A Sweeter Lazarus

Dalziel has been away from work for three months, recovering from gunshot wounds, and is on restricted duties. He returns to find Pascoe and a Drugs Squad operation running at a hostel for homeless people, where two homeless women have been murdered. An undercover officer, WDC Shaz Kendall, is inside the hostel. The suspect is Leon Pilger. He takes Kendall hostage on the roof of the building, Pascoe pursues him, and Pilger falls to his death.

Because Pascoe was in hot pursuit, his account of the fall depends on the only other witness, a young homeless woman who says her name is Abbie Hallingsworth. The Hallingsworth case is nineteen years old: Abbie was thirteen when she was abducted, the middle child of the brewing family, and her father Cyril could not raise the ransom because the brewery was failing. Her kidnapper, Gus Mullavey, killed her when he learned there would be no money, and he was convicted. Her body was never found. Dalziel worked the original investigation and remembers Mullavey's habit of playing games with the police: Mullavey offered a deal on the body's location, and the search party found a dead ram. If the coroner at Pilger's inquest decides the woman is a fantasist, her statement counts for nothing and Pascoe is exposed. Kendall, working the file, believes her, and Dalziel does not. His line to Pascoe is that the dead do not walk, not in Yorkshire.

Kendall invites the woman to stay at her house while she works back through the disappearance. The family is split. Martin Hallingsworth, the younger brother, accepts her. David Hallingsworth, who runs the brewery, does not, and his solicitor applies for an injunction to stop her repeating the claim pending a DNA test. At the brewery Martin drunkenly calls her Abbie, David arranges the test, and the woman agrees to take it. Dalziel meanwhile visits the dying Mullavey in the prison hospital, where the two exchange chess moves. The woman is positive about the test. Then Kendall comes home and finds her dead on the floor.

The investigation turns on David Hallingsworth first: photographs of his car less than a mile from the murder scene, a telephone call from the brewery to Kendall's house shortly before six, his clothes, and an answerphone tape taken out of the machine. David admits he was there but says she was already dead, and that he removed the tape because the caller was Martin, ranting. Under questioning he gives his real reason for resisting her return: as a young man he had counselled his father against paying the ransom. The published summaries do not describe how the case against him or anyone else is resolved, and the episode does not state it in the material available, so the ending is not recorded here.

The story opens Series 5, broadcast from July 2000 with all four episodes on consecutive Saturdays. It is the first appearance of Assistant Chief Constable Rebecca Fenning, who replaces Chief Constable Victor Raymond and who is described as the opposite of her predecessor because she allows Dalziel to bend rules and is not intimidated by seniority. It is also the only appearance of WDC Shaz Kendall. Dalziel's recovery is the series' way of resetting him: he is back at work, on restricted duties, with a temper undiminished and a body that has not caught up, and the case that finds him is one he closed nineteen years earlier.

Warren Clarke plays the return as a man who has been told to take it easy and has no intention of doing so. The episode's structural interest is the position it puts Pascoe in: his conduct is under scrutiny, the witness who could clear him is the one person Dalziel will not believe, and the series for once makes Dalziel's certainty a liability rather than an asset. Nicola Walker plays Abbie as a woman whose account cannot be checked and whose sincerity is not in question, which is exactly what makes her useless as a witness.