by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After You Can’t Cheat an
Honest Man I watched the latest
episode of Vera, an ITS
(Independent Television Service) British production aired on
PBS and a quite good policier featuring
the middle-aged Inspector Vera Stanhope (Brenda Blethyn), who heads the police
force in Northumberland, an English town close to the Scottish border and the
moor country. While other British authors, ranging from William Shakespeare to
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, had done more with this part of England than Vera creator Ann Cleeves and Martha Hillier, who wrote
this particular episode, “Death of a Family Man,” this was still a good
whodunit. The victim — discovered when a women’s rowing crew at the local
college are practicing and their boat literally crashes into the body in the river they’re using as
their practice run — is John Shearwood (Ian van Temperley, whom as usual we’re
introduced to as a corpse but eventually see more of in flashbacks), who’s got
an estranged wife, Stella (Maibritt Saerens); a son, Billy (Billy Howle), who’s
got into drugs (they’ve spent a small fortune on various rehab clinics) ever
since he ran down a little boy in his car, killing him, and narrowly escaped a
manslaughter charge; an embezzling partner in his delivery business, Mark
Donovan (Tim Dantay); an Inland Revenue agent who’s asked Shearwood to inform
on the other participants in an illegal liquor-smuggling business; and a
mistress, Gemma Makins (Clare Kerrigan), with whom he’s planning to run off to
France and who’s pregnant with his child — and who, just to make things
kinkier, is also the mother of the child his son Billy ran down with his car.
Only, in an odd but not entirely surprising twist, it turns out Billy didn’t
kill the kid — John himself had taken the wheel of the car at that point, and
the son agreed to take the rap for his dad because previously his driving record
had been “clean” and his dad’s hadn’t, but that was before the victim’s
condition took a turn for the worse and he died in hospital instead of
surviving his injuries. Obviously Martha Hillier was following the old whodunit
plotting strategy of giving the victim as many people as possible who had
reason to hate him so there’d be plenty of suspects around whom she could
distribute suspicion before the final revelation — Mark Donovan was the actual
killer; he and John were having an argument over John’s mistress and Mark
accidentally pitched him off his balcony into the nearby river, then tied his
shoelaces together to make sure he couldn’t swim his way out. It’s not much of
a resolution but the story had a kind of cruel appeal to it, and it benefited
from the final appearance of the attractive David Leon as Vera’s assistant, Joe
Ashworth — he left the series after this episode in 2014 — though one of Vera’s
other staff was a kick-ass woman with black hair, a leather jacket and black
form-fitting jeans, who’d be a good choice for Diana Rigg’s part if someone
wants to remake the TV series The Avengers and who looks like she’s being groomed to take over from Leon as
Vera’s assistant!
