Four and Twenty Blackbirds

A farmer goes missing and leaves his sheep and his house behind, which is not what farmers do. The local police call Wycliffe in, and the discoveries start coming: arson, bloodstains, a community struggling so hard it barely registers the smell of smoke. The man at the centre of it is reclusive old George Totts, and his own house has been torched.

The young man who rang the emergency services turns out to be Stephen Ling, the local vet's estranged son. The vet's surgery has been set alight as well, after a theft, and Stephen's hand is burnt. Nobody in the village is saying much, which is its own kind of statement. Wycliffe's reading is simple: the boy is hiding George Totts somewhere, and the burnt hand tells its own story. The neighbouring farmer, Mrs Prentice, is carrying secrets of her own, and in this village that is close to normal.

Charlie De'Ath is Stephen Ling, the boy with the burnt hand, and Lennox Greaves is Patrick Rowland. René Zagger is Rob Mills, Isabelle Weil is Jenny Prentice, and Christopher Driscoll is Inspector Perry. Jack Shepherd leads as Wycliffe, with Jimmy Yuill's Kersey, Helen Masters's Lane, Aaron Harris's Dixon and Adam Barker's Potter holding the investigation together. The cast keeps the village feeling lived-in, which is half the battle in an episode like this.

W.J. Burley and Julian Jones wrote it, Steve Goldie directed, and it aired in July 1995.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds is a story about a community stretched past what it can carry. The fires are the obvious signs. But the real damage is the kind nobody calls in: families split and farms failing, with neighbours who know things and do not say them. Wycliffe works the case the way he always does, slowly and in the right order, and the nursery rhyme title fits better than anyone expects. There is a patience to this one that rewards sitting with it.