Under World

The discovery of a skeleton deep underground in a disused mine shaft brings Dalziel and Pascoe to a small Yorkshire coalfield community. The body is identified as the missing miner Billy Farr, and the BBC's own billing describes the case as unearthing a tale of deceit, revenge and past murder.

Farr's disappearance is tied to an older case. A seven-year-old girl went missing and was murdered at about the same time, and a serial killer who had confessed to killing five other girls was suspected at the time. The girl and Farr were friendly, and because the two vanished on the same day, some of the community held Farr responsible. The retired senior officer who had charge of the original inquiry closed it on the assumption that the missing miner was the killer. Farr's son Colin works in the mine and is taking a night class taught by Ellie Pascoe, who is teaching an adult course in English mining literature. He is angry, drinks heavily and has returned to the community to clear his father's name. He and Ellie become close, and the friendship moves to the edge of what a married woman's friendship can be.

A second body is found down the mine, that of a mining boss named Heppelthwaite. The police begin to close on a suspect, and Colin Farr, who has become one of their chief suspects, goes into hiding with Ellie's help. The case is forced into the open when a journalist, Monty Boyle, rules out the other suspect on the front page of a Sunday newspaper, which embarrasses the investigation. Pascoe establishes the motive for the killing of Billy Farr and moves to arrest the suspect. Colin Farr reaches him first. In the closing stages the police descend into the mine workings, Pascoe is injured and trapped underground, and the community's accumulated resentment breaks into violence.

No source consulted names Billy Farr's killer. The published record also stops short of the confrontation between Colin Farr and the suspect and of how Pascoe is brought out of the mine, so the account above ends where the material does.

The episode adapts Hill's 1988 novel, the tenth in the series, and is the only Dalziel and Pascoe story set in a coalfield community. The novel's setting is the fictional mining village of Burrthorpe a few years after the miners' strike, and the strike's aftermath and the community's distrust of the police are the book's organising material. The television billing places the story in a small Yorkshire community and describes the case rather than the setting, so whether the transmitted version keeps the village name, keeps the strike backdrop, or keeps the newspaper serialisation of the retired officer's memoirs that sets the novel's plot in motion is not established. The cast does include Neville Watmough, the retired senior officer of the novel, and Monty Boyle, the journalist, which suggests the memoirs strand survives in some form.

Ellie Pascoe carries a strand of her own here. She is credited in all four Series 3 stories, but this is the one in which she is given a plot that runs independently of her husband: her relationship with Colin Farr puts her between the loyalty she owes Pascoe and the support she gives a student, and she acts on the second loyalty when she helps Colin disappear. The conduct this puts Pascoe in the position of policing is the episode's sharpest domestic problem. Joe Duttine's Colin Farr is the performance the plot turns on, because the story needs him to be both plausibly capable of a killing and believably the wronged son of a wronged man.

Two investigations run together here, one present and one historical: the body in the shaft and the missing girl whose case was closed on the wrong man. They are connected by the same day, the same village and the same reputation. Without confirmation that the strike material survives, the theme available is the narrower one of a closed community protecting itself against the police and incomers, and a family carrying a suspicion it cannot clear. Series 3 was not one continuous run: this went out in March 1998 and the next new story did not follow until October.