The second Monday of April 2011 has been a day of mixed fortunes commences with a struggle of swim and quick read of the newspaper before going to the supermarket for milk with I then forgot, some meats and fowl as the cupboard had become bare, two made up salads one chicken and bacon and the other prawn layered, some butter scotch for the night and four packs of the £2 for 8 Pepsi.
It was then I could not find the A A credit card last used yesterday afternoon when buying the two pairs of trousers and by mid afternoon I decided it was lost rather than mislaid and cancelled so a second replacement within a month is required with the added problem that I will have to advise the change in card number to the Olympic ticket bid. To day I discovered the card inside the pocket diary but it was too late to change and had to be cut up.
Yesterday there was also a quick return home for the arrival of he boiling servicing although in fact it was after 11.30 one and half hours into the two hour slot and then a brief stay of under 15 mins but it has been done for another year. I then found my day phone that had dropped to the floor in the car and I could settled for the day after a good lunch of a cut of steak and the rest of the tinned and tomatoes and beans from yesterday.
Today after the swim I also made a quick visit to Morrison’s for milk, select your own salad and a kipper topped and tailed. There were two in the pool on arrival and then a couple from the hotel so I sat out read the paper and my current book. After the breakfast I got ready for the dentist who has become a young Polish woman after the previous dentist left for Yorkshire. I needed another appointment for a filling replacement but this has to wait until after a return from holiday. I then went for two more pairs of trousers and decided to park at Asda when someone gave me a paid for ticket.
This meant that I could boy five pounds of food for four pounds. I found the latest location of end of sell by date counter and found two more quiche marked down from £1 to 74p excellent, purchased some strawberries and one other item which I cannot immediately recall. It was midday and then time for food, ah I remember, it was two Thai Fish cakes, already consumed with a compote of vegetables.
Yesterday I was not in the mood to begin Oranges and Sunshine and New Lives for Old- The Story of Britain’s child migration watched the recording of the first episode of the new series of Lewis. Later I watched the second part of the last episode of the last series of Waking the Dead. I have watched one awful film, Wanted, together with Crimson Tide.
I guessed that the Assistant Police Commissioner was a baddie early on in the last episode of Waking the Dead but not the extent of his infamy. A Soho frequenting pregnant prostitute has her aggressively drunk boyfriend picked up by police but he is then beaten to death in cells by a couple of young “beat” police in 1960’s with the help of the duty custody officer who they had visited for a quick drink on New Year‘s Eve.
About seven years or so later the boy becomes an orphan having previously taken the money from punters for his mother using accommodation provided by a Soho based gangster who has taken a shine to boy and then brings him as his own together with his natural son of a similar age.
About a decade and a half later the natural son uses money obtained from his father to buy a closed public house in countryside where he takes central London street boys to torture and terrorise before shooting 16 of them in the head at roughly three month intervals. He has been drawn to his prey by the son of the prostitute who has entered the police force and talks about the number of street children and that no one will miss them. This is not so because a kindly Vicar of a parish in the area has expressed repeated concern to the police over the number of youngsters he befriended and supported and who suddenly disappeared. This disappearance had been investigated by Trevor Eve as his first case on appointment to the Cold Case Unit without success.
At the start of the last two part episode, Waterloo, Trevor Eve is told that he can either retire or take up a training post with promotion. In his anger Trevor decides to reopen the investigation of the missing street boys before he leaves, securing support from the bewildered team until he discloses he is being forced out because of his unacceptable and at time illegal methods.
Early on in the investigation they discover that one of the boys died in a road accident along a stretch of motorway and they suspect he had been held somewhere within a two mile radius having accessed the motorway at junction points because of the gradient either side. Most of the area is owned by a farmer but the pub was purchased at auction 1978 purchased by a Henry Holmes who Sue Johnson immediately realises is the killer because it is the name of a convicted serial killer in the United States about 50 years before. An investigation of the site reveals the bodies of the street boys and an early appearance of the Assistant Chief Constable to offer his congratulations and support and the offer to appoint Trevor in charge of solving the case for as long as it takes. Given that the site is in the area of another police force the visit of the ACC and his direct involvement is unusual and therefore a big clue, one which Trevor and his team do not immediately pick up.
