Above the Law

Mr Justice Jerry Chance is shot twice in the chest at close range in Churchtown Wood on a Sunday morning. He had walked half a mile from his house to buy a newspaper, as he did every Sunday, without his Special Branch escort because he did not like to bother them. Motorcycle tyre tracks show a rider turning and riding away, and there are no witnesses. The judge was presiding over the trial of Kenneth Barbour, a large-scale importer accused of bringing fifteen million pounds worth of street heroin into the country, and had received threats before the trial. The first assumption is a contract killing arranged from inside the drugs trade, and Barbour is the initial suspect.

Dalziel and Pascoe take the case against Assistant Chief Constable Rebecca Fenning's instruction that Dalziel work with Special Branch, an instruction he resists. Christina Chance, the widow, is a candidate at the top of her party's list for the European elections three weeks away, and her election agent, John Parker, is concerned about press statements and about her safety. The police find her husband's private arrangements difficult, because he kept a separate part of his life away from her. Dalziel asks her directly whether her husband had homosexual relationships, and she says he did, that they never discussed it, that she never met any of the men and that they preferred it that way. She has no names to give.

The investigation turns to Simon Wallis, a twenty-five-year-old man in Leeds whom the judge had been seeing on Saturdays. Barbour, in prison and looking for leverage, is the source of the name, which he trades for considerations, refusing to say more on the grounds that prison is dangerous for a man in his position. Wallis is found dead in his flat of a suspected overdose, and the post-mortem places his death thirty-six to forty-eight hours before the judge's, which collapses the first theory of a jealous lover. Dalziel's alternative is that Wallis was killed to close a line of inquiry and that the judge was the real target.

Wallis's laptop, left with the last company he contracted for, provides the link. Half his work was for Ransom Telecom, and his invoices were at two hundred pounds an hour where his other clients paid fifty, which over six months amounts to a hundred thousand pounds from one client. David Ransom owns Ransom Telecom, is worth around twenty-five million, is building a mobile telephone network and wants a share of the European market. His offices are in the same building as Christina Chance's campaign office, and Christina's friend and lover, Peter Deller, was Ransom's former business partner. No published summary consulted states the culprit, the motive or the closing scene, and the identity of the killer is not recorded here.

The episode is the third of Series 5 and its interest is the collision of a murder inquiry with an election campaign, which puts a deadline on the investigation that the police cannot control. The judge's concealed private life is the obstacle rather than the clue: the people who knew him best can say the least, and the one man who can name a suspect is trading the information from a prison cell. Fenning's instruction to involve Special Branch is the institutional pressure, and Dalziel's refusal to accept it is the same argument the series has run since the force began asking him to do things for reasons of appearance.

Warren Clarke plays Dalziel working a case whose victim he does not much like and whose widow he does, and the interviews with Christina are the episode's best material because both characters are deciding how much to say. The story also continues the series' examination of what a senior officer's private life does to an investigation when it becomes public, which is the same territory Series 3's Child's Play opened. The title is the one the story carries in the billing, and the body in the wood in the first two minutes establishes the case before a single line of dialogue establishes the detective.