Soft Touch

The episode opens with Dalziel being told by the people above him that he is to be moved out of operations to the Best Value Review Panel. He takes it as a desk job and a demotion, says less hours and regular work would kill him, and spends the story unable to sleep. He also makes a remark to the panel thanking them for the chance to air his views in public, and in the press, about the way the force is run.

An unidentified man is found drowned in the canal. The post-mortem shows he had been shot at some earlier point and had carried an AK-47 round lodged in his spine, and the odontologist's reading of his root canal work puts him as pre-glasnost Eastern European. Dalziel refuses to let it go, because the canal is only a short distance from the Matty's Shoes works, so the Russian connection is pursued. Richard Mattis, who owns the shoe factory, has just come back from Russia with an export order and a Russian fiancee, Natalia Chevlikin, who had gone out as his interpreter and who he announces at the factory as his future wife. He is found dead in his office. The post-mortem shows a shoemaker's clicker knife driven between two vertebrae and into the spinal cord: death was immediate, the tip of the blade snapped off in the bone and the handle was broken off, possibly in a struggle. The body had been moved from where he was attacked. Before the killing someone had poured acid over the family portrait at the factory, and the family read it as a warning.

Marion Mattis, Richard's ex-wife, and their three children are the centre of the story. Sam, the eldest, works in the business; Deborah is settled in it; Chris, the youngest, has gone, having given up his nightclub after running up a large debt and dropped out of sight. Chris called his father three times in the hour before Richard died and left messages. Marion says nothing to the police about the factory's past until Dalziel presses her. Four years before, an employee, Stevie Earle, was badly burned by acid at the factory, and that accident is the reason for the acid on the portrait.

No published summary consulted states the identity of the factory killer, the resolution of the bypass scheme or the identification of the body in the canal, so those outcomes are not recorded here. The published record carries the story to the point where the police are working two unexplained deaths connected by a factory and a four-year-old burn.

The episode is the last of Series 8 and the point at which the series makes Dalziel's position the subject rather than the background. He is being moved aside, he says so publicly, and the case he then works is one his superiors would rather he left alone, which is the same conflict the series has been running since the first series and states most plainly here. The historical injury at the factory gives the present killing its motive, and the acid on the portrait is the warning the family read correctly and did nothing about.

Warren Clarke plays the demotion as a man who cannot sleep and will not stop working, and the inability to sleep is the detail that makes the panel posting a punishment rather than a change of duty. Colin Buchanan's Pascoe is largely the professional conscience of the episode, holding the investigation to what can be proved while Dalziel pursues a Russian connection on the strength of a bullet and a dental examination. The episode is also the last in which the series uses the single-episode format for the whole run, since Series 9 onwards is built entirely of two-parters.