Exit Lines

The episode sets up two deaths of elderly men on the same evening and runs them as separate strands. Dalziel leaves a country house restaurant visibly drunk and is seen driving his own car away. On a country lane the car hits a cyclist, who dies. Dalziel's old friend Arnie Bancroft, a teetotal bookmaker, says that he was at the wheel. Neither Pascoe nor the chief constable is convinced by the account. The restaurant staff included a waitress, Karen Spillings, who saw Dalziel driving, and her testimony is what puts him under suspicion. He is suspended from duty pending an investigation into the drink-driving allegation.

With Dalziel suspended, Pascoe leads the investigation into the murder of an elderly ex-soldier, Robert Deeks, who is found dead in his bath with a number of his personal possessions missing. Pascoe's first line of inquiry is Deeks' grandson, a serving soldier. Deeks had given the boy five hundred pounds towards an engagement ring, which made the boy aware that his grandfather kept a substantial sum in the house. Karen Spillings is the grandson's fiancee. The grandson is not the killer, and the investigation moves on to one of the boy's soldier comrades, with Karen Spillings turning out to be the person who set the killing in motion. She is the character who links both halves of the episode, because she is both the waitress who places Dalziel at the wheel and the woman at the centre of the family around the murdered man, and she changes her account of the driving once she is offered something better. Pascoe's pursuit of Karen brings him close to derailing Dalziel's own investigation, with consequences for both men.

Dalziel's suspension is not what it appears. With Bancroft's help he is working semi-undercover, presenting himself as a bent copper in order to get inside a group of wealthy men running a heroin operation. Bancroft's only son died as a result of that operation, which is why Bancroft is involved and why his stated reason for driving the car is a cover. The cyclist's death was not part of the plan and was not caused deliberately, but it served the cover that Dalziel and Bancroft were building.

The episode runs the two strands separately rather than braiding them, so the audience is asked to accept a suspension of the series' central figure and then told the suspension is itself a performance. Pascoe, leading an investigation for the first time, is given the case with the least evidence and the most domestic pressure, and he reads his own colleague's conduct as that of a man who has finally gone too far. It is Stephen Lowe's adaptation of Hill's eighth novel, directed by Ross Devenish. The novel's Detective Constable Dennis Seymour and its retirement home The Towers appear in published synopses of the book but in no source describing the episode, so whether they were dropped or renamed is not established.

Warren Clarke plays the suspension as a man who has decided to be seen doing wrong, and the performance is the episode's main pleasure: Dalziel in disgrace is still entirely Dalziel, drinking less than he appears to and working harder than anyone thinks. Colin Buchanan's Pascoe is given the promotion that the previous story announced and immediately finds himself investigating his own superior, which is the most exposed position the series has put him in. Arnie Bancroft's loyalty, stated as a favour to an old friend and actually the payment of a debt over his son, is the episode's quietest piece of plot.

The BBC's own summary is the suspension and the drink-driving allegation, and the episode rests on the decision to make Dalziel the subject of an inquiry rather than its conductor. Having spent six films establishing that he can be trusted to be right about people, the series asks what happens when the paperwork says he is wrong.