An Autumn Shroud

The third film opens with the wedding of Peter Pascoe and Ellie Soper, with Dalziel in attendance and not wholly at ease. Dalziel, at a loose end, takes a touring holiday on his own. The story then removes Pascoe and Wield from the screen for almost the whole running time.

Dalziel's hired car fails in a flooded country lane. He is offered help, a bath, dry clothes and a bed by Bonnie Fielding, the widow of Conrad Fielding, whose funeral he had passed earlier as a cortege travelling by boat on the river. Bonnie installs him at Lake House in Lincolnshire, and the next afternoon he is in her bed. The household is running out of money. Hereward Fielding, Conrad's father, is a poet of some reputation waiting to hear from the American-based Gumbelow Foundation, whose award carries a cheque for fifty thousand dollars. Bonnie has three children: Louise, colourless, by her first marriage to a man who died in an accident; Nigel, the youngest and the most fragile; and Bertie, Conrad's son born outside the marriage, whose behaviour toward everyone else in the house is calculated to offend. Bertie's film-maker friend Hank Uniff and Hank's sister Mavis are in residence, as is Charlie Tillotson, a friend of the family and an investor. The Fieldings are trying to restore their position by opening a medieval banqueting hall. Conrad had died up a ladder with an electric drill when the ladder slipped; the drill came down with him and was still running when he was found. The death was ruled an accident and the family claimed for life insurance on it.

Dalziel, suspicious by disposition and with time on his hands, begins to work the household with the help of the local police, whom he treats more gently than he treats Pascoe and Wield. What he is looking at turns out to be a large planned insurance fraud involving the whole family, Bonnie included. It becomes a murder case when Arthur Spinx, a claims adjuster, is found dead under the jetty, and again when Annie Greave, the housekeeper, disappears and is found strangled in Epping Forest. The suggestion on the police side is that Annie Greave had been selling information about the family's arrangements to the tax authorities.

Nigel Fielding had not run away. He had been hiding in Annie Greave's room, partly to avoid Dalziel and mainly because he had been sleeping with her since she arrived. He believed he loved her, and when she told him she was leaving, he lost control and killed her. The fraud is the family's; the killing is the youngest son's. The film's final revelation goes to Conrad's death rather than to the fraud. The insurance claim the family built on was sound in form and false in substance, because Conrad had died of a heart attack and not from the drill and the fall. The death the fraud was constructed around was not an accident at all, but it was also not a killing, so the whole scheme had nothing underneath it. Dalziel closes the trap in the open, at the medieval banqueting hall's first night, where he appears as Henry VIII. Peter and Ellie, back from honeymoon, attend as guests of the local bowls club, of which both Ellie's father and a local detective sergeant are members, with about seventeen minutes of the film left. Pascoe spends most of that as a foil and the rest as a silent witness while Dalziel, having given Bonnie every chance to come clean, brings the family down.

Malcolm Bradbury wrote this one, his only script for the series. The novel is An April Shroud, retitled for a change of season. Pascoe is absent for about ninety-five per cent of the screen time, leaving Dalziel alone with the largest guest cast of the three films. The novel does the same thing, so this is an adaptation working as intended rather than a production decision. Francesca Annis plays Bonnie as the host who takes Dalziel in and the member of the family most completely inside the fraud, and the film uses her warmth as cover for it. Robin Bailey's Hereward is pompous, splenetic and talkative, kept as the film's comedy. It was shortlisted for an Edgar Award in 1997, the only Series 1 story recognised by an award body outside British television.