Guardian Angel - Part 1

A housewife, Susan Goodman, is killed while doing her weekly shopping. The Radio Times summary for the part states the effect on the town and the first police reading, that Wetherton is rocked when a lethal chemical kills a woman at the supermarket and that Dalziel and Pascoe suspect terrorism is at the heart of a cruel death. The BBC's own one-line description of the part is that investigations into a terrorist attack lead the duo to a potential serial killer.

The death is caused by a lethal chemical, which the BBC's Series 10 guide names as teltroxin. The Guardian's overnight report of the broadcast describes the story in different terms, as a dark tale about a woman killed by sarin gas while on her weekly shop, and that difference of description is recorded rather than resolved. The terrorism reading does not hold. Wikipedia's synopsis says the pair soon discover that for some reason someone had a motive to kill a woman with no public profile. A second element arrives on the Goodmans' doorstep: a large sum of money, the amount Susan's husband Paul had lost in a pension scam set up by the Albion bank, is left there by an unknown caller. A package is then delivered to the doorstep of another local housewife, Angela Veitch, and she too is dead within minutes.

The connection the police find is Arcadia, the health retreat where the Goodmans had stayed, and its owner Brian Fairmile. The BBC's guide sets out the chain, with the two victims' lives put under the spotlight, a link discovered between them and the retreat, and Dalziel and Pascoe heading off to Arcadia to find the slippery Brian Fairmile ruling the roost.

No published source consulted states who killed the women, what Fairmile's part in it was, what the withdrawals and the returned money mean, or how the case closes, so those outcomes are not recorded here. The episode is the seventh of Series 10 and its interest is the reversal at the centre, because a death that presents as terrorism turns out to be a domestic killing with a financial motive and the suspect is a man with no public profile at all.

The chemical gives the story its shock and its false lead, and the pension scam gives it the reason, with the bank at the centre of a scheme that stripped the victims' households of savings and the money returned to a doorstep rather than to a court. Warren Clarke plays the investigation as a man who has to talk a town out of a terrorism panic, and the episode is unusual in the run for the amount of public fear it puts in the first ten minutes and then has to dismantle.