Houdini's Ghost - Part 1

Pal Miclean, a retired and wealthy entrepreneur, is found dead in the study of his former, now empty house. His face has been destroyed by a gunshot. The room was locked from the outside, and the summary material describes the weapon as operated by a string tied to his toe, the device that gives the story its locked-room problem. The available summaries differ on the weapon, one giving a shotgun and another a rifle, and that difference is recorded rather than resolved. Everything points to suicide, and Dalziel, who knew Miclean and is trying to stop smoking, takes the easy reading.

Dalziel was a close friend of the dead man and undertakes to spare the widow a scandal. Kay Miclean, the dead man's estranged wife, is the woman the episode's publicity calls Dalziel's one true love, and she and Dalziel had parted badly. She has been separated from her husband for five years and now runs a catering business. The policing decision and the personal one pull in opposite directions from the first scene, and the BBC's own summary for the part states the episode's shape plainly, that an old flame causes a rift between Dalziel and Pascoe.

Miclean's son Rob refuses the suicide finding and sets out to prove murder. He had an appointment with his father that morning, and he makes public his father's intention to change his will, which would have disinherited Kay and made another family share conditional on a divorce. The BBC's Series 10 guide gives the rift its cause inside the family, with Rob believing his father's death to be the work of his stepmother and prepared to go to any lengths to prove it. The same guide records how thin the case is: as the death toll rises, so do frustrations, and there are no suspects and no leads. Pascoe, kept at arm's length by Dalziel on the case, works instead on the business side and on Bill Walker, the contractor who bought Miclean's firm and who built the apartment block, Cherwell Tower, with him.

No published source consulted states the culprit, the motive or how the two locked-room deaths were achieved, and nothing is supplied here to fill that. The episode is the first of Series 10, which ran on consecutive nights in March 2006, and it is the story in which the series makes Dalziel's private life the subject of an investigation rather than a strand running beside one. The locked room and the string are the puzzle, but the case turns on Dalziel deciding what he wants to be true.

The personal material is the strongest the series has attempted, because the woman at the centre of it is one Dalziel had already lost and the family he is protecting is hers. Warren Clarke plays the easy reading as a decision rather than an error, which is what makes the second night's reversal land. Colin Buchanan's Pascoe is frozen out of the main inquiry and therefore works the development, which is where the story's actual crime sits, and the rift the BBC's summary names is a working disagreement before it is anything else.