Feeding the Rat

Gareth Denton dies on a cliff face, and for a while it looks like a climbing accident. Then a witness starts talking in the local pubs. He's not what you'd call reliable, but he's loud: Denton was pushed, he says, and the man who pushed him was his climbing partner Hugh Barrington. The pubs do what pubs do, and the story gets round the village before the police have finished their first interview.

Barrington is obsessive, and everyone who climbs with him knows it. The re-enactment of the fatal climb does nothing to clear him; if anything, it tends to bear the accusation out. Wycliffe is back at work and back on the case, and he's soon convinced Barrington did it. But the problem is motive. There isn't one that fits, and without it the case stays stubbornly open. The episode makes that frustration its engine, which is an honest choice: real investigations stall on missing pieces like this all the time. Wycliffe's team runs the climb again in harnesses, and the coast keeps its own counsel.

Underneath the cliff work, Lucy Lane is carrying something of her own. She's pregnant, split again from Angus, and she decides to bring the baby up on her own. It's handled quietly, and it lands harder for being understated. DC Dick Hall chips in with practical observations, the solicitor Toby Davies offers counsel, and the whole thing adds up to a procedural that refuses to wrap itself in a bow. It's a nice piece of restraint in an episode full of people pointing fingers.

Written by Isabelle Grey, directed by Alan Wareing. Paul Venables as Hugh Barrington, Jack Shepherd as Det. Supt. Wycliffe, Helen Masters as DI Lucy Lane, Cristian Solimeno as DC Dick Hall, Matthew Mitchell as DS Ken Robins, Chris Jury as Toby Penwarren, Kate Byers as Laura Starkie, Lynn Farleigh as Helen Wycliffe, Bernard Gallagher as Vic Garland and Toby Davies as the Solicitor.