Mens Sana

Harriet Vanstone, seventy-three, is found dead in a seaweed bath at a private health clinic by the nurse Maggie Hopcraft. Vanstone was staying at the clinic for a course of spa treatments, and Dr Allison Laurie, who attended her the day before, is willing to certify the cause of death as a heart attack. Dalziel is on a month's sick leave after the heart attack he suffered at the end of The Unwanted, so Pascoe runs the case. He is not satisfied with the certified cause of death, and he also becomes interested in Dr Laurie.

Bored at home and unable to return to work officially, Dalziel books himself a week at the same clinic to find out what is going on there. The Radio Times billing describes the arrangement as the two men using contrasting methods of investigating murderous events at a health clinic, which is a fair summary of the episode's structure: Pascoe works the case from outside while Dalziel is inside it as a guest, and neither of them can tell the other everything he knows.

The nurse who found the body is then found dead in what looks like suicide. A second killing follows, and Dalziel concludes that some of the people at the clinic are claiming to be someone they are not. Pascoe's own position becomes difficult, because the woman he has been seeing there turns out to be the prime suspect, and the episode asks whether he will let her go to avoid losing her. The strand the published synopsis singles out as the key is a death at the clinic two years before, to which all the current events are tied, and once that connection is made Dalziel takes charge of the investigation himself.

No published source consulted states the identity of the killer, the identity of the person the killer was impersonating, or the mechanism of either death, so the account here ends where the material does. What the sources establish is the shape of the solution: a false identity at the clinic, a second death, and a two-year-old death as the reason for the rest.

The episode is the second of Series 7 and the most unusual in the run for putting Dalziel and Pascoe in the same building without letting them work together. It is also the point at which the series gets the most use out of Dalziel's illness, because his being on sick leave is what licenses the hotel-style investigation and the concealment that goes with it. Pascoe's difficulty with the woman he has been seeing is the series' first sustained attempt to give him a private life after the end of his marriage, and it does not resolve well.

Warren Clarke plays a week at a spa as a man conducting a covert inquiry in a dressing gown, and the comedy of the setting sits against the seriousness of what he is finding. Colin Buchanan's Pascoe is running an inquiry in which his own judgement is compromised, and the episode is unusual in making the senior officer's certainty the reliable one. The impersonation at the centre of the plot is the kind of deception the series uses elsewhere, but here it is also a comment on the clinic itself, where nobody is quite what they present themselves as being.