A Death in the Family - Part 2

The first part closed with the police turning to Rebecca Stevens, a member of the group of university friends around the murdered restaurateur Steve Pitt. The second part's documented shape is given in the Radio Times summary, in the order the story plays it, that Dalziel's instincts are proved wrong, resulting in a race against time to save the life of a small child. The BBC's own one-line description is the same beat without the self-criticism, that Dalziel races against time to save the life of a small child.

What the story is protecting, and for whose sake, is the part's subject. The first part established that Steve Pitt and his missing business partner Imad Abdullah had carried out the six hundred thousand pound transit depot robbery, that a security guard and former detective sergeant died in it, and that suspicion had settled on Rebecca. The second part converts that into a rescue, because the case is not solved in an interview room but by finding a child in time.

The published record carries the ending as a race against time to save a small child, with Dalziel having read the case wrongly up to that point and with the suspicion of the previous night resting on Rebecca Stevens. No source consulted names the killer of Steve Pitt, states who carried out the robbery with him beyond the missing Abdullah, establishes what Abdullah's disappearance was, or describes the identity of the child and who is holding him or her. The question of who is protecting whom is not answered by any published source, and nothing has been constructed here to fill it, so the ending is not recorded in this account.

The story is the tenth of Series 10 and the last of the run, and its shape is the one the series uses most effectively in its final years, since the second night is a countdown rather than an inquiry and the solution and the rescue happen together. Dalziel being wrong is the episode's stated premise, which is the reversal the series had been building towards all series, and the child at the centre gives the last half hour a stake that has nothing to do with the robbery.

The group of friends who met at university is the setting the two nights share, and the story's interest is that a robbery and a murder both come out of a set of relationships the police had to unpick from the outside. The closing episode of Series 10 also ends the run as a whole, since the four stories transmitted in 2006 as Series 11 and 12 were filmed back to back with these and billed together everywhere except the United Kingdom.