Bones and Silence

Three strands run through this episode, and the film keeps them apart for most of its length. Dalziel witnesses a death by gunshot from his own house, looking into a neighbour's. A woman is shot in the face, and two men are present: her husband, Philip Swain, and her lover, Greg Waterson. Both insist they were trying to stop her killing herself and that the gun went off in the struggle. Dalziel is certain he saw Swain holding the gun and certain it was murder, while Pascoe is less certain because Dalziel had been drinking. Waterson absconds.

The second strand is a mystery play. A theatre director, Eileen Anstiss, is staging a community production in the cathedral and casts Dalziel as God. She casts Philip Swain, Dalziel's suspect, as Lucifer. The two men are in rehearsal together while one of them is the subject of the other's investigation. The third strand is a series of unsigned letters Dalziel receives from a woman who says she is contemplating suicide. He does not take them seriously and passes them to Pascoe, who does.

The investigation establishes that the woman Dalziel saw shot was not Mrs Swain but a drug addict known to Waterson. Mrs Swain had been killed ten days before the shooting, and her body had been buried underneath the new car park being built for the police department, designed by Waterson and built by Swain's construction firm. Two bodies are recovered from beneath the concrete. Swain maintains that his wife's death was an accident, but he is caught in a lie about where her body had been kept, and that lie convicts him of the second killing. The staged suicide in front of Dalziel was a cover for the earlier murder. On the letters, Ellie Pascoe works out that Eileen Anstiss is the writer, and Pascoe cannot prevent her from jumping to her death during the play's dress rehearsal. No source consulted states the motive for the killing of Mrs Swain, the method beyond the fact of the earlier killing and the burial, or the legal outcome for Swain.

The episode adapts the eleventh novel and is Alan Plater's third and last script for the series, after the first two episodes of Series 1. Two changes from the book are documented. The director of the play is renamed and recast: in the novel she is Eileen Chung, staging the York Mystery Plays, and on screen she is Eileen Anstiss, played by Josette Simon, with the casting of Dalziel as God and Swain as the Devil surviving intact. The stage of the murder also changes, because in Hill's book Dalziel sees the shooting through his kitchen window and the plot proceeds from his evidence at the scene, while the television opens on him almost witnessing a shooting that two men say was a suicide attempt. The shape of the deception, a real killing concealed behind a staged suicide attempt, is the novel's.

Michael Kitchen plays Swain, the suspect Dalziel is certain of and cannot convict, and the casting does a large share of the work the plot needs, because the audience has to accept both a man who could stage his wife's killing and a man who plausibly was trying to save her. Warren Clarke carries the episode's central problem: Dalziel's certainty rests on what he saw while drunk, and the series puts his judgement on trial rather than his evidence. Wield is beaten up by a group of local homophobes during the investigation, a separate thread rather than part of the Swain case.

The theatre strand is a moral frame rather than a puzzle: the staging puts the man who judges opposite the man he is judging, which states the episode's argument about the limits of a policeman's certainty. The letters carry the harder theme. A woman tells Dalziel she intends to kill herself and asks nothing of him. He treats the correspondence as an imposition and Pascoe treats it as a duty, and neither course saves her, because the man who took it seriously is the one present when she dies. Of the four Series 3 stories, this is the one in which the failure is Pascoe's.