The Tangled Web

Lily Armitage goes to visit an ailing friend at a tumbledown farmstead and finds her dead, locked in a freezer. The friend was bedridden, which somehow makes the freezer worse. That is the kind of opening that tells you everything about the village this episode lives in. Meanwhile, a pregnant teenager called Hilda Clemo walks out after a row with her family and is reported missing. Wycliffe has to find the thread that joins a body in a freezer to a girl on the road.

The Clemo family are a strange bunch, feuding among themselves in a way that produces more heat than sense. The more Wycliffe questions them, the clearer it becomes that the village is holding its breath over something older than either case. Old feuds and greed that has been festering quietly: the mystery is less about who did what than about what everyone agreed to ignore. Wycliffe's method is to keep asking the same polite questions until somebody says the wrong thing.

Gabrielle Hamilton plays Lily Armitage, and Stephanie Buttle is Hilda Clemo. The families around them are played by Robert Demeger as James Clemo, Kevin Dignam as Francis Harvey, Joanne Thirsk as Alice Harvey, and Richenda Carey and Giles Taylor as Jane and Clifford Rule. Trevor Danby is the Parson. Jack Shepherd leads as Wycliffe, with Adam Barker's DC Potter beside him.

W.J. Burley and Andrew Holden wrote it, Ferdinand Fairfax directed, and it went out in August 1994, midway through the first series.

The Tangled Web earns its title. The episode keeps shifting which theory looks right, and it refuses to let you settle on any of them for long. That is the right way to run a village mystery: leave the secrets in place and let the detective unpick them in his own time. For a story that starts with a body in a freezer, it stays oddly humane. But the freezer is the image that stays with you. Nobody forgets that one.