Guardian Angel - Part 2

The first part ended with a third death at Arcadia, the retreat where the two earlier victims had stayed. The Radio Times summary for this part places the enquiry at that building and poses the case's remaining question, that the evil afoot emanates from the manor house and that the victims may or may not be the subjects of foul play. The BBC's one-line description of the part is that Dalziel and Pascoe suspect there is some evil afoot at a manor house.

The unresolved matters the first part left are the ones this part works through, as set out in the BBC's Series 10 guide: whether the person who obtained the lethal chemical is the killer, who Barbara Lennox is, and where two people who have vanished have gone, whether they are running in fear for their lives. The guide puts the money and the victims together as the case's connections, with Dalziel and Pascoe discovering more links between the victims, large sums of money and a mysterious Barbara Lennox.

The documented material for the story goes no further than the questions. The BBC's own guide, written as a preview, poses them and does not answer them, and Wikipedia's summary stops at the third murder, the twenty-thousand-pound withdrawals and the money that vanished after the victims' stays at Arcadia. No published source consulted states who killed the three women, what Arcadia's owner Brian Fairmile's part in it was, what Barbara Lennox's identity is, or how the case was closed. The story's mechanism is documented, a lethal chemical obtained by an unknown party, delivered to homes and used at the retreat, and its motive is documented only in outline, as money connected to a pension scheme that had stripped the victims' households of savings.

The story is the eighth of Series 10 and the second night of the Arcadia case. Its construction leaves the audience with a set of questions rather than a solution in the published record, which is the largest documentation gap in the whole run, and the episode's own dialogue is not available to this account. The retreat is the setting that holds the two halves together, since the women who died had all stayed there and the money that came back to them was taken from them in a scheme run elsewhere.

The manor house material is the series at its most gothic, with a health retreat, a proprietor described as slippery and a house the enquiry keeps returning to. The three deaths at the centre are all women killed in their own homes or on their own errands, which gives the case a domestic quality the series rarely reaches, and the pension fraud is the reason they were worth killing rather than the crime the police were originally called about.