The Four Jacks

An archaeology student called Celia Dawe is found naked in bed with gunshot wounds, and the series opens on that image without flinching. She survives, barely, and lies in a coma while the surgeons work. The case that lands on Wycliffe's desk is strange from the first look, and it gets stranger.

Celia was on a dig run by Professor Faber, on land owned by David Cleeve, a mystery novelist of the wealthy sort. It was in Cleeve's own cottage that she was shot. The only lead is a yellow Metro seen near the property around the time of the attack, which is thin and everyone knows it. Faber, meanwhile, insists his own life is in danger, and nobody connected with the dig is behaving like an innocent.

Then a second man dies: Roger Kitson, shot while walking his dog on the beach. A man killed with his dog beside him is the kind of detail that stays with you. The two shootings may or may not be connected, and the team is chasing a yellow car whose owner, they suspect, knows something buried years back. With Celia still fighting for her life in hospital, Wycliffe has the sense that another murder is queuing up behind this one.

W.J. Burley and Edward Canfor-Dumas wrote it, Ferdinand Fairfax directed. Jack Shepherd leads as Wycliffe, with Jimmy Yuill's Kersey and Helen Masters's Lane, Aaron Harris as Dixon and Adam Barker as Potter. Tim Treslove is PC Pearce. Bill Nighy plays David Cleeve and is exactly the right amount of smooth, Nicholas Gecks is Faber, James Curran the surgeon, and Rupam Maxwell rounds out the cast as Paul Redman.

The Four Jacks is a patient opener. But it lets the first crime sit before piling on the next, and it trusts you to hold a dozen names in your head without being told which one matters. That is a confidence some shows never earn.