Home Truths

The episode opens at a public meeting in Brierstown, called over the future of the Brierstown Project, a community project for local teenagers. Two men are attacking each other's record on it. Councillor Bobby Ghataura accuses Tommy Collingwood of funding the project in order to control it and of stirring up anger and fear, and Collingwood says the council has decided to close the project with immediate effect, blaming unfortunate recent incidents of violence provoked by Ghataura's allegations. Matthew Collingwood, Tommy's son and the project's founder, intervenes and is applauded. As the meeting breaks up, Bobby Ghataura tells his daughter Simran that he is sorry, and she tells him he got what he wanted.

Simran Ghataura is shot once, in the back, near the railway. The cause of death is a single bullet to the back. Dalziel and Pascoe are drawn in because the local divisional squad has no resources available. The local superintendent, Detective Superintendent Julie Devon, makes it clear she does not want them: she tells Dalziel his sell-by date is showing and calls him a country bumpkin. The episode's synopsis puts the arrangement plainly, describing the pair facing race riots, corruption and a bolshy city squad and uncovering a cocktail of political ambition and unrequited love.

The community is tense throughout. DC Novello drives through a riot and has her car window smashed, and Dalziel and Wield get her out. Pascoe works the family. Simran's brother Ravi is traditional and protective, had disapproved of the freedom her father allowed her, and had arranged for a cousin to drive her to and from college when she started. Matthew Collingwood, questioned, says he and Simran were lovers, kept secret because of the two fathers and their political war, and that Simran had told him Ravi would kill her if he found out about them.

A witness, Fiz, comes forward through PC Surgit Singh. He says he was walking by the canal at about half past nine, saw Matthew Collingwood behaving furtively, and watched him throw something long and thin, the shape of a shotgun, into the water. The weapon is recovered, and the lab matches its serial number to a rifle stolen from a gun shop in Bradford the previous week and confirms it as the murder weapon. Matthew Collingwood is arrested. The published record does not state how the case against him is resolved or who is finally held responsible, so the account here ends at the arrest.

The episode is the second of Series 6 and its subject is a police force arriving in a community that does not want it, in the middle of a racial and political argument that has already produced a killing. The local superintendent's hostility is the institutional obstacle rather than the crime: Devon does not want Dalziel there and tells him so, and the episode is at its most interesting when the two forces are working against each other in the same street. Pascoe's interviews with the family carry the emotional weight, because the killing sits inside a household whose men had already taken positions on what Simran was allowed to do, and Matthew's account of the affair turns the political argument into a private one.

Warren Clarke plays Dalziel arriving somewhere he is not wanted and refusing to leave, and his exchanges with Devon are the sharpest scenes in the episode. The racial material is handled through the rivalries of the two families rather than as comment, so the campaign against the project and the campaign over a daughter are the same argument at different addresses. The episode also gives Novello her first sustained fieldwork in a hostile crowd, which the series uses again later when the standing cast does more of the legwork.