The Cave Woman: Part 1

A cave rescue is under way at Crossley Passage. Two people, Hazel Shaw and Gary Palmer, have been cut off by floodwater for two hours, and the rescue team, working under James Maddern with Mike Ruskin among the diggers and Constable Parvez Lateef helping underground, diverts water with dams and locates Hazel. She is splinted and stretchered out, with an air ambulance on standby. Lateef, told to go home after nine hours below, is told by Dalziel that he has worked half a day and should be sharp tomorrow, and Dalziel remarks to Pascoe that the lad is a good one and that keeping a team on its toes is management.

As the water falls, the rescue brings up a second body: a petite woman, about five foot two, stripped of clothes and jewellery and wrapped in polythene. Frank Mason reports multiple fractures consistent with a fall from a height and a fatal head injury from a number of blows with a blunt, curved object and no sharp edges, with a scar visible on the left arm. The wrapping is dated by its maker's mark, because the polythene was produced by a company called Stikpol, which traded from 1978 to 1990. Dalziel, at the scene, calls her Wetherton's own Tutankhamun, and Maggie Ruddlesdin of the Wetherton Argus is already asking about some sort of caveman.

Vanda Dewhurst comes forward and says the body may be her sister. Lynn Barron went missing in July 1985, aged twenty-nine, and had a scar on her left arm, and she kept her married name after the divorce. Her former husband is the Chief Constable, John Barron. The file records that Lynn Barron was reported missing on 20 July 1985 and last seen getting off a bus at Redmoor. The only suspect at the time, Eddie Summers, thirty-one, an amateur boxing champion, was interviewed twice under caution and had written Lynn a threatening note, and he died in a car accident the following month. The senior investigating officer on the 1985 case is now the Deputy Chief Constable, Iain Pyke.

Barron, his mother Maisie and his present wife Sophie are interviewed at the family house, which belonged to Maisie. Barron says the marriage broke down after Lynn suffered post-natal depression when Nerissa was born, that they divorced in 1983, and that Lynn still visited the house to see the children. She was coming over on the day Live Aid was televised and never arrived. Barron says he was at a police reunion until the early hours and then flew to Manchester and on to France for three days. Sophie, asked about her history, says she came to work for Barron as a nanny a year after Lynn disappeared. Maisie argues with her son about Charlie, the adopted son, and later tells the police she burned Lynn's clothes. Nerissa, a librarian, is followed and watched by an older man who knows her middle name and who had earlier helped her when she was locked out of the library. Charlie, the adult son and a film student, tells the police he last saw his mother a few days before she went missing, at her flat, when Lynn and Nerissa argued.

The episode is the first of Series 11 and the opening night of the story that ends the programme, and its interest is the collision between a rescue and an exhumation, because the second body is brought up by the operation to save the first. The polythene's manufacturer date is the detail that places the killing in a known window, and the case reaches the top of the force within a day, which is the position the series has been moving towards for its whole run.

The family material is unusually dense, with a missing woman, a divorce, an adopted son, a second wife who arrived as a nanny, a mother who burned clothes and a daughter being watched. Warren Clarke's Dalziel is at the centre of both a rescue he is directing and an investigation that keeps climbing away from him.