When Beyond Paradise’s Anne informed Humphrey that she’d been given a seat on the police and crime panel as part of her councillor duties, to say he wasn’t thrilled would be an understatement.
The DI was already feeling the heat after being ordered to lose a member of his team by the obnoxious Mr Smith from administrative planning, due to “unavoidable budget cuts”, and he certainly didn’t need his mother-in-law – now set to be “overseeing his activities” – making matters even more complicated.
“I do hope it won’t be a problem,” she added after making her big announcement, but the look on Humphrey’s face suggested otherwise.
Yet, in a glorious twist of fate, Anne’s intrusion into Humphrey’s work turned out to be exactly what he needed.
After Humphrey sacrificed himself so the rest of his team could remain intact, Anne’s spidey sense began tingling.
“Something didn’t ring true to me,” she said during an emergency meeting she convened with her son-in-law, Mr Smith and the powers that be.
Her suspicions deepened during a golfing day attended by Mr Smith, where she clocked him being overly friendly with a DI from another station – the only officer of that rank invited – prompting her to do some sleuthing of her own.
After finding herself in the records area of Shipton Abbott police station – by accident, of course – she learned that the budget for the previous year had actually registered an underspend (prompting real-life police personnel to laugh hysterically while bellowing: “In this economy?!”).
By contrast, council records showed that the other station had received an increase by the exact same amount that Shipton Abbott was being asked to lose.
Armed with that information, Anne hosted a dinner party under the guise of building bridges between Humphrey and his boss – when in fact it was all a ruse to access Mr Smith’s phone as part of her intelligence gathering.
After reading a number of flirty messages between Mr Smith and his mistress, Anne wasn’t in any doubt that his financial decision-making was being driven by something else entirely, before securing the piste de resistance: a photo of Mr Smith snogging his fancy woman during a surveillance operation with Martha and Kelby.
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“There’s a word for the use of public resources for personal gain, and that word is corruption,” mic-dropped Anne, before presenting the photo of Mr Smith – which quickly shut him up.
He promptly scurried from the room, his career (and most likely his marriage) in tatters, as Humphrey was reinstated in his rightful place after the station’s budget was restored.
Yes, it thankfully feels like we’ve seen the last of Mr Smith, but even so, watching him squirm, courtesy of Anne’s first-rate detective work, was even more satisfying than I could have imagined.
Now, onto the next big dilemma: who’s going to save Humphrey when Anne comes for his job?
Watch out, Goodman — there’s a new sleuth in town.
Beyond Paradise airs on BBC One and iPlayer.
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