The Last Vampyre (2)

Part one left Holmes in the village with the accusation against Carlotta hanging in the air and the deaths around John Stockton refusing to make sense. This conclusion does what Conan Doyle always does best. It pulls the supernatural off the table and puts a human being in its place.

Holmes, as usual, has been watching the right things at the wrong time. The villagers looked at Carlotta and saw a vampire. Holmes, who never much liked the view from a crowd, looked at the household instead and found something much more ordinary, and much more wicked. The blood on the child and the convenient deaths, the explanations arriving just in time to cover the last one. It all fits together once you stop believing in monsters and start counting motives.

But the unmasking, when it comes, is satisfyingly grounded. There is no stake through any heart and no garlic, none of the apparatus of the penny dreadful. There is only evidence, a confession of sorts, and a village that has to live with what it nearly did to an innocent woman. Holmes's verdict on the affair is characteristically dry: the undead had nothing to do with it, but the living have a great deal to answer for.

Jeremy Paul wrote it, Tim Sullivan directed. The cast is unchanged from the first part, and none the worse for that: Roy Marsden, Keith Barron, Yolanda Vazquez, Maurice Denham, Richard Dempsey, Juliet Aubrey, Jason Hetherington and Elizabeth Spriggs, with Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke as the pair from Baker Street.

The Last Vampyre is a reminder that Holmes's world has no room for the occult, only for people. The vampire is unmasked, the scheme is laid bare, and the village goes back to its tea. It is a quieter ending than the genre usually offers, and the better for it.