The Eligible Bachelor (2)

Part one left Hatty Doran's wedding dress in the Serpentine, a note in its pocket, and the bride vanished from the middle of her own wedding day. This concluding half puts every piece back together, and the pieces, it turns out, were never where the newspapers thought they were.

Holmes has been working through his nightmares as well as the case, and the dreams, which everyone else treated as a distraction, turn out to be part of the map. Watson keeps the records and the patience. Inspector Montgomery does his honest best with the police side. And the family, which spent part one offering opinions, spends part two offering alibis, which is rather a different thing.

The resolution explains where Hatty went and why she chose to vanish, and it does so without cheating. The clues were in plain view all along, from the wedding dress to the note to the people who swore they had nothing to hide. Every character introduced in the first half earns a place in the second, and when the truth finally surfaces it has the shape of a domestic story rather than a scandal, which is somehow worse for the people involved and better for the bride.

T.R. Bowen wrote it, Peter Hammond directed. Simon Williams returns as Lord Robert St Simon, and Paris Jefferson gets the best of it as Hatty, playing a woman who is more complicated than the headlines allow. Anna Calder-Marshall is Lady Helena and Agnes Northcote, while Rosalie Williams, Geoffrey Beevers, Mary Ellis, Phillada Sewell and Elspeth March complete the cast, with Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke holding the centre as Holmes and Watson.

The Eligible Bachelor is one of the gentler two-parters in this run, a story about people rather than poisoners. There are no villains in the usual sense, which makes the case harder and the ending kinder. Holmes solves it, which was never in doubt. But the story belongs to Hatty, and to the reasons a bride would rather disappear than be found.