Secrets of the Dead

The episode opens with Dalziel at the funeral of Fran Lock, Francesca Lock, an old friend and, many years earlier, someone he was close to. Her widower is Sergeant Ted Lock, the local desk sergeant, and her son is Detective Sergeant Mark Lock of Dalziel's own station. Pascoe is not in the country. He has flown to Florida to see his daughter Rosie and his ex-wife, arrives as they are leaving, drives six hundred miles to a connecting flight, and comes back having met Ellie's new partner. His account of the trip is that the business with Ellie no longer hurts and that the hurt is his daughter falling off a bike or waking in the night with someone else there.

The case is the murder of a local solicitor, David Brewer, found in his ransacked office, tied to his chair and bound with strips of his own shirt, severely beaten. A letter addressed to Dalziel is among Brewer's belongings and has already been opened. Wield hands it over unread. It is in Fran Lock's hand. In it she writes that she has kept something from him that he had a right to know, and that he has probably already guessed from the pictures, that Mark is his son. She goes on: Ted does not know, their relationship would not have worked because Dalziel did not want to marry her and Ted did, and she is telling him now partly because of the other letter, because her shame was used against her and she did something she regrets immensely. She asks him to use the information wisely.

At Ted Lock's request Dalziel makes Mark Lock acting DI in Pascoe's absence. Pascoe's return has not been expected. When Fran's name comes into the investigation, Dalziel takes Mark off the case. Wield links Brewer's death to a murder five years earlier, that of Paul Sutton, a private detective killed in similar circumstances, and Mark Lock had worked that case. Sutton had been hired by Valerie Silwood to investigate her husband, the GP Robert Silwood, over an affair with Fran Lock.

The Piper strand supplies the motive. Tom Piper, a butcher, and his wife Sarah lost their three-year-old daughter in Stanby in July 1996. The child had a severe attack, her inhaler did not work, and Silwood and Fran Lock attended. The episode is the third of Series 6 and the most tightly constructed of the four, because the murder investigation and the letter run on separate clocks and the letter is not evidence in any case the police are running. The published record does not state how the Brewer killing resolves or what Dalziel does with what he has been told, and nothing is supplied here to fill that.

Warren Clarke plays the funeral and the letter as the only two occasions in the series where Dalziel is entirely without a defence, and the sequence in which he reads what Fran wrote is the emotional centre of the run so far. The episode also marks the point at which the series gives Dalziel a private life with consequences rather than merely a history, because the son who does not know is a serving officer in his own station. Mark Lock's position is the episode's real subject, since he is handed a promotion on the strength of a request made by a man who has just been told he is the reason for it.

Colin Buchanan's Pascoe is largely absent from the first third, and his account of the Florida trip is the series telling the audience that the marriage is over in the plainest terms it has used, and that the loss he feels is his daughter's rather than his own.