... perhaps if you pursue all of the little crimes you run into some big ones, because that is what happens here. The film opens with a couple lying in bed. The woman gets up and by talking to herself you quickly learn that the guy in bed with her is her lover, not her husband, and may very likely belong to someone else. Her angry babbling wakes the man, of whom you never see much more than his hands and you do not hear his voice. Once he is awake, she tells him she is pregnant and that he should start spending whole nights with her, finally make the break completely to her. He quickly grabs her across the face, she screams, and the scene changes.
In Brighton a rental management company has been broken into, and the police are investigating. But other than the damage done to the door in the break-in, nothing has been taken but the company's book of leases. This makes no sense to the officer in charge, because if somebody wants to run out on their lease, why not leave town since breaking and entering is an even bigger crime? The owner of the rental company is unhappy with the way the investigation is run, and calls the detective's supervisor to complain. The supervisor asks inspector Fred Fellows (Jack Warner) to help out. Fellows starts by asking about the leases that were getting ready to expire, and drives out to the house where the lease was going to expire the next week. The police do find the house seemingly deserted. They look around, find nothing amiss but do find a trunk in the garage with a dismembered woman in it. Thus a breaking and entering case has just turned to murder.
The problem is, this house was rented by a man, the police have no idea what his right name is, they have no idea who the woman is, and they have no motive. Because it was such a short term lease nobody in the neighborhood knows anything about the tenants. So the detectives begin to methodically go through any clue they can think of. They find a woman's name and address scratched on a pad in the house. They have the testimony of a woman across the street about the only time she ever saw the man outside during the day - it was from a distance, and then he had a vacuum cleaner in his hands and was paying for groceries, and they have the tools that were used to dismember the woman that were found in the house's incinerator. That's it. From there the detectives go on to actually solve the crime. The closest comparison I can make is that it is like the first half of Law and Order transported to Britain from New York City, and it is truly fascinating. There are lots of dead ends, several interesting people that the police run into during their investigation, and always the press hounding them for a story.
I'd highly recommend this one.