Dead Meat: Part 1

The story opens with WPC Janet Jackson taking part in a raid on a Chinese warehouse packed with illegal immigrants. The BBC's Series 9 guide frames the raid as the beginning of the horror that follows, and Jackson has no idea what it will lead to.

The body of a man is found in the tiger enclosure of Latimer's Private Zoo. It looks as though the tigers have mauled him, but when Dalziel and Pascoe arrive they treat the death as suspicious, because the forensic findings at the scene do not match the injuries on the body. The dead man is identified as Robin Challoner, a fanatical animal rights activist with a particular grievance against the zoo's owner, Guy Latimer. He is identified by his mother, Jenny Challoner, who appears unmoved by her son's death.

The zoo and its hi-tech veterinary surgery stand in the grounds of a stately home that was once the scene of an infamous murder. The estate's owner, Lord Tiger Harper, disappeared after the killing of a local man, Billy Huddlestone, at a party at the house. He was never seen again and left the estate in Guy Latimer's care, and Latimer and Harper were lovers. The published synopses disagree about the date: Wikipedia says Harper disappeared more than twenty-five years earlier after being accused of murdering another local man at a dinner party, the BBC's Series 9 guide says the murder was in the Seventies, the BBC programme page for this episode says Harper disappeared twenty years ago, and one listing gives 1979. Dalziel remembers the case and has always believed Harper was in hiding nearby.

As the inquiry proceeds, a zookeeper disappears and the assistant vet, Maria Chan, is found dead, with one aggregator synopsis putting her in the zoo's swimming pool. Her death brings to light an illegal organ transplant operation running at night on the estate, using Chinese immigrants as donors in return for papers giving them the right to remain in the United Kingdom. The immigrants are the people taken in the warehouse raid with which the story opened.

No source consulted states who killed Robin Challoner or how the Harper question is answered, and the published record carries the story only as far as the discovery of the transplant operation, so the ending is not recorded here. This is the first half of the story, and the second night is dealt with separately.

The episode is the third of Series 9 and the most elaborate of the run, since it puts an animal-rights killing, a vanished aristocrat and an organ-trafficking operation in the same grounds. The zoo is the device that holds them together, because the state-of-the-art veterinary surgery provides the clinical facilities the transplant operation needs, and the animals give the killers a way of presenting a murder as an accident. The class material is unusually blunt for the series: the estate belongs to a man who has been missing for decades, the man left in charge of it was his lover, and the people being used are the ones taken in a raid at the beginning of the episode.

The strongest single idea is that the mauling is wrong on examination, which is the series' method stated plainly, since the detectives know the death is a murder before they know anything else about it. Guy Latimer is written as a man defending an inheritance he does not own against an activist who has a genuine grievance, and the episode is careful not to make either of them sympathetic.