Dust Thou Art: Part 1

A student, Lisa Johnstone, is kidnapped in broad daylight. WPC Janet Jackson tries to intervene and is taken by the kidnappers as well. The Radio Times listing confirms the first half of that sequence as the night's hook, and the synopsis gives the kidnappers as two local thugs in balaclavas.

Two killings follow quickly. The music teacher Visha Iqbal, deputy director of the Wetherton Arts Centre, is found stabbed in a ditch, and a letter is sent to his wife setting out his affair with Lisa Johnstone, which is the reason the police take the affair as the motive until the bodies multiply. The art dealer Anna Wisley, whom Pascoe had helped after saving her from a hit-and-run, is then found murdered at the bottom of a ravine after her car was run off the road. A third body, that of the arts centre's manager Emma Collins, is pulled from a river. Lisa's parents, meanwhile, are trying to raise a ransom by liquidating assets and have not told the police.

Dalziel concludes that all three killings and the kidnapping are connected to the Wetherton Arts Centre, which is at that moment staging a production of Oliver. A scam involving forged seventeenth-century old master drawings comes to light, and the inquiry settles on jealousy and the forged-art business as its two threads.

No published source consulted describes the finding of Visha Iqbal's body, the forensic work on the ravine death, or the mechanics of the forgery scam beyond the fact of it. Two sources disagree about Anna Wisley's occupation, with Wikipedia calling her an art dealer and one aggregator calling her the head of a local museum and a rich woman, and that disagreement is recorded rather than resolved.

The episode is the fifth of Series 9 and the first half of the story with the strongest personal stake of the run, because the officer taken is one of Dalziel's own and the question of whether he is responsible for her disappearance is the one the second night is built on. The arts centre setting gives the series an institution it can use for both the forgery and the jealousy, since the drawings and the affair are both things people at the centre are trying to keep from being seen. The production of Oliver running while three of the centre's staff are killed is the kind of juxtaposition the series uses sparingly and gets a great deal from here.

The kidnapping of a police officer in the first minutes is the sharpest opening in the run, and the police response is complicated by the fact that a civilian was taken at the same time and the two cases cannot be worked as one. Pascoe's connection to Anna Wisley means the second murder is one he has a history with, which is the third thread tying the detectives to a case that is otherwise about an institution.