Dead Meat: Part 2

The BBC's line for the second night is that Dalziel is determined to prove the missing Lord Harper is still alive and that Pascoe is convinced the tigers are hiding something. The Radio Times repeats Dalziel's determination, adds the question about the tigers, and tells readers to see the previous night's listing for the cast.

The published summaries agree on three things happening in this part. There is a second murder to solve, there is a suicide to explain, and Pascoe has a decision to make after Ellie gives him news, which follows from her arrival in Wetherton engaged to another man. The zoo inquiry closes around the estate's history and around the veterinary surgery.

Lord Tiger Harper, who disappeared after the killing of Billy Huddlestone at the house, is credited in the cast for this story, so the character appears in it rather than remaining a name in the back story. No published source states what is found of him or in what condition. Published sources describe this second night as resolving the second murder, explaining a suicide and giving the organ-transplant operation at the zoo's surgery its outcome, but they do not name the person responsible for Robin Challoner's death, do not state how the suicide fits, and do not describe the ending of the Harper strand beyond Dalziel's insistence that Harper is alive. Nothing has been reconstructed here to fill those gaps.

Ellie Pascoe's return is the personal strand, because she arrives in Wetherton engaged to another man and the news she gives Pascoe is one of the developments the published record notes without explaining. That strand is the reason this story matters in the run beyond its plot: it is the point at which the series revisits the marriage it ended after Series 5, and it does so inside a case about an estate inherited by a man's lover and a business run on people who have no papers.

The strongest thread in the second half is the one the BBC's own line names, which is the disagreement between the two detectives about what they are looking at, with Dalziel pursuing a missing man and Pascoe pursuing an animal. The episode is also the point at which the story's social material comes to the front, since the transplant operation depends on immigrants who were taken in a raid and are being offered papers in return for organs, and the horror of the operation is presented as an extension of the estate's ordinary business dealings rather than as a separate crime.