The boy who died in the road accident in 1982 had only disappeared two weeks before and according to Sue Johnston the psychopathic control freak of a killer would have become angered and frustrated by the escape and premature death and would need to immediately find a replacement victim. This leads to a review of Met records from that time. This results in a report of an incident involving the attempted kidnap of a street boy and that as a constable, the ACC was one of two police who investigated the incident. Moreover the vehicle involved is same colour and make as seen by a local farmer at the pub when visiting to report a farm vehicle had broken down and access to the main road would not be possible until a repair had been completed. Eve understandably wants to know why the ACC omitted to mention this before and did not pursue the case at the time especially when the witness died shortly afterwards without making an official statement.
The next breakthrough is the discovering of a bullet used to kill one of the boys and this is of the same weapon used to kill a retired police officer, the officer who was in charge of the shortly to be father beaten to death by him and the two other policemen. The team visit the house which is occupied by the man’s son who does a runner, because of majurana plants in an outhouse.
The Det Inspector formerly of the anti Terrorism force and now attached to the unit reveals to Sheila and then to Eve that she may have caused his retirement because of saying to her former boss that she had thought him unfit because of the risks he placed Sheila in. Eve is outraged. She had admitted her likely involvement in his demise because she was summoned to see the ACC who attempts to blackmail her into spying on Eve for him, especially about the unsolved killing of the policeman, or he will reveal to Eve her report about his suitability.
In order to regain the confidence of Eve she keeps watch and follows the ACC who goes for a meeting with someone but she is spotted observing, so the ACC manages to get in her car with a gun before she can escape. However she deposits a surveillance device in the car.
The son of the murdered policeman reveals when put under pressure that his father admitted to him he had killed someone in custody and this leads to the discovery of who the man was and that his then unborn son became the ACC. It is then discovered that the man who took him in after the death of his mother was a notorious known criminal who somehow managed to evade capture and conviction despite strong evidence against him on a number of matters. The two other policemen involved in the killing also died, allegedly by criminals, although this was so we later can assume it was by the foster father of the ACC on information from him. We learn that the foster father gave the boy gun to shoot the officer who had killed his father about the age of seven years but he had then finished of the man as the frightened boy was a poor shot who had then wet himself.
We learn that when the ACC had gone to the assistance of the attempted kidnap of the Street boy in 1982, he had immediately recognised the kidnapper as his foster brother and arranged for him to knock him down so he could escape. The foster father had then bought a farm in Africa for his killer son which explained why the kidnaps had ended.
The car of the missing Detective is found in a crusher which the forensic specialist investigates in secret discovering samples of blood. The ACC appoints two of his staff to investigate the case of the missing detective whose body is found in the garden shed of Eve after he is found not to be cooperating with the ACC in a proposed deal and cover up.
What seals the fate of the ACC is that finding that the FBI had been called in to help the police in the African country when the son had become a farmer after 50 African boys had gone missing over a period of time. The son had then been killed in yet another unsolved crime. It is then found that the ACC had made a short visit to the African country at the time of the death. Eve reveals this information to the man’s foster father who has him killed. Eve, Sue the Forensic officer and the other member of the team meet up under Waterloo Bridge to make the closure of the case and the series. Underpinning this episode is the loss of Eve‘s son, a drug addict street boy whose father son difficulties and whose murder was covered in an earlier series. Another chapter closes.
I missed the first episode of the new series of Lewis, the Oxford based Detective investigations which continued after the death of the actor who played Morse, the work of Colin Dexter and where episodes are continuously played on one station or another since its untimely end in 2000, having runs annually from 1987 to 1993 with specials from 1995- 33 two hour shows with adverts, 90 minutes in actual length, which I have come to know by heart as most feature my beloved Oxford city and county. His Assistant Kevin Whately took over the key role together with an academic former theology student played by the upper class public school Lawrence Fox.
