Wrong Time, Wrong Place - Part 1

Dalziel and Pascoe travel to Amsterdam for a European police conference on people trafficking and prostitution, hosted by Detective Superintendent Wim de Kuiper of the Dutch police. The BBC's own one-line description of the part states the turn the story takes, that Dalziel's life is turned upside down when he becomes involved in a suspected murder. The published summaries describe local police meeting the visiting officers with undisguised irritation, and Dalziel's impatience with the conference is the story's starting point, with Wikipedia describing him as bored by de Kuiper's mumbo jumbo and the detailed listings synopsis saying the two men lose one another on the night of their arrival.

Dalziel skips the conference dinner and goes to a club. There he meets Tracey Baxter, a British singer from Yorkshire working in the city, and the two spend the evening seeing the city together before going back to her flat. He wakes the next morning with her body beside him. She has been killed by a cut to the throat, described in Wikipedia's synopsis as fourteen slashes. The listing synopsis adds that he had been drugged and remembers nothing of the killing, but that he does remember Tracey telling him a friend of hers had not turned up for a civil wedding that morning, which is where the second plot begins.

Dalziel becomes the prime suspect in a Dutch murder investigation. He is charged and then released on strict bail conditions, and the second part of the story is built on what he does next. The investigation he is excluded from carries on without him, with Pascoe working it alongside Constable Parvez Lateef and Constable Kim Spicer. The strands the part establishes, as the BBC's guide sets them out, are a missing young Muslim British woman, the murder of a Sheffield Wednesday supporter, illegal diamond dealing and police corruption. A second killing follows, with a body found floating in a canal.

No source consulted states how the case resolves, so the ending is not recorded here. The episode is the fifth of Series 10 and the strongest opening in the run, because it puts the senior detective in the position the series normally puts a suspect in, and it does so abroad, where he has no standing, no contacts and no authority. The night he cannot remember is the episode's device and its problem, since the audience learns what happened at the same pace he does.

The Dutch setting gives the series its only sustained foreign location, and the conference material is used to establish how little Dalziel wants to be there before he is given something to do. Warren Clarke plays the arrest and the bail as a man who has spent his working life on the other side of that conversation, and the episode's tension comes from the fact that he cannot investigate the murder he is accused of. Rye Pomona's absence is felt here, and the story's place in the run is as the point at which the series takes its central character furthest from his own ground.