Dance of the Scorpions

A building society manager and his wife are shot dead in what starts out looking like a kidnapping gone wrong. That's the official line, anyway. It is a gruesome business, and it puts Wycliffe at odds with his own superiors from the start. The weapon was a shotgun, which points the police at licensed gun dealers and, soon enough, at Patrick Durno.

Durno has never been convicted of anything, but he has form of the unprovable kind: links to organised crime from his London days. Wycliffe wants him looked at properly. But then comes the order to drop the man, no explanation given. Any sensible officer would have swallowed it. Wycliffe presses on anyway, and he puts a much wider police operation at risk in the process. There is a domestic casualty too. The long-promised holiday in Paris gets postponed, and Helen, unimpressed, makes her own plans and goes without him.

Leslie Grantham plays Durno, which is the kind of casting that makes you watch him twice. Wycliffe is Jack Shepherd, patient and stubborn in equal measure, and Lynn Farleigh is Helen. Helen Masters and Jimmy Yuill do the legwork as DI Lucy Lane and DI Doug Kersey. Around them: Stevan Rimkus as Parsons, Daniel Moynihan and Celia Breckon as the Dysons, Timothy Carlton as the Rotary Club chairman, Tim Wylton as Franks.

Arthur McKenzie wrote it, Paul Harrison directed, and it went out as a standalone special in December 1997.

The case itself is a proper tangle of guns and professional pride, and Wycliffe unties it the way he does everything: one patient interview at a time. The title suggests something elegant with a sting, which turns out to be about right. Dance of the Scorpions is a story about a man who trusts his own reading of a case over the instructions he has been given, and about the wife who quietly books her own holiday. It's hard not to like both of them for it.