Recalled to Life

The episode opens in 1963 at Westropp Hall, where a weekend house party is in progress. Pamela Westropp is found shot in the gun room, and the American nanny Cissy Kohler confesses to the killing and is convicted. In the present, a Home Office review accepts that Kohler's confession was obtained under duress and her conviction is unsafe. A television report notes she spent nearly twelve years in the psychiatric wing of Langton Prison and that evidence put before the court indicated she had been assaulted in the interrogation that produced the confession. Kohler is freed after thirty-five years. Dalziel's reaction to the news is that she is as guilty as hell.

Dalziel has a personal stake: he worked the original case as a young officer under Detective Superintendent Wally Tallantire, whose handling of it made his name and is now being reopened. Tallantire is retired, living in a care home and unable to feed himself since a stroke. Chief Constable Raymond puts a Deputy Chief Constable from London, Geoffrey Hiller, in charge of the inquiry, with Detective Inspector Stubbs assisting. Pascoe is told to liaise with Hiller and keep away from Dalziel, and Hiller tells Dalziel the case will end with Tallantire blamed and the file closed.

Dalziel does not stay out of it. He keeps a key he found in Westropp's jacket in 1963, the key to the gun room, and he is shown the file on the confession: three drafts of a confession in Tallantire's handwriting, each with Cissy Kohler's name at the top, the last matching the signed version delivered to the court word for word. Pascoe reads this as an officer drafting a confession and working on a prisoner until she signed it. Dalziel's answer is that Tallantire wanted to be sure she was not protecting anyone, and that the bruises on her neck came from dragging her out of a lake after she tried to drown herself. He also gives Pascoe the original scene: the gun fixed in a vice with a wire on the trigger, the door locked, the key on the floor by the body, the blood smeared on it, and Tallantire's conclusion that someone had slid the key back into the room after she had been bleeding for a while.

The second case is the death of Mavis Marsh, Pamela Westropp's friend and later Sir Thomas Partridge's mistress, who had been living beyond her means at a rent of a thousand pounds a week. Hiller's inquiry calls it murder, and the strand connects the present investigation to the same circle as the 1963 killing. Westropp dies in the course of it. The Chief Constable and Dalziel agree that the shooting of Fisher will be recorded as self defence on Westropp's account, and the Chief Constable observes that the story is hard to believe given Westropp had already died, asking Dalziel whether he is familiar with Lazarus. The published record does not state whether Cissy Kohler is charged, released or returned to prison, because the synopses consulted stop at the hunt for Westropp.

The episode is the second of Series 4 and adapts Hill's thirteenth novel, taking its title from Dickens. Its structure is a review rather than an investigation, which is the departure: the police are not looking for a culprit but deciding what to say about a thirty-five-year-old conviction, and the man with most to lose from the answer is the one who has spent his life believing in it. The gun-room reconstruction is the point at which Dalziel stops defending an old colleague and starts defending the thing he saw.

Warren Clarke carries the episode as a man refusing a conclusion he has been ordered to accept, and the personal cost is the story's engine: Dalziel was taught the job by Tallantire and is now being asked to let him carry the blame. Colin Buchanan's Pascoe is on the other side of the instruction, told to liaise and to keep away, and the episode is one of the few in which the two men are formally on opposite sides of an inquiry. The title is a return from the dead, and the episode uses it twice over.