The Last Rites

The Reverend Jordan arrives at the village church and finds his cleaner dead below the cross: Jessica Dobell, partially clothed, the body arranged in a way the police surgeon will describe as posed. The village reaches for the most dramatic explanation it has, and satanic cult talk fills the air fast. Wycliffe looks past the sensation and starts on the woman's actual life, which is where the trouble turns out to be.

Jessica Dobell was the kind of woman a village like this disapproves of loudly and watches closely. Her sexual morality was a topic of conversation long before her death, and the air around the case is thick with violent hatred, not all of it aimed at her. Some of it is just loose, looking for a target. Wycliffe prefers motives you can spend: money, jealousy, the ordinary gears of village life, and he finds them where the sermons never reach.

Jeff Rawle is Reverend Jordan, the man who finds her, with Dinah Stabb as Celia Jordan. Ellie Haddington and Paul Moriarty are Katherine and Abe Geach, Nigel Terry and Julia Deakin are Lawrence and Stephanie Vinter. Every house in the cast carries its own grudge. Jack Shepherd anchors it as Wycliffe, with Jimmy Yuill's Kersey and Aaron Harris's Dixon, and Helen Masters as DI Lane.

W.J. Burley and Rob Heyland wrote it, A.J. Quinn directed, and it aired in August 1994.

The Last Rites sits in the space between communal hysteria and steady police work, and it never lets the hysteria win. But the satanic cult story is a way of not looking at the woman, and the episode knows it. The village is full of people who had a view of Jessica Dobell, and the question underneath is how many of them knew her at all. That is the quiet horror the episode is really pointing at, and it lands without raising its voice.