A Killing Kindness

The episode opens with a serial strangler already at work. Three women have been killed in four weeks, and after each killing an anonymous caller telephones the local newspaper with a quotation from Hamlet. The press name him the Wetherton Choker. The first two victims, the widow Mary Dunwoodie, thirty-seven, and Jane Lansbury, seventeen, were strangled and laid out on their backs with their hands crossed on their chests. The third, and the one the episode follows from the start, is Brenda Sorby, an eighteen-year-old bank clerk. The opening traces Brenda's last afternoon: buying her own engagement ring, then going to the horse fair to meet her fiance, Tommy Maggs, whom she misses because his employer pulls him away to a burglary. Her body is found in the canal the following morning, and the canal disposal does not fit the pattern set by the first two killings, which the police notice.

Sergeant Wield visits Mrs Sorby and finds she has called in a gypsy clairvoyant, Rosetta Stanhope, to contact her daughter, and Rosetta describes Brenda's last moments. The local press gets hold of it and reports that the police have consulted a psychic because they are baffled, which angers Dalziel both at the publicity and at the idea. Dalziel then visits Rosetta and finds the body of her eighteen-year-old niece, Pauline, making her the fourth victim. The killing of a woman connected to the investigation rather than to the pattern is the turn the episode rests on. The horse fair has a gypsy camp attached, and Dalziel finds several of Brenda's missing effects there and settles on a suspect from the camp. He assaults the man during questioning, which destroys the case. Adi Pritchard, a radical solicitor and friend of Ellie Pascoe, clashes with Dalziel over the assault and his treatment of the gypsies.

Brenda's manager, Alistair Mulgan, is pointed at briefly. The more substantial false trail is Mark Wildgoose, a drama teacher at the local comprehensive who has been sleeping with sixth-form girls, one of whom becomes engaged to him and is killed almost immediately. His estranged wife Lorraine accuses him, and the connections that make him plausible are that this year's school play is Hamlet, that he had taught two of the victims, and that he knew Mary Dunwoodie. He is not the killer. Mary Dunwoodie is the victim who does not fit, being thirty-seven and a widow rather than a teenager. Her household is where the answer lies, and Pascoe finds it by going back to her former home.

The killer of the novel is Austin Greenall, a religious man who runs the local aero club. The clairvoyant names him early. He confesses to Pascoe, but the case against him is circumstantial and he is acquitted, after which he dies in a glider. The television adaptation keeps the book's course and withholds the revelation until very close to the end, closing with the killer bringing his own story to an end. Paul Goodwin is credited as Austin Greenall in the television cast list, which is the one piece of independent confirmation that the character survives the adaptation. No source consulted sets out the television arrest, trial or acquittal in explicit terms.

Malcolm Bradbury wrote the adaptation. Edward Bennett directs, replacing Gareth Davies from the season opener. What the adaptation changes is a matter of degree rather than structure. Crookall, who had read the novel, reports two reductions. The clairvoyance is dialled a long way down from the book, though it could not be removed entirely because the plot depends on it, and Adi Pritchard is much softened from the hardline radical of the novel. The identity of the killer and the withholding of the reveal follow the book.

Warren Clarke's Dalziel is at his least defensible here, beating a suspect badly enough to lose the case without the episode softening the consequence. The treatment of the gypsy camp is the most exposed material in the story: Dalziel's language about the travellers is openly hostile, the evidence he finds in the camp is real, and the assault is real too. That the suspect is innocent does not make his conduct a matter of judgement alone, because it costs him the case. This is the series' first serial-killer story, and the first time Dalziel damages an investigation rather than merely offending people.