Time to Go

A drugs raid on a nightclub, the Tribal Pulse in Wetherton, opens the story. Dalziel and Pascoe press the club's management while an eighteen-year-old, Zachary Graham, known as Zack, is taken to hospital in a coma after collapsing in the toilets. His friend was found with him, and a haversack of amphetamines was left behind when a man fled. The club's manager, known as Snake, insists the place is clean and that the drugs were found outside.

The owners are twins, Nicholas and Sophie Richmond, who tell Dalziel they have no parents, only Uncle Henry, their guardian angel. Uncle Henry Richmond is a wealthy man with a whisky habit whom they later describe as the money behind the club. Snake runs it day to day, and two men, Tony and Zack, have been working to take it over. The hospital findings turn the case. Zack's toxic screen shows MDMA plus traces of potassium cyanide and a large dose of nutmeg essence. A bad batch would have produced other casualties, so the tab was made for Zack alone. He dies after his parents consent to the withdrawal of life support.

Zack's father runs a pharmacy. He tells Wield that his son came home a few months earlier, low and in trouble, stealing methadone and suchlike from the shop, owing money to people he called bad people who, Zack said, would cut him up. Pascoe puts it to the parents that Zack was dealing. Their son's friend Derek Erskine, known to everyone as ET, becomes the pivot of the case: he and Zack were partners in a plan to take over the club, he was photographed with Sophie in a suggestive pose, and Zack had the photograph and was going to use it as the club's new advertising image. ET claims he was only ever the one watching and warns Pascoe to watch out for Sophie.

Two burglaries follow. Zack's room is entered for the photograph, and the missing household keys are the means. Zack's father's shop is turned over, and under questioning he admits he robbed his own shop to keep supplying his son and that Tony threatened him afterwards. The raid on the club becomes a farce for the police and a trap for one man. Boris Waddell, a pastry chef, is caught with a stash of ecstasy planted in the hood of his jacket, enough to mark him as a dealer. Pascoe interviews him and then meets his mother, Mary Waddell, who is Dalziel's ex-wife. She and Dalziel were married when he was a sergeant, she left without warning, she has since married Alan Waddell, and she tells Dalziel to prove her son's innocence or release him.

Snake is then found dead in his office, suffocated with a cushion, with ecstasy tabs laid on each eyelid. The blond hair found on the sofa near the body points at Sophie Richmond. The published record does not state the charges or the outcome for Sophie or Henry, and does not settle the police position on whether Nicholas had anything to do with the manufacture, so the account here ends where the sources end. The dossier also notes a credit for Sarah-Jane Potts and Andrew Lee Potts, who play the twins and are in real life the sister and brother of those names, which is a casting point and not a plot one.

The episode is the third of Series 4. Its interest is the domestic reveal rather than the drug case: the appearance of Dalziel's ex-wife inside a murder inquiry gives the series its first sustained look at Dalziel's private history, and it arrives as a plot function rather than as backstory, because Mary Waddell's demand is for her son and the man she is making it of is the one who failed to stay married to her. The club setting places the story squarely in the late 1990s, with the twins as owners who are younger than their own business and an uncle behind both, and the raid that opens the episode becomes the least effective police action in it.