The first episode has connections with the last episode of waking the Dead because the murder occurs at the last all female college in Oxford which has just voted to admit men for the first time. The murder occurs at a special meal and social gathering at which a number of former graduates return. The occasion is also designed to mark the move of a Professor to the USA. She is an internationally know feminist and celibate who invites the brightest and best to share her home.
The case has difficult echoes for Kevin who several years ago had commenced the investigation of an assault on a young visitor, the sister of a student at the college who remains in a coma since the event. He had left the enquiry after his wife had been killed and it was taken over by another officer with the help of the then female assistant to Whately.
As with Waking the Dead I worked out the villain -the Professor on her way to America. The motive for the murder is related to her evangelical feminism and the student son of an exceptionally wealthy family who before his disappearance was notorious for approaching every female within his immediate orbit for sex.
What emerged is that he had affairs not only with several of the bright ones taken under the wing of the Professor, played by Juliet Stevenson, but also with her and at the party attended by the 15 year old sister of an undergraduate, he had set his sights on the new arrival. The Professor had killed the young man and later disposed of his body in a farm building at the former USAF base at Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire. She had knocked out the young visitor to prevent identifying disclosure and the girl had developed a coma from which she had not recovered.
Kevin had retained a feeling that although it was established that the young girl had been attacked by the young man before his disappearance there was something more about the case that he had been unable to unravel before personal tragedy had led to his further direct involvement. He visits the girl in hospital and meets her sister who visits every morning before work and afterwards most days talking to her, hoping that she will recover. He also makes contact with his former partner who now runs a small boat yard and I sensed that she was somehow involved beyond her immediate failure to remember the case until reminded by Whateley. Later when there is a further murder at the college she visits him to enquire about progress, to go out with him for a drink, to ask why he had never approached her sexually when they were partners, to give him a good night kiss and to say she would like to see him again. She is then found murdered too.
The police then find in her office the kind of crime analysis board used in Waking the Dead as if she has been re examining the original case herself. It is established that she had started to blackmail the Professor although if it was clear in the film how she was able to do this I cannot now remember. There are other aspects which I do not remember the links although two of the female members of the group had their lives significantly adversely affected by one of the others who reported back ground information in such a way that it led to the break of a marriage and loss of direct care of her children in one case and to being passed over for an important promotion in another. What is understood is that his present assistant knowing that his boss had an issue about the original case at the college staying up all night, piercing together all the photographs that were taken and held by the investigating police in a time line which eventually leads to a query about the owner of one of the costumes. Fortunately, and amazingly, some will say, the girl comes out of the coma and when she begins to regain her strength she is hypnotised in order to remember the events of the that night and what she says adds to the certainty that the owner/hirer of a particular costume caused the injury. It may be my lack of immediate memory or that my mind wondered to the young woman who I had know at one of the then all female colleges and to other aspects of my time at Ruskin and in Oxford that this is a far from satisfactory note on the episode. Although it remains available to be viewed again it is not something I now wish to use time doing. Oddly rather than disappear to the Sates the professor goes to where she hid body and then dousing herself in petrol, burns herself to death.
The second episode of what I suspect is also a last series of four programmes proved more satisfying, possible because it communicated more of the flavour of the Oxford College city that I remember although also like the Midsummer Murder series there are just too many bodies too frequently for the series to have the kind of integrity of Wallander, or the first Morse based on published novels.
The crime in the second episode is the murder by drinking poisoned wine of a visiting Female Bishop from the USA attending a conference at a small college “Christian” teaching college called St Gerard’s, funded by an aristocratic Italian woman played by Sian Phillips and her daughter who is having a passionate affair with a college servant.
