The Price of Fame

The episode opens with Dalziel already off the Penny Wilson case. Penny Wilson, a teenager, went to the chip shop and disappeared. Dalziel had arrested Roy Daynes on suspicion of abducting her and, during a formal interview that was recorded, grabbed him and refused to let go; Pascoe pulled him away and puts the duration at about a minute. The Assistant Chief Constable, Alex Lawrence, tells Pascoe that Dalziel's methods are outmoded. Daynes does not want a misconduct hearing, so none is held, but Dalziel is told to take leave and would be referred to the Occupational Health Unit on his return. He goes on a fortnight's enforced leave while Penny is still missing. Later the ACC tells Pascoe that Daynes's brief has said nothing and that the police will not charge him, on the grounds that there is no girl, no evidence and no conviction.

The second case is the death of Efrona Davis, an entertainer at Wayland Bay Holiday Village, found dead on the beach. She had become famous through the fly-on-the-wall documentary Wayland Bay Watch and had been the programme's People's Choice. The post-mortem establishes a depressed skull fracture sustained before death, bruising to the left cheek consistent with a blow, and water in the lungs, which means she was alive when she went into the water. A boat found half a mile down the coast yields nothing. She had arranged to meet Gavin Oldham, one of three young men staying at the village, after work, and Oldham has disappeared.

The detective chief inspector assigned as senior investigating officer, Derek Hawes, is preoccupied with a separate case, a two-million-pound diamond consignment hijacked from the courier Alan Turner, who has also disappeared. Pascoe and Milligan work the Efrona Davis killing, and Pascoe asks Lawrence to reinstate Dalziel as senior investigating officer in place of Hawes, arguing that Hawes does not want the job and that no other officer on the force has Dalziel's experience of murder investigation. Lawrence agrees on condition that Dalziel stays away from the Penny Wilson case entirely and that his methods are kept in check.

No source consulted states how the Efrona Davis killing resolves or who is responsible, and the Penny Wilson case is left open in the material available, with the missing girl and the man the police could not charge both unresolved. The episode is the second of Series 8 and its structure is a study in two failures running at once: a suspect who walks away because the interview was destroyed, and a murder investigation being run by a man whose attention is on something else.

The instalment's real subject is the terms on which Dalziel is allowed to work. He is brought back because nobody else can do the job, and the price is a set of conditions he does not accept and does not observe, which is the arrangement the series runs on from here. Colin Buchanan's Pascoe is the one who argues for him and the one who has to enforce the conditions, and the episode is careful to show that the argument Pascoe makes is correct while the position he is put in is impossible. The documentary strand gives the story a second kind of fame, since the dead woman was known to a television audience and the village she worked in understood her through a camera.