'Mother Redcap' (BBC1, tx. 21/2/1998)

A High Court judge is placed under high security when he is threatened the day before he is due to pass sentence on five convicted gangsters. Two policemen are placed outside the bedroom of the judge and his wife. The following morning WPC Radnor rushes in when a crash is heard from the bedroom. The judge is found dead on the floor with a thin puncture wound in his heart. The windows are still barred and the only other person in the room is the judge's wife, who claims not to know how he died. No evidence is found except a torn fingernail.

Jason, an estate agent, contacts Maddy about investigating the strange happenings at the 'Mother Redcap' inn. Jonathan is picked up by the police at the request of Chief Inspector Speed, who asks him to help solve the judge's murder.

Jason recounts how decades earlier seven men all died at the inn after looking out of the first floor window. He takes Maddy to look inside the inn, where they find the dead body of a vagrant. The next day it is discovered that the fingernail recovered from the Judge's room belonged to the old woman found in the inn, although she died several days before the judge's murder.

During lunch Radnor tells Jonathan that her two brothers were also policemen and died in the line of duty. Maddy goes to see Jason at home and discovers that he belongs to a nudist colony. Jonathan and Maddy go to the 'Mother Redcap' and discover that the floor beneath the window is connected to an ingenious mechanism that kills people by electric shock. Jonathan realises that the judge was killed in the same way. His alarm clock was rigged to give him an electric shock by Radnor, who then stabbed him to divert suspicion. She had found the old woman at the inn a few days earlier and she had told Radnor about the electric shock mechanism. Radnor helped the woman break off a broken nail and left it in the judge's room by mistake. The judge was indirectly responsible for the death of her two brothers and she made a deal with the gangsters to kill him in return for the booby-trapped alarm clock. During a scuffle with Radnor, Chief Inspector Speed falls and dies. Jonathan makes sure that he is given posthumous credit for solving the case.