The major red herring issue of this episode is the election by the college Fellows of a new head. For some reason never explained although the college is for the teaching and training of Friars and is a traditional Christian establishment two of the four contenders for the position of the retiring head who hash plans to open and run a facility in Italy, are women, who have gained positions with the college. Moreover one has an extraordinary past in that as a child she left people to die in a burning property without raising the alarm. She had been convicted and sentenced to youth custody and given a new identity and is now in an ongoing relationship with a former criminal who has become a successful detective story writer to whom she has not revealed her past which I find unlikely in the particular circumstances.
The cause of the subsequent deaths and the near death of what proves to be the successful candidate in the election is that the college servant is in fact a close relative of family who died in the fire and has been plotting revenge for years. The murdered bishop was a mistake because he had left the poisoned wine for a room rather than a person and the hotel had switched rooms before the arrival of the two guests. The intended victim was the retired policeman in the original case that had come to Oxford although I cannot remember why.
The second red herring was the only other survivor of the four was an arch traditionalist opposed to females having any role in the church. However his sin was to steal bottles of the special vintage wine available only to those resident in the college and to sell to a third party. While the who dun it aspect of this series is always a consideration of greater and lasting significance in the series has been the relationships and truths about relationships and life in general. In this episode Kevin has noted the adverts for early retirement and voluntary redundancy and his sergeant has also noted his interest.
Kevin explains that he is about to become a granddad and his daughter has suggested he moves to their area (if not with them) and he is tempted. His first reaction is to assume the sergeant is considering his prospects as a consequence but the response is to say that if Kevin goes he might also because he is unlikely to find someone else who understands him. For the sergeant this episode raises his past as having entered a seminary to become a priest/vicar but then leaving for reasons he has never disclosed to Kevin. He is offered a post at the college by one of the other candidates who do not survive. The future of both men is uncertain which partly why I suspect that the 19th and 20th episodes will be the last of Lewis. Lewis was far crying from Morse with a reverse relationship Morse the intellectual versus Kevin the Geordie so that it became Kevin ad Kevin with Laurence the cultured thinker. The two worked well together but the Oxford setting could not mask the roughness of some of the stories.
It was then I could not find the A A credit card last used yesterday afternoon when buying the two pairs of trousers and by mid afternoon I decided it was lost rather than mislaid and cancelled so a second replacement within a month is required with the added problem that I will have to advise the change in card number to the Olympic ticket bid. To day I discovered the card inside the pocket diary but it was too late to change and had to be cut up.
Yesterday there was also a quick return home for the arrival of he boiling servicing although in fact it was after 11.30 one and half hours into the two hour slot and then a brief stay of under 15 mins but it has been done for another year. I then found my day phone that had dropped to the floor in the car and I could settled for the day after a good lunch of a cut of steak and the rest of the tinned and tomatoes and beans from yesterday.
Today after the swim I also made a quick visit to Morrison’s for milk, select your own salad and a kipper topped and tailed. There were two in the pool on arrival and then a couple from the hotel so I sat out read the paper and my current book. After the breakfast I got ready for the dentist who has become a young Polish woman after the previous dentist left for Yorkshire. I needed another appointment for a filling replacement but this has to wait until after a return from holiday. I then went for two more pairs of trousers and decided to park at Asda when someone gave me a paid for ticket.
This meant that I could boy five pounds of food for four pounds. I found the latest location of end of sell by date counter and found two more quiche marked down from £1 to 74p excellent, purchased some strawberries and one other item which I cannot immediately recall. It was midday and then time for food, ah I remember, it was two Thai Fish cakes, already consumed with a compote of vegetables.
Yesterday I was not in the mood to begin Oranges and Sunshine and New Lives for Old- The Story of Britain’s child migration watched the recording of the first episode of the new series of Lewis. Later I watched the second part of the last episode of the last series of Waking the Dead. I have watched one awful film, Wanted, together with Crimson Tide.
