Walls of Silence

Alec Jordan, a seventeen-year-old music student who has just won a scholarship to the Royal Academy, is found dead in a lake. Dr Paul Ashurst's post-mortem finds a bruise on the right cheek, bruising on the chest consistent with attempted resuscitation, alcohol, and a large dose of the benzodiazepine tranquilliser flunitrazepam, the drug known on the street as roofies. Wield identifies the family, and the reason the case is loaded is that Alec's mother was killed ten years earlier when Dalziel's car struck her during a pursuit.

Dalziel gives Pascoe the account in one scene. He had been running the team breaking a security-van robbery, the robbers were caught, and he went after their getaway driver. Coming round a corner thirty yards behind the driver's car he hit the woman in the road. It was pitch black, he was in lawful pursuit, and she was not looking where she was going. No criminal charges followed and the police insurance paid the husband forty thousand pounds. The man he was chasing was never caught, and none of the others would identify him.

Brian Jordan, Alec's father, asks for Dalziel to be taken off the case, and Assistant Chief Constable Belinda Kennedy removes him. Dalziel keeps working it anyway, and much of the episode runs on that split, with Pascoe and Wield working the official inquiry under Pascoe's hand while Dalziel works his own line. Pascoe's inquiry looks at Alec's school. Suspicion falls on Alec's best friend, Sophie Caine, who is uncooperative, and the working assumption among the police is that Alec was gay. Dalziel carries out an unannounced search of the school, which produces Sophie's arrest for possession of cannabis and a press conference the following day about drugs in schools. The school excludes her and stands by its procedures.

Sophie then tells the headmaster, Ken Crowley, that Julian Beeson, a teacher, supplied her with the drug and made her pregnant. Crowley says the governors' procedures for investigating misconduct will be followed, and Beeson keeps his job for the moment. Sophie, who was in care for two years and was close to leaving for university, goes up on the roof of a tower block and jumps. Dalziel confronts Beeson, who resigns, and Dalziel tells him plainly that Sophie was pregnant with his child. At the school Wield finds a copy of Lives of the Composers inscribed to a young man who had given Alec something, which is how the drug supply inside the school is traced. The published record does not name Alec's killer or state the closing outcome, so the account here stops where the material stops.

The episode opens Series 6, which ran on Monday nights in late 2001 rather than the Saturday slots of the earlier runs. It is also the point at which the series puts Dalziel's own past at the centre of an investigation, because the case he is removed from is the one where his earlier conduct is the reason he cannot be seen to work it. The father's objection is not an obstacle to be overcome but a legitimate position, and Dalziel's decision to keep working anyway is the episode's moral problem rather than its solution.

Warren Clarke plays the removal as an insult he absorbs and then ignores, and the scene in which he gives Pascoe the account of the pursuit is the flattest, least defended piece of acting in the early series, which is what makes it work. Colin Buchanan's Pascoe is left running an inquiry whose main suspect has been taken off it by the ranking officer in the room, and the school strand gives him the episode's second failure: a girl excluded for drugs who then accuses a teacher and is dead within days.