To Sup with the Devil

The Ship Inn's landlord is found bludgeoned to death, and the first problem the police face is that nobody liked him. Ray Gurney ran a noisy pub and collected enemies the way some men collect glasses. The pub itself goes quiet, which in the Ship Inn's case was probably a first. Wycliffe can't find anyone with a good word to say, which is useful in one sense and useless in another: motive is everywhere, and so is silence.

An informant named Gary Tregenna obligingly points the finger at Sam Venning, who recently married Gurney's ex-wife Lisa. Venning resents the money Lisa gave him to bail out his own pub, and he admits to visiting Gurney on the night. He swears he didn't kill him. But the interesting part is Tregenna, who turns out to be considerably less innocent than his helpful manner suggests, and it's DI Lane who starts to see it. Lisa sits awkwardly between the two men, remarried and still tied to the old life by the money she handed over.

Then Lane mishandles the pursuit, and the case goes from procedural to rescue mission. Wycliffe and Kersey have to stage something dramatic to pull things back. It's the kind of turn that reminds you these are real people making real mistakes, not a machine processing suspects.

Written by W.J. Burley and Carolyn Sally Jones, directed by Graeme Harper. Jack Shepherd as Det. Supt. Wycliffe, with David J. Nicholls as Ray Gurney, Kate Steavenson-Payne as Josie Perrett, Michael Attwell as DCC Stevens, Helen Masters as DI Lane, Jimmy Yuill as DI Kersey, Ian Kirkby as DS Naylor, Tim Wylton as Franks, Darren Ruston as DC Weller and James Curran as the Chief Constable.

A pub landlord nobody liked, an informant with his own agenda. The episode serves it all up with the froth still on. It's messy, and that's the point.