I guessed that the Assistant Police Commissioner was a baddie early on in the last episode of Waking the Dead but not the extent of his infamy. A Soho frequenting pregnant prostitute has her aggressively drunk boyfriend picked up by police but he is then beaten to death in cells by a couple of young “beat” police in 1960’s with the help of the duty custody officer who they had visited for a quick drink on New Year‘s Eve.
About seven years or so later the boy becomes an orphan having previously taken the money from punters for his mother using accommodation provided by a Soho based gangster who has taken a shine to boy and then brings him as his own together with his natural son of a similar age.
About a decade and a half later the natural son uses money obtained from his father to buy a closed public house in countryside where he takes central London street boys to torture and terrorise before shooting 16 of them in the head at roughly three month intervals. He has been drawn to his prey by the son of the prostitute who has entered the police force and talks about the number of street children and that no one will miss them. This is not so because a kindly Vicar of a parish in the area has expressed repeated concern to the police over the number of youngsters he befriended and supported and who suddenly disappeared. This disappearance had been investigated by Trevor Eve as his first case on appointment to the Cold Case Unit without success.
At the start of the last two part episode, Waterloo, Trevor Eve is told that he can either retire or take up a training post with promotion. In his anger Trevor decides to reopen the investigation of the missing street boys before he leaves, securing support from the bewildered team until he discloses he is being forced out because of his unacceptable and at time illegal methods.
Early on in the investigation they discover that one of the boys died in a road accident along a stretch of motorway and they suspect he had been held somewhere within a two mile radius having accessed the motorway at junction points because of the gradient either side. Most of the area is owned by a farmer but the pub was purchased at auction 1978 purchased by a Henry Holmes who Sue Johnson immediately realises is the killer because it is the name of a convicted serial killer in the United States about 50 years before. An investigation of the site reveals the bodies of the street boys and an early appearance of the Assistant Chief Constable to offer his congratulations and support and the offer to appoint Trevor in charge of solving the case for as long as it takes. Given that the site is in the area of another police force the visit of the ACC and his direct involvement is unusual and therefore a big clue, one which Trevor and his team do not immediately pick up.
The boy who died in the road accident in 1982 had only disappeared two weeks before and according to Sue Johnston the psychopathic control freak of a killer would have become angered and frustrated by the escape and premature death and would need to immediately find a replacement victim. This leads to a review of Met records from that time. This results in a report of an incident involving the attempted kidnap of a street boy and that as a constable, the ACC was one of two police who investigated the incident. Moreover the vehicle involved is same colour and make as seen by a local farmer at the pub when visiting to report a farm vehicle had broken down and access to the main road would not be possible until a repair had been completed. Eve understandably wants to know why the ACC omitted to mention this before and did not pursue the case at the time especially when the witness died shortly afterwards without making an official statement.
The next breakthrough is the discovering of a bullet used to kill one of the boys and this is of the same weapon used to kill a retired police officer, the officer who was in charge of the shortly to be father beaten to death by him and the two other policemen. The team visit the house which is occupied by the man’s son who does a runner, because of majurana plants in an outhouse.
The Det Inspector formerly of the anti Terrorism force and now attached to the unit reveals to Sheila and then to Eve that she may have caused his retirement because of saying to her former boss that she had thought him unfit because of the risks he placed Sheila in. Eve is outraged. She had admitted her likely involvement in his demise because she was summoned to see the ACC who attempts to blackmail her into spying on Eve for him, especially about the unsolved killing of the policeman, or he will reveal to Eve her report about his suitability.
In order to regain the confidence of Eve she keeps watch and follows the ACC who goes for a meeting with someone but she is spotted observing, so the ACC manages to get in her car with a gun before she can escape. However she deposits a surveillance device in the car.
