Truth and Consequences

Thirksby is a former mining village with a disused colliery. A company is clearing the site for a hi-tech factory and the clearance is being opposed. The episode opens with a protest at the site, where a young woman is knocked into a trench and nearly killed. The mine is dug over and a body is found, identified as PC George Brierly, the undercover police officer who was sent into Thirksby during the miners' strike of 1984 to 1985 and who vanished with the strikers' fund, which the police believed had been taken by him. The paper record has Brierly leaving the area and going abroad.

Dalziel is sent back to Thirksby. He served there in the early 1980s and ran the original investigation. His sister, Harriet Clifford, lives in the village with her husband Stan Parry, and the two of them are estranged from him. Stan was a strike-breaker and is disliked for it. Stan had also, at the time, been alleging that somebody was siphoning strike funds, and his notes naming Brierly are found by his son Jeff Parry, who is going out with Emma Harvey. Jeff's mother is dead. Dalziel questions Stan, and the fact that Dalziel is known in the village to be a policeman who was there during the strike sets the whole investigation at an angle to the people it has to question.

The village hall is the entry point to the old inquiry. The relevant 1984 account is Sheila Harvey's: she left a women's meeting, went home to collect Ron's tea and then went to the village hall, where she found her husband unconscious. Pascoe and Novello check the statements against press photographs taken by the local paper's photographer on the night, which are held on file, and two anomalies emerge. A 999 call was logged just before midnight, but one of the four women Sheila was at the meeting with is photographed back on the picket line by quarter past ten. And Tom Bennett claimed he was on the picket line all night but is missing from two photographs taken between half past ten and half past eleven.

Tom Bennett is the man behind the site development. He is found dead in woodland with a knife wound to the side of the chest, four children on ecstasy find the body, and his Land Rover is in the woods car park a quarter of a mile away. The published record does not state who killed Bennett or how the Brierly strand resolves, and nothing is supplied here to bridge that. The episode is the last of Series 6 and the one that takes Dalziel back to the place and the year that shaped him, with the strike as the reason the village does not trust the police and the reason his own sister will not speak to him.

The photographic evidence is the episode's method and its best idea: the case is broken by comparing what people said in 1984 with what a local photographer's negatives show they were doing, which is an investigation into a record rather than into a suspect. Pascoe and Novello do that work while Dalziel is occupied with his family, and the division is deliberate, because the man with the local knowledge is the one who cannot use it without being seen to be settling an old score.

Warren Clarke plays the return as a man back among people who know exactly who he is, and the scenes with Harriet and Stan carry more weight than the murder. The episode is also the point at which the series states its debt to the strike years directly rather than as backdrop, and it is the clearest example in the run of a case whose solution is buried in a village's own account of itself.