Heads You Lose: Part 1

A local fisherman brings up a human foot. Police divers then find other body parts among illegally dumped medical waste in a lake near Wetherton. The waste is traced to Wetherton Royal Infirmary, and what began as a search for a missing person becomes a murder inquiry. Dalziel concentrates on a missing nurse, Leanne Proctor, who was last seen three days earlier by her flatmates.

Running alongside the murder inquiry, Pascoe is seriously hurt in a police chase and is left in a coma. The BBC's own synopsis describes this as a car crash, while Wikipedia's describes him as injured while pursuing a suspect through an underground maze of tunnels. Dalziel keeps a vigil at his bedside and, in the BBC's words, realises just how much his partner means to him. As a patient in the hospital's neurological ward, Pascoe becomes close to the staff nurse Shannon Hayes, and the account on the actor's own site says a relationship develops between them while he is her patient and that it ends in tragedy later in the story.

The hospital strand widens. Dalziel finds an uneasy relationship between Wetherton's leading hospital physician, Dr McKenzie Mansfield, and the neurology consultant Mr Alisdair Collison, along with political wrangling involving the local businessman Barry Jemmerson, who is the hospital's main source of funding. An aggregator synopsis adds that the hospital is under threat of closure, that staff have taken sides on the issue and that a local contractor hopes to profit by building a new private hospital, and those details are recorded as a reported claim rather than verified fact.

The Radio Times listing for the first night states the case in a single question, whether a serial killer is at large at Wetherton Royal Infirmary, and points the reader to the following night for the conclusion. As the first half, the episode ends without naming the person responsible, and the police work between the discovery of the body parts and the identification of a suspect is not described in any source consulted.

This opens Series 9, the first run in which every story is told across two nights, and the police work is divided between the hospital and the lake while Dalziel has a personal stake in the second of the two. The coma gives the series its first sustained stretch with Pascoe absent from the investigation, and the episode uses the absence to show what Dalziel does when the partner he argues with is the one in the bed. Warren Clarke plays the vigil as a man who has run out of things to say and stays anyway, and the relationship between the senior officer and the hospital's internal politics is the frame the first half leaves the second half to close.