The Cave Woman: Part 2

The part opens where the first left off. After almost five hours underground, a search party reaches the sump and the two missing officers. Jenny Mills survives. Constable Parvez Lateef is dead, caught by the rising floodwater, and Dalziel refuses the first assessment that the body is beyond help, insisting that he can be warmed up and that they have to try. Lateef's mother, Sameen, tells him in front of the rescue team that he sent her son back down and killed him. In the car afterwards Pascoe offers the line he will repeat through the story, that it was not his fault, and Dalziel answers that it was, and that Lateef's death was a complete waste which achieved absolutely nothing.

Charlie Barron tells Nerissa that he remembers their grandmother burning their mother's clothes on the night she went missing, and that Live Aid was still on the television. Nerissa tells him it was a long time ago, that his memory is playing tricks on him, and asks him to let it go. Frank Mason's examination of the flat in Similton Street produces one new fact for the team, because the mud on the door frame contained short brown dog hairs, and the man who killed Eddie Summers may own a short-haired brown dog. The dental records confirm the body is Eddie Summers, and the file explains why nobody established that in 1985: the body in the car crash was too badly damaged for a dental check and the inquest accepted the circumstantial evidence of someone who had seen Summers drive away half an hour before the crash. That someone was Vanda Dewhurst.

Vanda is interviewed at her house. She had an affair with Summers, one-sided, because she loved him and he only ever loved Lynn. Lynn had been low for a week because she had found out about John and Sophie. On the night she disappeared, Lynn told her she was going to take the children and go and live with Eddie as a family, and Vanda told her the truth, that she loved him. Lynn stormed out and Vanda never saw her again. She says she believed Summers had died in the crash, received a phone call five years later from a man living in Scotland, began visiting him, and two years ago brought him to live with her because his health had failed. He hid in a room in the cellar when anyone came. Three months ago he left without explanation, moved in opposite Nerissa Barron, and then kidnapped her. Asked why he might have done that, Vanda says he was her father.

Dalziel and Pascoe test the motive. If Barron had found out his daughter was not his own, would that be a reason to kill his ex-wife. Dalziel doubts the Chief Constable would risk his career on it, and Pascoe suggests the thing that would matter is someone else taking his place in his children's lives. They agree to check Nerissa's DNA against Summers's. Lateef's funeral follows, and Posh attends to pay her respects.

The episode is the second of Series 11 and the second night of the story that ends the programme. Its emotional centre is the death of a young officer for whom Dalziel has no defence, and the sequence in which Lateef's mother accuses him in front of the rescue team is the hardest scene in the run. The investigation itself turns on a body that was misidentified in 1985 on circumstantial evidence given by the woman who had been visiting the man ever since, which is the kind of long-buried error the series has been exposing since the first series.