The Trojan Horse

Alex Keir reports his wife missing, and he does the distraught husband act very well. Wycliffe watches him do it and stays doubtful. Then a ransom note turns up, which is the sort of thing that moves even a sceptic. And then Alison Keir is found dead at the wheel of a crashed car, smelling strongly of drink. The kidnapping case becomes something much less comfortable: possibly a murder wearing an accident's clothes.

The pieces do not fit, and the title says why. There is a ransom demand with nobody left to pay it and a woman who apparently drank and drove into a crash, while the husband's grief never quite convinced Wycliffe. The kidnapping story is the gift brought to the police, and the question is what was hiding inside it. Wycliffe's team works the gap between the story and the facts, which is where this show always lives.

John McArdle is Alex Keir, the bereaved husband with something held back, and Margo Gunn is Alison, seen in the investigation's rear-view mirror. Judy Brooke plays two parts, Angela Sykes and Diana Byrne, which gives the casting a quiet puzzle of its own. Jack Shepherd leads as Wycliffe, with Jimmy Yuill, Helen Masters, Aaron Harris and Adam Barker as the team, Adam Kotz as Dave Penryn and Brenda Cavendish as Mrs Tregelles.

W.J. Burley and Steve Trafford wrote it, Patrick Lau directed, and it aired in June 1995.

The Trojan Horse is a careful, simmering procedural that plays fair with the viewer. It raises the question of whether the missing person case was ever real and lets the answer wait until the end. The pacing is patient in the way Wycliffe himself is patient, and the last stretch does the work the title promised. There is a quiet pleasure in watching suspicion and evidence slowly change places, which is the whole game here. And it is the kind of episode that rewards a rewatch, because the clues were there all along.