The Pea-Green Boat

Harry Tremaine goes out to his fishing boat and never comes back, because the boat goes up with him. The explosion kills him outright, and suspicion lands on his son Freddie, who stands to inherit everything. But Wycliffe is not convinced. He has a list of people who wanted Harry Tremaine gone, and every one of them has a different reason.

The list is a good one. Harry's wife was having an affair with his own partner, which is the kind of news that reaches the harbour before the police. A developer wants the quayside land for a marina, and Harry would not sell. Then there is the stranger: someone, name unknown, who received five hundred pounds in cash from Harry on the first day of every month. That is the detail Wycliffe keeps coming back to, because nobody pays that kind of money out of habit.

Roy Alon plays Harry Tremaine, whose death sets everything in motion, and Anne Stallybrass is Mrs Tremaine. Brendan O'Hea is David Jones, Jan Pearson is Mary Clark, and the Greaves family are Barry Jackson as Alexander and Paul Bettany as Ian. Jimmy Yuill's Kersey and Adam Barker's Potter do the rounds with Wycliffe. David Bliss is Soco, and David J. Nicholls is the scrap metal merchant.

W.J. Burley and Steve Trafford wrote it, A.J. Quinn directed, and it aired in August 1994, closing out the first series.

The Pea-Green Boat is a proper little whodunnit, the kind where the boat explosion is the easy part and the hard part is the money. Everyone in the frame has a motive you can hold in your hand, from the partner's affair to the developer's drawings, and always that monthly five hundred. Wycliffe ties the loose ends together with his usual patience. The title, borrowed from the nursery rhyme, suits a story about a boat that went out whole and came back in pieces.