Deadheads

Dick Elgood, the owner of a bathroom products firm, complains off the record to the police about one of his employees, the accountant Patrick Alderman, whom he suspects of trying to kill him. Elgood has recently had two accidents, a faulty desk lamp and a collapsing garage door, neither of which shows any sign of interference. What prompted the complaint is that Elgood remembers two earlier deaths at the company, both men dead and Alderman on the scene with his career advancing afterwards. Elgood is also Alderman's rival for the chief executive's job. He retracts the accusation soon after making it, and Dalziel, who knows him, hands the case to Pascoe almost as a courtesy.

Pascoe and Wield work backwards through Alderman's life. Every death connected with him is explicable as an accident or natural causes: an elderly relative, a colleague, a man who fell off a ladder. Each death benefited Alderman. None can be proved to have been caused by him, and several of them could not have been engineered by anyone. The episode's running argument is whether a sequence of coincidences that all point one way is evidence of anything. Patrick Alderman is in his early thirties, an accountant, quietly spoken, diligent and undemonstrative. He inherited the house and garden at Rosemont and spends his time on his roses, never without his pruning knife, and his habit is deadheading: cutting off spent blooms so that the young growth comes through. The television version keeps the horticultural material as the organising image.

Pascoe's wife Ellie gives Daphne Alderman a lift in the rain and the two become friends, despite Ellie's politics and Daphne's conservatism. The friendship complicates the investigation, because Pascoe is looking into Daphne's husband while his wife is confiding in his wife. The affair between Elgood and Daphne gives Elgood a motive for wanting Alderman out of the company that has nothing to do with murder.

The single death that looked deliberate, a man who fell from a ladder, turns out to be an accident after all, caused by the man discovering his wife in bed with Dick Elgood. That removes the only candidate for a killing and undercuts the whole pattern. A separate strand follows a gang of housebreakers, whom Cadet Sanjay Singh identifies and whose next target, Rosemont, he predicts. Singh is nearly killed stopping the robbery.

Dalziel and Pascoe conclude that there is no crime to charge, nothing but a run of improbable coincidences, and the investigation closes. Alderman is appointed Elgood's deputy. Ellie and Daphne remain friends, and Pascoe and Alderman become friends. Then Elgood dies. Alderman had been upset at how badly Elgood managed his garden and at his habit of leaving bags of insecticide where children could reach them. The bags are left on a windowsill above a water tank, and overnight gales blow one into the tank. Elgood, who swam every morning before showering, is found dead in his swimming pool, having tried to wash off the irritant. Alderman's career advances once more. The episode leaves the audience in no doubt about what it believes while leaving the story's evidence incapable of proving it.

This is Alan Plater's third script for the series, and the adaptation follows the novel closely. Crookall describes it as catching the flavour of the book and in particular the uncertainty as to whether there has been a crime at all, with a push towards belief that never confirms it. The novel's circular construction is kept: it opens with the boy Patrick being taught deadheading by his great-aunt and closes with the adult Patrick pruning in the same garden. The television version also keeps the ending in which he registers a rose he has created and named for his wife, the reveal that turns his coldness into devotion. Jonathan Cullen plays Alderman as a man with almost no surface, described by Crookall as somewhere between a cypher, a robot and a cold fish, and the part only works if the audience cannot read him. Melissa Knatchbull's Daphne and Susannah Corbett's Ellie carry the episode's warmth, and Crookall rates their friendship as the best thing in it: two characters with incompatible politics who like each other and tolerate the difference.