A Game of Soldiers

Nancy D'Amato, a forty-two-year-old American tourist from Boston, comes to Thorpborough to trace her great-great-grandparents. In the churchyard she asks the gravedigger, Jake Hawkins, about Huntley graves, and he offers to show her the older plots. She is staying at the local hotel. Her body is found on the army training ground at Bulby Camp by privates out on an exercise run. She has been beaten and appears to have been drugged, and the passport in her bag identifies her.

Her husband Gus arrives from Boston. He is a homicide detective with Boston PD, and he identifies the body. He supplies the identifying detail Dalziel wants: a wedding ring set with three rubies, and two small Chinese tattoos on her lower back, which he describes as Taoist symbols. Dalziel refuses to let him sit in on the post-mortem on the grounds that he will be a witness. Nancy was seen drinking in the Axe and Sword with two privates from the nearby base, Frank Ellerby and Kevin Gillman. Gillman, nineteen, is found unconscious with a bullet wound to the head after being taken out on a night walk by his instructor, Sergeant Brian Skinner, and dies. The rifle's serial number matches an SA80 that had gone missing from an assault exercise, and the rifle belonged to Ellerby. Gillman had been drinking and was being processed for discharge by Skinner, who is shown bullying him. Ellerby is then found stabbed at Bulby Camp, a single wound to the left upper abdomen passing under the lower rib into the heart, consistent with a commando-knife stroke. Skinner is arrested and his billet searched. Hawkins is also arrested, questioned and released: he has previous convictions involving women, he lied about having seen Nancy, and Ellerby had fought with him and blamed him for Gillman's death.

The identification then breaks down. The blood group of the woman in the morgue is A, while Nancy's insurance documents say AB, and those documents have been altered. A photograph of the woman leaving the hotel is not Nancy at all: she is Mary Nicholl, a local prostitute whose maiden name was Huntley and who shares a name with the family Nancy was looking for. The published record states that the body turns out not to be Nancy's and that Nancy is alive, but does not state whether she is arrested on screen, so her position at the end is not recorded here.

The episode opens Series 8, which ran on Saturday nights in January 2004 and is the first series to use the two-part format for some of its stories. Its construction is a switchback rather than a puzzle, since the audience is given an identification and then told the identification was wrong, and the deaths of two soldiers and a gravedigger all follow from the first mistake. The camp setting gives the series an institution it has not used before, and the army material is presented as a closed world with its own loyalties and its own violence.

The strongest element is the husband, a fellow detective who cannot work the case and cannot leave it, and Dalziel's refusal to let him into the post-mortem is the professional boundary the episode is built around. The Huntley name is the hinge, because the woman the police were looking at and the woman who died shared a family name and nothing else, and the episode is at its most careful when it is dismantling its own first conclusion.