For Love Nor Money

The retirement party of Detective Superintendent Donald Fitzgerald is held at the start of the episode. Dalziel is in a bad temper because Fitzgerald has just lost a court case against Danny Macer, a local criminal and a long-standing adversary of Dalziel's, who was acquitted of the murder of the informant Ted Barnes. Macer turns up at the party. Fitzgerald leaves, returns home and tells his wife he is leaving her, then goes out again taking a new golf club he was given as a retirement present.

The next morning Fitzgerald is found dead on the driving range of the Bishop Hinton golf course. He has been battered about the head and three golf balls have been pushed into his mouth. The killing repeats the circumstances of the murder of Ted Barnes, the informant Macer was cleared of killing, and Dalziel treats Macer as responsible. The team looks into Fitzgerald's private life and finds an affair with the physiotherapist Rachel Waller. Dalziel pushes after Macer regardless, and his health is visibly failing. He is then knocked down by a hit-and-run driver. Pascoe tells Assistant Chief Constable Stella Applegarth that Dalziel is not well enough to work, and she takes him off the case and sends him back on sick leave.

Pascoe takes over the investigation. He finds a key on Fitzgerald leading to a bank deposit box holding a hundred thousand pounds in cash, which suggests that Dalziel's suspicions about Fitzgerald were not wrong, though perhaps not for the reason he thought. Rachel Waller, the woman Fitzgerald had been seeing, is then murdered. An unsuspecting local man is burgled after picking up a piece of evidence without knowing what it was, and working back from that, Pascoe concludes that the trail leads to Detective Constable Dean Sheldon, a junior officer on the team, who had been with Fitzgerald's daughter Christine on the night Fitzgerald died.

Sheldon is the culprit named in the published synopsis, which then says that he goes on the rampage with a gun. No source consulted states what happens during that sequence, who is threatened or how it ends. Separately, the series' character list states that Applegarth's link to Danny Macer is that they were childhood sweethearts, and that Dalziel suspected her of being part of the pay-off which produced Macer's acquittal.

The episode is the fourth of Series 7 and the most structurally ambitious of the run, because it takes Dalziel off the case twice, once by illness and once by his own conduct, and leaves Pascoe to build a case that implicates a fellow officer and reaches into the senior ranks of the force. The bank deposit box is the turn the story depends on, since it means the man Dalziel was certain about was corrupt while the man he was certain had killed him was not, and Pascoe has to make that distinction without the certainty Dalziel works from.

Warren Clarke plays the failing health and the obsession together, and the hit-and-run is the point at which the series makes his condition a plot fact rather than a running note. Colin Buchanan's Pascoe is given the largest share of the investigation he has had in the run, and the episode is the first in which he is the one who has to decide what to do about a colleague. The final rampage is the one part of the ending the published record does not describe.