A Death in the Family - Part 1

A raid on a transit depot in Wetherton ends in murder and a large theft. Wikipedia's summary gives the robbery as a high-stakes, high-reward transit depot robbery in which the robbers get away with six hundred thousand pounds, and the BBC's guide places it as a raid at a transit office in Wetherton. A security guard is killed in the raid. He is Dave Compton, and the case is uncomfortable for the two officers from the first minutes, because Wikipedia says Dalziel and Pascoe were a little shaken by the death, having known Dave from his time in the force as a detective sergeant.

Before the enquiry is far advanced, a second killing follows. Steve Pitt, a restaurateur, is slashed to death with a knife in the kitchen of his restaurant. The BBC's guide describes him as the charming smooth-talker Steve Pitt and places him at the centre of a social group that is the story's real subject: the dead man is linked to a local restaurant and a close-knit group of friends who met at university and are as tight knit as a family, and when Steve is killed the ties are unpicked to reveal the most dysfunctional, incestuous family in Wetherton.

The suspects are inside the group. Wikipedia records that there are many, including the ex-boyfriend of his current partner, Claire, who is now three months pregnant with Pitt's child. The Radio Times frames the episode as the duo becoming entangled in a sordid and incestuous group of friends while investigating the murder of a man at the scene of a robbery. The robbery and the killing turn out to be connected through the victim.

The published summaries do not name the killer of Steve Pitt or state what the missing business partner Imad Abdullah's disappearance was, so those outcomes are not recorded here. The episode is the ninth of Series 10 and the first night of the final story of the run, and its interest is the group of friends rather than the robbery, because the case is arranged so that the police have to work out which of a set of people who consider themselves a family is responsible for one of them being dead.

The security guard's death is the detail that makes the episode personal, since the man killed in the raid was a former detective sergeant known to both officers, and the story is one of the few in the run in which the police are investigating the death of one of their own from the outset. The robbery supplies the money and the restaurant supplies the relationships, and the two threads are joined inside the group who met at university.