The Scapegoat

Every Halloween, the village sends a life-size effigy of a man down to the sea, strapped to a blazing wheel. It is an old ritual with an old purpose: load the community's sins onto a scapegoat and let the tide take them, in place of the human sacrifice it once stood in for. The ritual has run so long that nobody in the village thinks it strange, which is exactly the kind of thing that interests Wycliffe. This year the sea gives something back. Local undertaker Jonathan Riddle's body is found washed up among the rocks, and it takes very little imagination to see him as this year's offering.

But Wycliffe is not buying it, not entirely. The ritual makes a fine story, but an undertaker is a man with clients, and clients have reasons. Riddle knew where the bodies were buried, so to speak, in a way that made him useful and dangerous at once. The murder inquiry spreads through the village, and the episode saves its best image for last: a figure strapped to a burning wheel, plunging over the cliffs.

John McEnery is Ephraim Gardner, Catherine McCormack is Asenath Gardner, and Carole Nimmons plays Sarah Riddle, the undertaker's widow. Jack Shepherd leads as Wycliffe, with Jimmy Yuill's Kersey, Aaron Harris's Dixon and Adam Barker's Potter on the team. Christopher Ashley is Sgt Luff, Laura Brattan is WPC Eva Luff, and Helen Masters completes the regulars as DI Lane.

W.J. Burley and Russell Lewis wrote it, Martyn Friend directed, and it went out in August 1994.

The Scapegoat is about how a village talks itself out of responsibility. The tradition is ancient and faintly horrible, and the episode never lets you forget that the line between effigy and victim is thinner than the village would like. Deep-rooted customs can hide the plain facts of a crime very effectively. That is the point, and Wycliffe, as ever, is the one who refuses to be charmed by the story.