Heads You Lose: Part 2

The second night continues the inquiry into the body parts found in the lake and the disappearance of the nurse Leanne Proctor. The BBC's line for the episode is a question, whether a further death at the hospital will be passed off as natural causes, and the Radio Times repeats it and points readers back to the previous night's listing.

Two developments carry the case to its close. The first is the prime suspect, as Dalziel and Constable Lateef build a case against a man they believe murdered Leanne Proctor and attacked another nurse. The published synopsis records that Dalziel sets up a sting to catch him in the act, using the staff nurse Shannon Hayes, Pascoe's partner by this point in the story, as the bait. Convinced they have their man, Dalziel and Lateef then find CCTV footage which places him in Oldham at the time of the killing, and the case against him collapses.

The second is the prescribing. Shannon Hayes discovers that a withdrawn drug is still being prescribed to some epileptic patients, and that discovery is what identifies the person actually responsible. The synopsis states it directly: when Shannon discovers that a withdrawn drug is still being prescribed to some epileptic patients, the real culprit is revealed. The person responsible is therefore the one still prescribing the withdrawn drug to epileptic patients, and the deaths at Wetherton Royal Infirmary follow from that prescribing rather than from a serial attacker, which is why the earlier suspect's alibi was genuine and why the deaths could be passed off as natural causes. The published synopsis stops at the moment of the reveal and does not name the culprit or describe the arrest, so the identity of the person revealed is not stated in any source consulted. Shannon Hayes is killed in a car crash, which is recorded by the actor's own website, and that is the tragedy the previous night's episode was said to be leading towards.

The name of the drug, its clinical effect, the consequences for the hospital and for the officers are also not stated in the published material, and the episode's own dialogue is not available to this account, so nothing has been reconstructed to fill those gaps.

The two-part construction is used here to separate the false solution from the true one, since the first night builds the case against a suspect and the second dismantles it, which is a shape the series has used before but never across two whole nights. The sting is the episode's centre and its mistake, because the police commit the nurse who later solves the case to a plan that produces nothing, and the correct answer arrives through clinical knowledge rather than police work. Dalziel's certainty is wrong for the length of a whole episode, and the person who corrects it is the one who dies.