Ruling Passion

The episode opens with Dalziel keeping Pascoe at work on a Friday evening and spoiling the Pascoes' planned weekend away. A series of burglaries of unoccupied houses has been running, with the thief taking small collectables: figurines, stamps, polished stones. The one clue Dalziel has is that the burglar urinated in the householder's kettle, which Pascoe calls micturating, a word Dalziel then repeats at his expense for the rest of the episode. The urine breaks the case, because the burglar is diabetic and passes water frequently. The burglary becomes a murder when an estate agent named Matthew Ryder is battered to death having interrupted him. The strand also runs through the antiques trade, through a Birkham shop where at least one stolen item has been resold, and through the diabetic dealer Jonathan Etherege.

Because Dalziel kept him late, Pascoe and his pregnant wife Ellie reach their friends' cottage in Thornton Lacey on Saturday morning instead of Friday evening. They find Rose Hopkins, Timmo Mansfield and Carlo dead from shotgun wounds, and the host, Colin Hopkins, missing. Superintendent Derek Backhouse of the local force runs the case. He treats Pascoe as a witness with useful local knowledge rather than as a fellow officer off his own patch, and Pascoe is left shuttling between two forces and two investigations. Colin Hopkins' body is later found in a scene arranged to suggest murder followed by suicide, with a note written out for the Pascoes. The note turns out to be a quotation from Alexander Pope, and Backhouse rejects the suicide reading as too neat. Pascoe discovers that Colin, a journalist, had written a book about middle-class poverty that exposed the private secrets of several village residents. One resident objected, took one of Colin's own clay pigeon shooting guns, and killed the three guests and Rose. The manuscript was burned. The two strands part company here: the Yorkshire killing is theft that went wrong, and the Oxfordshire killings are a private response to exposure. They are not connected.

Dalziel takes Ellie to lunch at Birkham partly to break the news of Pascoe's promotion to inspector before Pascoe tells her himself, and partly to warn her that her husband will only overtake him in the force if she leaves him alone to work. At the same lunch she recognises Anton Davenant, a journalist who has been appearing in Thornton Lacey as often as Pascoe has, under the alias Terrence Dick. Backhouse's investigation turns on the Thornton Lacey end of Davenant's reporting. Ellie gives birth to a daughter, named Rose after the murdered friend, and Dalziel, who all but abducts the child from her crib, is asked by Ellie to be her godfather.

The episode adapted Hill's third novel, which is why the series has to rearrange the characters' lives. Ruling Passion arrives second in transmission but third in publication order, after the novel in which the Pascoes married, so Peter and Ellie are already married and Ellie is heavily pregnant, whereas in the book they are a couple not yet married and Pascoe is still a sergeant. The novel stages three parallel crimes including a property swindle in Scotland, and the television version drops the Scottish strand. The book's two unconnected killers, both unpremeditated, are kept, so the strands meet only through Pascoe rather than through a shared culprit.

Warren Clarke carries the Yorkshire half as comedy, and the script gives him the running joke about Pascoe's vocabulary. The choice that matters in the Oxfordshire half is understatement: Pascoe is a witness who is also a detective, and Colin Buchanan plays the professional difficulty of being unable to do either job properly rather than the grief. Peter Blythe's Superintendent Backhouse is the guest performance the story turns on, written as a contrast to Dalziel, smoother and apparently more sympathetic but valuing Pascoe only as a witness. The episode also marks the start of the friendship between Ellie Pascoe and Dalziel, which the series uses later. Susannah Corbett's contribution is the Yorkshire side: Ellie identifies the burglar before Dalziel does, through the antiques shop, and the episode gives her that win rather than giving it to Pascoe.