Charades

Nobody expects to find a body nailed to their back door, least of all on holiday. David and Angela Miller open up their Cornish holiday home and find Ezra, a local villain, pinned to it, blasted with a shotgun for good measure. It reads as a message, and the village knows who sends messages. Suspicion settles fast on Gary Penhale, a local lad whose family once lived in the Millers' house and who has been sending them strange threatening notes.

The case looks tidy, which is what makes Wycliffe uneasy. Colin Drake, an overly helpful local with feelings for DI Lucy Lane, keeps steering the evidence Penhale's way, and the notes do the rest. But there are complications. Angela Miller was recently the victim of a hit-and-run, she is the moneyed half of the marriage, and her husband's business is floundering. Wycliffe starts looking at the couple instead of the boy, and the title starts to make sense: everyone here is playing a part.

David Haig plays David Miller and Judi Maynard is Angela, the two of them doing a good impression of a holiday couple with nothing to hide. Doyne Byrd is Devenish. Jack Shepherd leads as Wycliffe, with Helen Masters's Lane, Jimmy Yuill's Kersey, Aaron Harris's Dixon and Adam Barker's Potter. Harriet Ashcroft is Ruth and Tom Eastwood is the barman.

W.J. Burley and Jonathan Rich wrote it, Martyn Friend directed, and it aired in July 1995.

Charades is about the performance people give when the police arrive. The obvious villain is a distraction, and the episode is careful to let him be one for a while. Domestic tension and criminal ill-feeling turn out to be the same story, which is the kind of twist the series does better than most. There is also, in the middle of it all, a man with a crush on a detective inspector, which the show plays without ever making him a joke.