Strangers

A wedding where every guest is a stranger to the bride and groom. That is the bizarre setup of the fourth series opener: Karen Drew and John Leigh meet through an advertisement in the local paper, marry three weeks later, and fill the pews with other people who answered the same ad. The ceremony, in Penzance, has the feel of a production, everyone doing their part and nobody quite knowing the other players.

But the honeymoon does not last the night. John is found stabbed and robbed in the couple's luxury hotel while Karen is out walking, and the investigation hits a wall immediately: every single guest has an alibi. All those strangers, accounted for. Which leaves Karen, the bride of three weeks, squarely in the frame. In a quieter corner of the episode, Wycliffe is dealing with George Aston, an old man who killed his terminally ill wife because she asked him to, and who now sits waiting for a judgment he does not fear. The two cases sit oddly beside each other, and that is deliberate.

Peter Hammond wrote it, Alan Wareing directed. Aired in the summer of 1997, it opened the fourth series. Josephine Butler is Karen, Anthony Green is John, and Sidney Livingstone and Pat Rossiter are Harry and Rose Burrows. Ronald Hines is George Aston, with Barbara Kirby's Registrar and Michael Attwell's DCC Stevens in support, and Jimmy Yuill's Kersey and Helen Masters's Lane working around Jack Shepherd's Wycliffe.

It is a story about the difference between the strangers you marry and the strangers who stand beside you at the altar. The ad brings a roomful of people together, and one of them is a killer. Whether the old man in the other case is one too, or something kinder, the episode leaves for you to decide. That ambiguity is the point, and it works.