Houdini's Ghost - Part 2

The first part ended with the death of the private detective who took the photographs of Jason Chapman. This part opens on the second of the two locked-room deaths. Rob Miclean is found dead in virtually the same circumstances as his father, the room locked and the body arranged the same way. Pascoe, who had doubted the first suicide finding, doubts this one too. The post-mortem settles part of the question without settling the case, because Rob had an inoperable brain tumour and had only months to live. On that evidence Dalziel reads the death as suicide a second time. The BBC's own summary for the part states Dalziel's position as a subject rather than a solution, that he is crushed by betrayal when faced with the cover-up of mass murder.

Pascoe continues on the business line. Dalziel's former partner Bill Walker bought Miclean's firm, and the two men had built the apartment block Cherwell Tower together, which Pascoe's enquiries suggest holds a secret of its own. The BBC's Series 10 guide sets out what the two halves of the story are about, describing Pascoe uncovering a story of family ties, love, betrayal, cover-ups and radioactive waste while Dalziel is drawn further in by the woman he used to love. The Radio Times summary for the part gives the emotional shape rather than the mechanics, with Dalziel crushed by betrayal and his own naivety and turning to Pascoe, and asking whether he can still count on their friendship.

The betrayal that both the BBC and the Radio Times name is not identified in any published summary, and the closing resolution is not described there either to the extent that a writer could state the culprit, the motive and the mechanism with confidence. The documented material carries the story as far as a cover-up of deaths connected to the Cherwell Tower development, a cover-up in which Dalziel's private attachment to Kay Miclean leaves him exposed, and a case Dalziel has read as two suicides. Nothing is supplied here to close that.

The two nights are the most closely joined pair in the run, because the second is a direct continuation of the same two deaths and the same room. The radioactive waste strand is the reason the deaths matter beyond the family, since the apartment block was built over something and the men who built it are the men who profited. Dalziel's reading of the second death as suicide is the point at which the audience stops trusting him, and the story is arranged so that the character learns the same thing about himself at roughly the same moment.

The betrayal that the summaries name is the story's last turn and the published record does not say what it consists of, whether it is Kay's or Walker's or a part of his own history he had not examined. What the material does establish is that the case ends with Dalziel needing his partner, which is the inversion of the previous night, in which he had frozen Pascoe out.