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Bernard Tyzack runs a caravan site and appears to be exactly what he seems: a local businessman who is good with people and doing all right. Then somebody stabs him to death in a pub car park, and the man holding the knife is Mick Sennam, a thief who has never been violent in his life. Even the suspect is surprised by himself.

Sennam insists he was paid to frighten Tyzack, nothing more, and he sticks to that story even when it stops making sense. But the more Wycliffe looks at the victim, the less respectable he becomes. Tyzack was a fraudster and a pimp, and his family had no idea, which means the man mourned at the funeral is not the man who was killed. Sennam is too frightened to name the person who hired him, and in custody he takes the only way out he can see. Kersey takes the blame for that, hard, but it is his handling of the case that gives Wycliffe the means to reach the truth underneath.

W.J. Burley and Isabelle Grey wrote it, David Innes Edwards directed. Aired in July 1997, it was the second episode of the fourth series. Nick Wilkinson is Tyzack, Ian Bartholomew is Sennam, and Elizabeth Rider is Trisha Tyzack. Mark Jefferis's Colin the Landlord and Steve Whyment's Tregeen round out the local scene, with Jeremy Fowlds's Wallis, Robin Sneller's sergeant and Helen Masters's Lane working around Jimmy Yuill's Kersey and Jack Shepherd's Wycliffe.

The episode pairs a sudden, clumsy death with the slow disappointment of finding out what the victim was really like. It is one thing to lose a man; it is another to lose the idea of him. The title says it all. The truth in this one lands uncomfortably close to home, and it stays there.