≤br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
As China 9, Liberty 37 was wrapping up my husband Charles came home from work and the two of us watches a better-than-average episode of Midsomer Murders, the long-running British TV series about a fictional “Midsomer County” in central England and the two local police officials, Detective Chief Inspector John Barmaby (Neil Dudgeon) and his younger, decidedly cuter partner, here called “Jamie Winter” and played by Nick Hendrix. (Charles was sorry that we weren’t watching an episode with Barnaby’s previous partner, “Charlie Nelson,” since “Nelson” is my husband’s last name.) The story is called “Crime and Punishment” and deals with Bleakridge, which because of its remoteness used to be the hotbed of crime in Midsomer County until a local woman named Ingrid Lockston (Frances Barber), furious at the death of her husband at the hands of a hit-and-run driver two years earlier, sets up the Bleakridge Watch to patrol the streets. Alas, the members of the Bleakridge Watch perform their duties with such zeal they hand out their own parking tickets to people they feel have broken their rules regardless of whether what they’re doing is legal or not. They’ve also gone after the owner of the local inn, “The Hangman.” His name is Mitch McAllister (Neil Morrissey) and he’s barely hanging on because the leaders of the Bleakridge Watch have targeted him and his customers. He’s relying on his wife Lena Ferrara (Katy Cavanaugh) for the extra income she’s bringing in, ostensibly from a mobile beauty shop she runs out of her van.
Also, the Bleakridge Watch is in danger of losing its government funding when the local city council decides it’s completed its work and its money should be cut in haof – until a series of opportunistic burglaries starts occurring and the council is scared into keeping the Watch’s funding at its current level. When a local butcher named Corwin is found murdered – bashed in the head with a meat tenderizer and stuffed into his own freezer – Barnaby and Winter discover scars on his legs that indicate he’d been in bondage, not at the time of his murder but a month or two earlier. Later another Bleakridge Watch member, Azeem Meer (Emilio Doorgashingh), is also found murdered. The cops comb through the usual assortment of red herrings, including a scary-looking Bleakridge Watch member who stuffs tablecloths into the drains at the inn’s kitchen and thereby forces it to close,and two brothers with criminal records, one of whom is dating Corwin’s wife, until the police learn that Azeem had carefully preserved all the goods the mystery burglar had stolen in a locked closet in his home. It turns out that he and Ingrid had been in league with each other to start burglarizing the homes of local residents to scare them into continuing to fund the Bleakridge Watch.
It also turns out that Lena Ferrara’s true sideline is not running a mobile beauty service but hiring herself out as an S/M dominatrix, which she did as a living before she married Mitch and turned back to in order to make enough money to keep his inn in business≠ though when Mitch finds out (after the cops inadvertently raid one of her BDSM sessions and she protests that she’s not a prostitute and she hasn’t technically been unfaithful because her services don’t involve actual sex) he’s disgusted and walks out of their relationship. The killer turns out to be Barbara Walton (Vicki Pepperdine), wife of red-herring su suspect Duncan Walton (Philip Bird), who two years ago saw Frank Lockston drunk and weaving down the street on his way to go home and beat his wife Maxine (Sara Powell). While Ingrid has continued to lionize her brother and declare him the victim of a tragedy, Barbara says she ran him down and killed him deliberately to spare Maxine any further domestic abuse from him. Only she abandoned her car on the road and it was stolen by the two brothers, who drove it into an old barn – and two years later it was discovered by Corwin, who had been assigned by Ingrid to “investigate” the burglaries because she considered him too stupid to put two and two together and come up with the truth. So Barbara had to kill him and also kill Azeem, who had lent his camera to Corwin, which contained an image of the barn where the death car was hidden even though in the meantime Barbara had also turched the barn and thus hopefully destroyed the evidence. “Crime and Punishment” is a much grimmer taie than most of the Midsomer Murders episodes, and it takes a pretty dark view of human nature rather than the genteel air of most British mystery stories.
