Child's Play

Two stories in this episode run side by side and converge. At the funeral of Gwendoline Huby, a woman the Radio Times calls elderly and wealthy, a stranger interrupts the service. Alessandro Pontelli claims to be her son Alexander, missing in action in Italy in 1944. The family is not pleased. The other heirs are John Huby, who is bluff and hostile, and the hotelier Stephanie Windibanks, who is more philosophical. Windibanks believes Pontelli is genuine because she remembers a birthmark, while the family's former housekeeper, Ella Keech, says there was no birthmark. Before anyone can establish who he is, Pontelli is shot dead at the wheel of his car in the police station car park.

The second story concerns Wield's private life. A young man, Cliff Sharman, telephones and then visits Wield. He knows more about Wield's private life than he should, including the name of Wield's friend Maurice Eaton, and he threatens to expose Wield's sexuality unless Wield helps him trace his father, who disappeared some years earlier. The young man is talking about a newspaper expose of homosexual policemen. Wield is gay and has kept it from everyone. Sharman is then murdered, found dead beside the road, and Wield becomes a suspect in his death. The dead man turns out to be connected to the Huby dispute, which is how the two stories meet.

News of the threatened exposure reaches the top of the force. The Deputy Chief Constable, Raymond, wants the gay officer identified and removed, and Dalziel is put in the position of being asked to expose a colleague and a friend. Dalziel instead protects Wield. The published record states only that the police identify the killer and the rightful beneficiary of the money, and that the murdered young man has a link to the Huby family. It does not name Pontelli's killer or the legitimate heir, or describe how the Wield strand is left, so the account here stops where the record does.

The episode adapts Hill's ninth Dalziel and Pascoe novel under the novel's own title. It is the book in which Wield's homosexuality becomes a plot matter, and the television version follows it. When Wield tries to tell Dalziel, Dalziel answers that he had known since Wield's first day in CID and that Wield had fooled nobody, and the matter is not raised between them again. In the novel Wield is forced to admit his sexuality to Dalziel, who already knew, so this is one of the few places where the adaptation's change to a regular character follows the source material rather than departing from it.

The episode belongs to David Royle. Wield has been a supporting presence since Series 1, the sour one of the group with the good investigative eye, and this is the story that gives him something to lose. The plot against him comes from outside the force, through a young man who wants a favour, and from inside it, through a senior officer who wants him identified. The threat is aimed at the man and not at his work, so the pressure is on his private life rather than his detective ability. Warren Clarke's Dalziel is the second performance the strand turns on: his refusal to give Raymond the name separates Dalziel's professional conduct from the institution he represents, because he obstructs his own force to protect a colleague without argument or announcement. Margaret Tyzack, Bryan Pringle and Linda Marlowe carry the family dispute, and Jack Hedley's Pontelli holds the question of whether he is genuine for as long as the plot needs it.

The institutional theme is the one the episode states most clearly. A deputy chief constable treats a colleague's sexuality as a disciplinary matter and asks a superintendent to inform on him, so the problem is not the murder but what the force intends to do to one of its own. Dalziel's answer is the one the series gives throughout: the man he knows is not the man the paperwork describes. This is the only Series 3 story with no Ellie Pascoe, and the only one whose central problem is internal to the police force rather than a crime. Malcolm Tierney's DCC Raymond enters the standing cast here, and this is the episode in which the series makes one of its four principal characters gay in a way the audience is shown rather than told.