The son of the murdered policeman reveals when put under pressure that his father admitted to him he had killed someone in custody and this leads to the discovery of who the man was and that his then unborn son became the ACC. It is then discovered that the man who took him in after the death of his mother was a notorious known criminal who somehow managed to evade capture and conviction despite strong evidence against him on a number of matters. The two other policemen involved in the killing also died, allegedly by criminals, although this was so we later can assume it was by the foster father of the ACC on information from him. We learn that the foster father gave the boy gun to shoot the officer who had killed his father about the age of seven years but he had then finished of the man as the frightened boy was a poor shot who had then wet himself.
We learn that when the ACC had gone to the assistance of the attempted kidnap of the Street boy in 1982, he had immediately recognised the kidnapper as his foster brother and arranged for him to knock him down so he could escape. The foster father had then bought a farm in Africa for his killer son which explained why the kidnaps had ended.
The car of the missing Detective is found in a crusher which the forensic specialist investigates in secret discovering samples of blood. The ACC appoints two of his staff to investigate the case of the missing detective whose body is found in the garden shed of Eve after he is found not to be cooperating with the ACC in a proposed deal and cover up.
What seals the fate of the ACC is that finding that the FBI had been called in to help the police in the African country when the son had become a farmer after 50 African boys had gone missing over a period of time. The son had then been killed in yet another unsolved crime. It is then found that the ACC had made a short visit to the African country at the time of the death. Eve reveals this information to the man’s foster father who has him killed. Eve, Sue the Forensic officer and the other member of the team meet up under Waterloo Bridge to make the closure of the case and the series. Underpinning this episode is the loss of Eve‘s son, a drug addict street boy whose father son difficulties and whose murder was covered in an earlier series. Another chapter closes.
I missed the first episode of the new series of Lewis, the Oxford based Detective investigations which continued after the death of the actor who played Morse, the work of Colin Dexter and where episodes are continuously played on one station or another since its untimely end in 2000, having runs annually from 1987 to 1993 with specials from 1995- 33 two hour shows with adverts, 90 minutes in actual length, which I have come to know by heart as most feature my beloved Oxford city and county. His Assistant Kevin Whately took over the key role together with an academic former theology student played by the upper class public school Lawrence Fox.
The first episode has connections with the last episode of waking the Dead because the murder occurs at the last all female college in Oxford which has just voted to admit men for the first time. The murder occurs at a special meal and social gathering at which a number of former graduates return. The occasion is also designed to mark the move of a Professor to the USA. She is an internationally know feminist and celibate who invites the brightest and best to share her home.
The case has difficult echoes for Kevin who several years ago had commenced the investigation of an assault on a young visitor, the sister of a student at the college who remains in a coma since the event. He had left the enquiry after his wife had been killed and it was taken over by another officer with the help of the then female assistant to Whately.
As with Waking the Dead I worked out the villain -the Professor on her way to America. The motive for the murder is related to her evangelical feminism and the student son of an exceptionally wealthy family who before his disappearance was notorious for approaching every female within his immediate orbit for sex.
What emerged is that he had affairs not only with several of the bright ones taken under the wing of the Professor, played by Juliet Stevenson, but also with her and at the party attended by the 15 year old sister of an undergraduate, he had set his sights on the new arrival. The Professor had killed the young man and later disposed of his body in a farm building at the former USAF base at Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire. She had knocked out the young visitor to prevent identifying disclosure and the girl had developed a coma from which she had not recovered.
Kevin had retained a feeling that although it was established that the young girl had been attacked by the young man before his disappearance there was something more about the case that he had been unable to unravel before personal tragedy had led to his further direct involvement. He visits the girl in hospital and meets her sister who visits every morning before work and afterwards most days talking to her, hoping that she will recover. He also makes contact with his former partner who now runs a small boat yard and I sensed that she was somehow involved beyond her immediate failure to remember the case until reminded by Whateley. Later when there is a further murder at the college she visits him to enquire about progress, to go out with him for a drink, to ask why he had never approached her sexually when they were partners, to give him a good night kiss and to say she would like to see him again. She is then found murdered too.
