The Boscombe Valley Mystery

Alice Turner sends for Holmes when her lifelong friend, the farmer William McCarthy, is found dead in Boscombe Valley. The police have their man already: McCarthy's son, James, who admits he quarrelled with his father that morning but will not say what the argument was about. Silence in the dock is as good as guilt, and James is charged with murder.

Holmes, as always, is less interested in the confession than in the details. The scene of the death tells a different story from the one the prosecution wants, and the son's stubborn refusal to explain himself turns out to be protecting someone else entirely. The case leads Holmes back through the years to Australia, to an old friendship and an older crime, and the local murder turns out to be the last echo of something that happened on the other side of the world. John Turner, Alice's father, is closer to the truth than he wants to be. The strength of the episode is how slowly it lets the truth out, and how much it trusts the two old men to carry it.

June Howson directed, from John Hawkesworth and Conan Doyle. Peter Vaughan's John Turner is a fine, heavy performance, a man carrying a secret like a sack of stones, and James Purefoy, years before he was Mark Antony in Rome, gives James McCarthy the right mix of defiance and misery. Joanna Roth's Alice is the story's heart, with Jonathan Barlow, Leslie Schofield, Cliff Howells and Makala Saunders in support.

It is a domestic tragedy dressed as a murder mystery, and the dressing is very good. The solution, when it comes, is not exactly a surprise, and Holmes's part in it is gentler than usual. He solves the case. And then he does something with the answer that would not occur to most detectives. That is the whole of it, and it is more than enough.