Sins of the Fathers

The paralysed daughter of the local farmers Sue and Jamie Blackstone is able to walk again after she is taken to a tree in Wetherton woods known locally as the healer. The village treats the recovery as a miracle and the case attracts publicity. An excavation at the tree, carried out to establish whether it is sound, uncovers the remains of a young girl who disappeared from a children's home more than forty years earlier.

Dalziel and Pascoe trace the manager of the home, Father Leonard Tibbings, a priest in the parish. What the investigation establishes is a systematic chain of abuse by Tibbings and his church. Children at the home were separated from their siblings, including identical twins, and put to unpaid work on farmland belonging to the church. A second strand runs alongside it. A young priest had been sent to the parish to look into the reported miracle, and he is murdered. Church records have also been stolen, and the missing records matter to the case. Father Tibbings had run the children's home until it was destroyed by fire.

While Pascoe tries to establish what happened to another girl who is missing, Dalziel's attention is taken up by his own family. In the village he runs into his sister, Harriet Clifford, whom he has not seen for years, and finds that she is dying of cancer. She is looking for a brother of whom Dalziel knew nothing, and she has news for him that the episode treats as the harder disclosure. No published source consulted states the identity of the killer of the young priest, the resolution of the missing-girl strand, or what happens to Father Tibbings, so those outcomes are not recorded here.

The episode is the third of Series 7 and the point at which the series returns to the family material it opened in Thirksby. Harriet's reappearance gives Dalziel the second of his two estrangements, after the sister in the mining village, and the episode pairs a public inquiry into institutional abuse with a private one into what his own family did and did not tell him. The miracle at the tree is the device that starts both: a genuine recovery that draws a priest to the parish, which is what exposes what happened at the home forty years before.

Warren Clarke plays the meeting with Harriet as a man being told things he has spent decades not asking about, and the family strand carries the episode's emotional weight more than the investigation does. Colin Buchanan's Pascoe works the missing girl and the stolen records, which is the part of the story that can be proved, while the part that matters to Dalziel is the part that cannot. The children's home material is the darkest subject the series has handled to this point, and it is treated as an institutional failure rather than as an isolated crime, with the separation of siblings and the unpaid farm labour as the detail that makes the scale of it clear.