkins and Conan Doyle. Robin Ellis, Poldark himself, gives Sir Robert the full, feverish intensity of a man who has bet everything, and Frank Grimes's Mason is the worried voice of sanity. Elizabeth Weaver's Lady Beatrice Falder keeps her own mysteries, with Denise Black, Michael Bilton, Martin Stone, Michael Wynne and James Coyle in support.

The solution is a twist on a twist, the sort Conan Doyle liked to build around inheritance and identity, and the episode plays fair with it. It is a quiet entry in the canon, a stables yard and a furnace and a family that has run out of luck. Sometimes that is enough. The episode also gives Robin Ellis one of his best chances to be properly unhinged in a suit, and he takes it.