Fallen Angel: Part 1

Wetherton Gold Cup day opens the story. Dalziel has a Yankee bet running and tells Pascoe he will be three thousand up if his next horse comes in, and there is a sweep in the office in which Posh draws Silver Soda, which is also Dalziel's next horse. In the weighing room Todd Fletcher and Sammy Hogarth trade barbs about the last race, and Drummond Sachs, the racecourse vet, is taking bets. Sammy has been banned for taking cocaine and came back to win the Princess Mary Stakes on The Unicorn, he is riding Silver Soda here and leaving Swainbank's Stables for a bigger contract, and Jean Swainbank and her daughter Natalie remark that a couple more days will see it over, because loyalty counts for nothing when someone is waving a big fat cheque.

Silver Soda wins the Gold Cup and Dalziel's bet lands, with Baines sent for the beers. During the race Sammy is visibly in trouble, and after it he collapses. A steward's inquiry is announced, which would hold up Dalziel's winnings, and he watches Sammy being treated and tells him he is going to be all right. The jockey dies. Frank Mason's post-mortem finds massive internal haemorrhaging, several fractured ribs and other fresh trauma, no clotting factors in the blood and a fatally high level of Warfarin. Sammy Hogarth bled to death. The Warfarin is an anti-coagulant, possibly rat poison and possibly medicinal, and because it is not an immediate killer it may have been building in his system for several days. Mason's conclusion is that it is an odd way to do it, but that Hogarth was murdered. Dalziel sends Posh home because she has a big day ahead, her first case as a detective, and tells her to be in at half past six.

At Sammy's flat the team finds an unsigned contract, apparently an offer from a rival yard, and learns from the neighbours that he had a break-in about six weeks earlier. In the bathroom there are laxatives, vitamins and slimming pills, and Posh is set to gather and test them all and to contact everyone on Sammy's mobile and address book. The forensic report that follows confirms that the tablets in a container marked sleeping tablets were high-dosage Warfarin, which is how the poison was administered. The phone work produces the story's second disappearance: a woman on Sammy's list, Julie-Ann Henshaw, had worked at Swainbank's until she went missing on 26 September the previous year, and her mother Moira has kept her daughter's phone account alive in case anyone who knew her called. Posh is on the line when Moira answers. Moira Henshaw says her daughter was sleeping with Sammy and tells Posh what she knows.

The episode is the third of Series 11 and the first night of the racing story. Its interest is the setting, because the series has not used a racecourse before and the episode gets a great deal from a world in which the horses are worth more than the people and a vet is taking bets. The poisoning is the crime and the syndicate behind the yard is the reason for it, and the episode's structure is the standard two-night one, with the death established in the first ten minutes and the connections left for the following night.