Cunning Old Fox

Georgina Webster, a young businesswoman, is thrown from her horse during a meet of the Harlesden Hunt and dies. The death is recorded as an accident until James Marsham, the Master of the Hunt, receives an anonymous letter saying her death was a good thing. Marsham asks the police to investigate, and Assistant Chief Constable Rebecca Fenning puts Dalziel in charge over his objections. The body is exhumed and the post-mortem finds the horse was startled by a device in the hedge containing gunpowder.

The local hunt saboteurs come under scrutiny, in particular their organiser, Midge Cartwright, whom Dalziel questions about the day. Dalziel dislikes the hunting set more than the saboteurs and tells Midge that the hunt exists to keep lads like us down, but he has no sympathy for the activists either. Pascoe, who can see the arguments on the hunting side, is the counterweight, and Georgina's shareholding in a trust-run Equestrian Centre gives the investigation a financial line to follow.

Novello goes undercover among the hunting set. In the same period the huntsman, Robert Derringer, is killed at the Harlesden kennels, where he is fed to the hounds, and an attempt is made on Marsham's life at his stables, from which he is pulled by Birdyce, a hunt follower tolerated by the hunt but never admitted to it. Dalziel's temper gets the better of him in a pub confrontation with Marsham that turns on class: Marsham tells him that fox hunting is England and that Dalziel has hauled himself up through the ranks, and Dalziel tells Marsham he will see him at the station with his hangover. Fenning closes the investigation as a stupid and partisan thing to do, and Dalziel continues it informally, keeping Novello in place undercover.

Marsham's estranged daughter, Susie Hobbs, is one of the saboteurs, a fact her father concealed from the police. She tells them what she saw as a child: a hunt follower came out of the woods with a small boy, the horses charged and knocked the man down, he cracked his head and died later in hospital, and the hunt did not stop. The Master of Hounds that day was her own father, she was the only person who stopped, and the boy was left standing.

The killer is Henry Crayford, a member of the hunting set who is in fact Martin Hewitt, the small boy from that day. His father, John Hewitt, was the hunt follower killed by the hunt. Crayford had taken the identity of a boy whose family died in a sailing accident in the Mediterranean, a substitution the episode uncovers through a school and a retirement-community witness rather than through records. He had put the gunpowder in the hedge without knowing who would be on the horse, and when asked about Georgina he says he did not know it would be her and that life is a gamble. He killed Derringer and made the attempt on Marsham, and his motive is against the hunt as an institution: as Pascoe puts it, it was the hunt he was killing off, and Crayford agrees that they are all tarred with the same brush. Dalziel closes the episode with a fox, named Reynard, released in the town, telling it to come into town where it will be a lot safer. The last exchange between him and Pascoe is about servants and masters, prompted by Dalziel's reading of Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and his observation that the servant Dixon's death in the book gets only a couple of sentences.

The episode was written by Steve Attridge and Malcolm Bradbury from Hill's characters, with no corresponding novel. Hunting is the institution under examination and the episode makes both sides unattractive: the hunt is an inherited privilege defended by a man who cannot see it, and the saboteurs are a group with their own vanities. David Calder's Marsham is the guest performance the story turns on, and Adrian Rawlins plays Crayford as a man whose grievance has had decades to settle into method. Jo-Anne Stockham's Novello is given her first sustained undercover assignment, which is also the one she loses.