On Beulah Height

Two timelines run through this story. Fifteen years before it opens, the village of Dendale, in the valley under Beulah Height, was emptied and flooded to make a reservoir. Just before the water rose, eight-year-old Mary Wulfstan disappeared and was never found. Benny Lightfoot, a local man, was arrested over it and released for want of evidence; he then disappeared himself, and a younger girl, Betsy Allgood, was attacked and got away. The episode's own account of the earlier case is one missing girl and one attack on a child who escaped, where Hill's novel has three earlier missing girls.

The present-day case begins on a hot Sunday when Lorraine Dacre, eight years old, goes out onto Beulah Height with the family dog, Tig, and does not come back. Dalziel, straight from a barbecue at the Pascoes' in a loud shirt and shorts, takes over the search and tells the villagers the past has repeated itself. Graffiti reading Benny's Back stays legible on a shop window despite a man scrubbing at it, and several people report seeing someone who looks like Benny Lightfoot. Walter Wulfstan, Mary's father, tells Dalziel he too has seen the man, having gone back to Dendale for the first time to pick bilberries for his adopted daughter Elizabeth, where he saw a boy as thin as a rake who smiled and waved at him.

Pascoe's attention is split. His daughter Rosie is rushed to hospital with meningitis and falls into a coma. He reads her the local children's story of Nina and the Nix, and the story runs under the case: Rosie's dream is that the Nix has taken Nina, and the search parties do not find the girl. Dalziel works the old file. Geordie Turnbull, who drove a bulldozer when the dam was built and was questioned over Mary's disappearance at the time, is brought in after a child's shoe and a hair ribbon are found in his car. They turn out to belong to children he drives to football matches, forensics cannot match either to Lorraine, and Dalziel releases him with a warning. Wield traces Benny's mother, Agnes Lightfoot, to a nursing home. A white camper van is seen and traced.

The break comes from the dog. Tig leads Wield to a small den built into the hillside, where Lorraine's body has been left, and the post-mortem gives death from a blow to the head. The falling water level of the reservoir has also exposed the drowned village, and the search of the ruins reaches a cellar. A police diver goes down and recovers what is left of a man, identified as Benny Lightfoot by the metal plate in his skull. The man being sought is therefore not Benny but Bobby Slater, Benny's brother, back from Canada and drawn by the story that their grandmother had hidden money in a tin chest.

The episode adapts Hill's seventeenth novel and introduces Detective Constable Shirley Novello in the standing cast. Rosie's illness puts Pascoe's attention on his family while Dalziel's is on a village that believes its past has returned. The drowned village, brought back into view by the falling water, is the image the story is built on: a place and a crime surfacing at once, with the community reading the present through the old case and being wrong about what it sees.

Warren Clarke's Dalziel is in his element, holding a village that has already decided what has happened, and the sequence in which he takes over the search in holiday clothes establishes how quickly he moves from a guest at a barbecue to the man running an operation. Colin Buchanan's Pascoe is largely absent from the investigation at the start, and the split between the two men's priorities is the emotional structure of the story. The episode opens Series 4, the first run transmitted from June 1999, and it is one of the stories in which the series' habit of pairing a present killing with an older case is at its most complete, since here the old case is not a subplot but the reason the villagers already know who they are looking for.