Dead on Arrival

A surprise silver wedding anniversary, laid on by the Wycliffe children, comes to an abrupt halt when Customs find five corpses in an abandoned meat lorry at a Cornish ferry terminal. Five illegal immigrants, dead on arrival, and the driver, Eddie Sowden, has gone missing. When the police catch up with him he claims to know nothing about the bodies in his own vehicle. Wycliffe doesn't believe a word of it, and says so without raising his voice. But the timing is wretched.

What makes the episode unusual is how it keeps pulling back to the family Wycliffe was supposed to be celebrating with. Ruth, Helen and Irene are there, and so is David, all of them waiting for the man of the house to come off duty. The anniversary party becomes a backdrop the case keeps intruding on, and you feel the tug on Wycliffe every time the phone rings. Sowden sticks to his story, and the lorry's cargo sits at the centre of everything: the dead, and the living who profited from them.

W.J. Burley and Steve Trafford wrote it, Michael Owen Morris directed. Aired in the summer of 1996, it opened the third series. Charlie Hayes is Ruth, Gregory Chisholm is David, Lynn Farleigh is Helen and Grace Mitchell is Irene. Stuart Organ plays the slippery Sowden, with Peter Leafe's Customs Officer, Jimmy Yuill's Kersey, Adam Barker's Potter and Aaron Harris's Dixon working the case around Jack Shepherd's Wycliffe.

It is a fine reminder that the procedural and the personal are the same thing for a man like this one. The bodies in the lorry are somebody's family, and so is the man chasing the truth about them. Twenty-five years of marriage gets put on hold because five strangers died in a truck. The episode never forgets either half of that, and it is the stronger for it.