The police then find in her office the kind of crime analysis board used in Waking the Dead as if she has been re examining the original case herself. It is established that she had started to blackmail the Professor although if it was clear in the film how she was able to do this I cannot now remember. There are other aspects which I do not remember the links although two of the female members of the group had their lives significantly adversely affected by one of the others who reported back ground information in such a way that it led to the break of a marriage and loss of direct care of her children in one case and to being passed over for an important promotion in another. What is understood is that his present assistant knowing that his boss had an issue about the original case at the college staying up all night, piercing together all the photographs that were taken and held by the investigating police in a time line which eventually leads to a query about the owner of one of the costumes. Fortunately, and amazingly, some will say, the girl comes out of the coma and when she begins to regain her strength she is hypnotised in order to remember the events of the that night and what she says adds to the certainty that the owner/hirer of a particular costume caused the injury. It may be my lack of immediate memory or that my mind wondered to the young woman who I had know at one of the then all female colleges and to other aspects of my time at Ruskin and in Oxford that this is a far from satisfactory note on the episode. Although it remains available to be viewed again it is not something I now wish to use time doing. Oddly rather than disappear to the Sates the professor goes to where she hid body and then dousing herself in petrol, burns herself to death.
The second episode of what I suspect is also a last series of four programmes proved more satisfying, possible because it communicated more of the flavour of the Oxford College city that I remember although also like the Midsummer Murder series there are just too many bodies too frequently for the series to have the kind of integrity of Wallander, or the first Morse based on published novels.
The crime in the second episode is the murder by drinking poisoned wine of a visiting Female Bishop from the USA attending a conference at a small college “Christian” teaching college called St Gerard’s, funded by an aristocratic Italian woman played by Sian Phillips and her daughter who is having a passionate affair with a college servant.
The major red herring issue of this episode is the election by the college Fellows of a new head. For some reason never explained although the college is for the teaching and training of Friars and is a traditional Christian establishment two of the four contenders for the position of the retiring head who hash plans to open and run a facility in Italy, are women, who have gained positions with the college. Moreover one has an extraordinary past in that as a child she left people to die in a burning property without raising the alarm. She had been convicted and sentenced to youth custody and given a new identity and is now in an ongoing relationship with a former criminal who has become a successful detective story writer to whom she has not revealed her past which I find unlikely in the particular circumstances.
The cause of the subsequent deaths and the near death of what proves to be the successful candidate in the election is that the college servant is in fact a close relative of family who died in the fire and has been plotting revenge for years. The murdered bishop was a mistake because he had left the poisoned wine for a room rather than a person and the hotel had switched rooms before the arrival of the two guests. The intended victim was the retired policeman in the original case that had come to Oxford although I cannot remember why.
The second red herring was the only other survivor of the four was an arch traditionalist opposed to females having any role in the church. However his sin was to steal bottles of the special vintage wine available only to those resident in the college and to sell to a third party. While the who dun it aspect of this series is always a consideration of greater and lasting significance in the series has been the relationships and truths about relationships and life in general. In this episode Kevin has noted the adverts for early retirement and voluntary redundancy and his sergeant has also noted his interest.
Kevin explains that he is about to become a granddad and his daughter has suggested he moves to their area (if not with them) and he is tempted. His first reaction is to assume the sergeant is considering his prospects as a consequence but the response is to say that if Kevin goes he might also because he is unlikely to find someone else who understands him. For the sergeant this episode raises his past as having entered a seminary to become a priest/vicar but then leaving for reasons he has never disclosed to Kevin. He is offered a post at the college by one of the other candidates who do not survive. The future of both men is uncertain which partly why I suspect that the 19th and 20th episodes will be the last of Lewis. Lewis was far crying from Morse with a reverse relationship Morse the intellectual versus Kevin the Geordie so that it became Kevin ad Kevin with Laurence the cultured thinker. The two worked well together but the Oxford setting could not mask the roughness of some of the stories.
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