The Unwanted

Pascoe returns to his home town for the wedding of his school friend Sergeant Ian Henslowe to Jill Lowry, the daughter of the wealthy farmer Ted Lowry. Pascoe is best man, his parents Bill and Annie Pascoe are guests, and the marriage joins the two largest farming and land-owning families in the area. The reception is interrupted by the discovery of a body in the Lowry pig sheds. The dead man is Corporal Martin Wilkie, Ian's closest friend in the regiment, a loudmouth who insulted people, among them Pascoe's cousin Terry Pascoe.

Dalziel has just come from a hospital check-up on his heart and has not told anyone what the appointment was for. He arrives to investigate. The death happened in Pascoe's own home town, Pascoe knows most of the witnesses and one of the suspects, and Dalziel therefore takes him off the case and tells him to stay at his parents' house and pick up local gossip instead. Jill Lowry admits that she was having an affair with Wilkie and may be pregnant by him. Dalziel and Pascoe visit Wilkie's regiment and his home, and find the house ransacked and set on fire by an intruder.

Two further deaths follow, staged to look like a murder and a suicide: the bride and the bridegroom. A local man, Kemal Sulejvic, who had escaped an immigration raid, is also killed. Dalziel becomes interested in the group of illegal immigrant farm workers who were rounded up the night before the wedding and in the possibility that some were missed, with the Sulejvic family, Kemal, Naida and Emina, among that workforce. Pascoe's relationship with his father runs underneath the case, because Bill Pascoe resented his son's decision not to go into farming and the recent foot-and-mouth outbreak has left him reliant on Pascoe's cousin Terry for help on the farm.

The published synopsis states that Pascoe is forced to choose between his childhood crush and his father when the crush is revealed as the killer and the father becomes the next intended victim. Motive and method are not stated in any published source, and no connective detail is supplied here to bridge that.

The episode opens Series 7, which ran on Monday nights in the autumn of 2002 and is the first run in which the stories are almost all original to television rather than adapted from the novels. Its structure is the series' most domestic, because the investigation happens in the place Pascoe grew up and among people who have known him since childhood, and the professional cost is that he cannot work the case he is best placed to solve. The device of removing him is the same one the series used with Dalziel four episodes earlier in Walls of Silence, and the effect is to put both men outside the inquiry at the moment they are most needed in it.

Dalziel's hospital appointment is the other thread, and it is the first sign of the heart trouble that governs the next several stories. Warren Clarke plays the investigation as a man working at slightly less than full capacity and refusing to say so. The immigrant labour strand gives the story its social dimension, with a workforce rounded up the night before a wedding and a man killed who had escaped the raid, and the episode is unusual in the run for setting a case inside rural prosperity rather than among people who have none of it.