Great Escapes

Dalziel's car breaks down on the moors a mile short of a village on his way back from a charity do on the coast. He walks to the local inn and is taken in for the night by the landlord and landlady, Mike and Jess Pitman. In the bar that evening are Sally Craig, the barmaid; Tracy Pitman; the Pitmans' son Paul; and a party led by Keith Henshaw, who has interests in a greyhound track and in clubs in Leeds. The talk is of an escaped prisoner: Charlie Walker, serving time for the murder of his wife Kate seven years earlier, has got away from police custody while being moved. Kate Walker's body was never found, and Charlie and Kate's daughter, Nicki, lives at the inn with her grandparents.

The next morning Dalziel finds Sally Craig's body out on the moor. The post-mortem shows asphyxia and injuries made by large canines, and the animal bites were inflicted before she died, with the pathologist unable to separate the head injury from the mauling as the cause of death. She had also been sexually assaulted. Blood on her skirt is not hers. Something pulled the body out again after she was hidden, which means she was meant to be found.

A police search of the surrounding land finds a pit built for dogfighting, with chains and a tranquiliser. The scene is constructed so that the animals can wound each other without being able to overpower each other. Mike Pitman, Trevor Nesbitt, Paul Pitman and Frank Fyley are among those involved, and the dialogue has Mike complaining that the fights should have been stopped months earlier while Nesbitt answers that they had all done well out of it. A pattern on Sally's skirt matches material found at the pit, and she had found out about the fights.

Kate Walker's body is then found, frozen, having been kept in a freezer. She died of asphyxia from compression of the throat, aged twenty-eight, and the post-mortem gives mould around the nostrils and freezer burns and cannot say how long she had been frozen. Both women had struggled. The published synopsis does not state whether Charlie Walker killed his wife or was wrongly convicted, and the record does not describe the closing confrontation on the moor.

The episode is the third of Series 8 and the most contained of the run, since it takes place in one village and largely in one building and its detective arrives by accident. Its interest is the difference between the crime everyone is talking about and the crime nobody is, because the escaped prisoner dominates the conversation in the bar while the killing that actually happens is connected to the dogfighting pit on the moor behind the pub. The animal-cruelty material is treated plainly and is the darkest thing in the episode rather than a detail in it.

Warren Clarke plays a night in a country pub as the beginning of an investigation, and the pressure of the episode comes from the fact that he is a stranger taken in and then obliged to arrest the people who took him in. The frozen body is the single most disturbing image in the run to this point, and the detail that the first body was moved so it would be found is the part that turns a mauling into a message.