Glory Days - Part 1

Wetherton Wanderers Football Club has just finished top of the Premiership, and the club's celebrations are cut short when the team coach is left standing on a level crossing and struck by a train. Three people die, among them the club manager, Martin Bendelow. The coach driver, Ben Hawkins, disappears from the scene, which is the first thing the investigating officers treat as suspicious. The Radio Times summary for the part states the case as a question about the man rather than the crash, asking who had it in for club manager Martin Bendelow.

The post-mortem changes the charge. The BBC's own guide describes what the pathologist's evidence does to the case, that his death is not all it appears to be when a post-mortem reveals the crash was no accident. The listings synopsis is more specific, recording that Bendelow was not killed by the impact but suffocated after the crash, once he had already been injured. That synopsis says strangled while Wikipedia says suffocated, and the difference is recorded rather than resolved. Either reading converts a fatal accident into a murder and places at least three other people on the coach in the frame.

Dalziel's attention goes to motive rather than opportunity. The published summary says the police learn there is more than one person with a motive for Martin's death, and that some rather surprising skeletons start tumbling out of his family's closet. The Bendelow family is the tight group the story works through, with Emily, Barry and Beth Bendelow and Kath Heaton among them, and the club men Ben Hawkins, Joe Waddington, Dave Redrup, Conor Avery, Juanito Torres and Kylie Johnson in the credited cast. The summaries do not assign roles to most of those characters. Press interest in Martin Bendelow runs alongside the police enquiry, and the journalist Naomi Chappell's connection to the story is one of the strands the second part takes up.

No source consulted names the killer or states the outcome of the case, so the ending is not recorded here. The episode is the third of Series 10 and the most overcrowded of the run, since it has a football club, a family, a crash and a press strand to carry in a single night. Its best idea is the post-mortem, because the case turns from an accident into a murder on the pathologist's evidence and every death afterwards follows from that single finding.

The club setting gives the series a world it has not used before, with a team at the top of its league and a manager dead before the celebrations are over. Warren Clarke plays the investigation as a man who has no interest in football and considerable interest in who profits from a death, and the episode's structure is the series' standard one for a two-parter, with the first night establishing the situation and the false readings and the second night providing the resolution.