Lone Voyager

A famous yachtswoman disappears and nobody panics at first. Paula Tresize's boat, the Lone Voyager, has been found scuttled on the seabed, and the search becomes a recovery. Then a body turns up in the china clay pits owned by the Davis brothers, the family locked in a land feud with Paula, and everything stops being routine. Her much younger husband Ben Walker makes the identification: the dead woman is Joanna, Paula's doctor, a woman who was about to emigrate and who had somehow been shot with Paula's own gun.

The doctor, it seems, had spent time convincing Paula she was mentally ill. That detail sits at the heart of the mystery. Wycliffe has to unpick it while the rest of the job piles up around him: Kersey still embittered, still waiting on Le Page's findings, the team stretched thin. The domestic deception is intimate and quietly nasty, which is exactly the sort of crime this show does well.

The settings do half the work. A wrecked boat on the seabed and a body in the pale water of a clay pit are images that stay with you, and the show lets them breathe instead of rushing past. Ted Fisher, Vanessa, the small Cornish world of the piece, all get room to move. There's a fine line between atmosphere and padding, and this one stays on the right side of it.

Written by W.J. Burley and Phil O'Shea, directed by Michael Brayshaw. Jack Shepherd leads as Det. Supt. Wycliffe, with Jimmy Yuill as DI Kersey, Con O'Neill as Ben Walker, Alan Cody as Ted Fisher, Helen Masters as DI Lane, Edward Clayton as Sgt. Cannon, Michael Attwell as DCC Stevens, Nicholas Lopez as DC Fincham, Nicola Jeffries as WPC Sally Miller and Linda Slade as Vanessa.

It's a story about trust and who controls the truth about your own mind. And it lets the yachtswoman stay at the centre of it, even when she isn't on screen.