The Dig: Part 2

The BBC's line for the closing night is a question about reconciliation rather than about a killing: can the two detectives reconcile the road crew and the archaeologists. The Radio Times sets it down as the conclusion of the week's drama and directs readers to the previous night for the cast.

Three things are documented about this part. The death toll rises. Dalziel becomes convinced that Clive Jacobs, the man he put away and who has now been released, is his man again. And the identification of the unidentified body moves on, with the published synopsis recording that Lateef makes a breakthrough on it and the aggregator synopsis recording that a facial reconstruction has to be redone after the first attempt is stolen. The IMDb credit data supports the reconstruction strand, because the Part 2 record credits George Irving twice, once as Robin Blake and once as Stuart Mills.

The published sources do not state who killed Tarzan, who killed the person found in the dig, or how the bypass and the council and surveyor business are resolved. Wikipedia's story synopsis ends on Lateef's breakthrough on the unidentified body, which is the story's stated last development. The credited double identity, with Robin Blake and Stuart Mills both played by George Irving, is the only indication in the credits that the buried body and the councillor are connected, and that indication has not been confirmed by any source. Nothing has been reconstructed here to fill those gaps, so the ending of the case is not recorded in this account.

The story is the fourth of Series 9 and the one that puts the most pressure on Dalziel personally, since the suspect he is certain of is a man he convicted years earlier and released, and his certainty is therefore a statement about his own record as much as about the man in front of him. The road and the dig give the episode two institutions in conflict, a council and a university, with a network of corruption inside the first and a genuine historical interest in the second, and the wrecking of the site is the point at which the dispute stops being procedural.

The facial reconstruction is the detail that gives the second night its method, because the police are trying to put a face on a body buried in secret while the village is arguing about a road, and the theft of the first attempt is the kind of interference the episode uses to show that somebody at the site does not want the body identified. Pascoe works the corruption while Dalziel works the man he arrested, and the case is solved, so far as the record shows, by a junior officer examining a skull.