Foreign Bodies

The episode works four deaths that occur within hours of one another, in four different places, and presents them in this order. Claude Leon Fournier, a French art dealer in his forties, twice divorced and well off, is found dead at the foot of an embankment below a motorway bridge, with his car still up on the hard shoulder. Traffic police had a report at half past two in the morning of two cars stopped there, a Citroen and a modified hot rod, and by the time a patrol arrived only one car was left. He had been staying at the Royal Station Hotel in York. Pascoe and Wield take the case, because Dalziel is signed off sick and short of breath after his shooting and is about to go on holiday. This is the one death Wield is expected to handle alone.

Dalziel takes his holiday at the seaside and is met by a postcard from an old flame, Florence Stockton, who is staying locally. On a trip to Whitby, a coffin is washed ashore at the spot where, in the local Dracula tradition, the vampire is said to have landed. It contains the embalmed body of a well-dressed elderly man, and the name on the coffin is Mattu Ionescu. The local detective, DI Larkin, is on the scene with a television reporter. Florence, shown the body, says she has never seen the man before, and later, pressed by Dalziel, admits that Ionescu was her first husband, a Romanian who conducted at the Vienna State Opera.

The third death is a Japanese tourist. Tosio Kawabata is on an organised coach tour of Yorkshire with a party from Osaka, having joined the tour at York Minster rather than travelling with it from the start. He slipped away from the group at Haworth to walk to Top Withens, the farm said to have suggested Wuthering Heights, and is found stabbed on Haworth Moor. West Riding force handles the discovery, and the witnesses are tourists who have gone home to Japan. Dalziel tells Florence about the death and she admits she knew Kawabata too, having met him on a cruise. He was her third husband.

The fourth is a Stasi officer at the university. Pascoe has been asked by Assistant Chief Constable Rebecca Fenning to give police advice to Professor Barnaby Winkler, a War Studies academic who appears on television and is about to publish a book on the Cold War. Winkler says he has been approached and needs discreet protection, lectures Pascoe and Wield on the Stasi, tells them he worked on both sides of the Iron Curtain and says that what he is now is history. He burns papers in his garden and disappears, leaving his car near the sea, and a former Stasi officer, Jurgen Falke, is found in Winkler's office. The published record does not state how the four deaths connect or how the episode resolves them.

The construction is the point of the episode: four killings in four locations with four separate forces, placed side by side rather than braided, so the audience is asked to hold a pattern before any character does. The Florence material gives Dalziel a private line through a public case, and the running joke is that a seaside holiday produces a body in a coffin. The title is borrowed from a James Bond novel, and the Whitby setting plays on the Dracula association deliberately.

Warren Clarke's Dalziel is off duty for most of the episode and investigating anyway, which is the version of the character the later series uses most often: even on sick leave he is working a case, and the other three deaths arrive through him rather than through the station. Colin Buchanan's Pascoe is left with the York killing and a professor who may be a victim or may be someone else entirely. The episode is the second of the four consecutive Saturdays in Series 5 and follows the series' habit of pairing an unexplained death with a secret history, though here it does so four times over.