Fallen Angel: Part 2

The part opens in the hospital where the baby pulled from the aircraft wreck is being treated. She has been named after Dalziel, Andrea rather than Andrew, and is no more than a week old. There was nothing to identify her except that her umbilical cord was tied rather than clamped, which is not what happens in British hospitals, so someone was expecting her and she may have been born abroad. Dalziel leaves his card with the ward and asks to be told if anyone comes looking.

The syndicate reacts to the crash in the yard, with Drummond Sachs dead, the members asking each other whether something is going on, and the answer being that there is no syndicate. The Lawsons, waiting, get a telephone call telling them there has been a terrible accident. Posh apologises for the dinner with Jake McNally, asks not to be sent back to uniform and is kept on with a warning, and then tells Dalziel she has found Julie-Ann Henshaw. The French post-mortem report reaches the team by way of Dr Ashurst. Julie-Ann was dead before she entered the water: there is iron oxide around the head wound, so she was struck with a metal object, and there was highly chlorinated water in her gullet but not in her lungs, meaning she was in chlorinated water after death rather than drowned in it. She was wearing one small stud earring in her left ear and was ten weeks pregnant.

Moira Henshaw identifies her daughter, tells the police her son Jamie is in the army in Iraq, refuses a call to the Ministry of Defence on the ground that her son should hear it from her, and says the two children were close. At the McNally house the police put the aeroplane to Jake and Sandra: it is owned by SM Air, a company registered in Sandra's name, which hires it out. Neither of them can fly it. Sandra says she knew nothing about a baby on board. Pressed on Julie-Ann, Jake calls the relationship nothing serious while his mother calls her a gold-digger and a trollop, and when told Julie-Ann was pregnant Sandra tells Dalziel to prove that they silenced her. Dalziel suggests the body went in the McNally pool before it was dumped from the aircraft, and Sandra answers that the pool uses ionisation rather than chlorine and she has the guarantee to prove it. Forensic officers sample it anyway, and Dalziel has the pool checked against the post-mortem findings.

The ante-natal clinic is the next turn of the screw, because Julie-Ann visited a clinic the week before she disappeared and Ken Lawson signed in with her. Dalziel and Pascoe take this to Swainbank's on the day Natalie's caesarean was booked and are told the child was stillborn. Ken Lawson then admits to a relationship with Julie-Ann, a stupid fling which he says he told Natalie about.

The episode is the fourth of Series 11 and the second night of the racing story, and it is the most tangled of the run, since the deaths of a jockey and a vet are tied to a missing woman, a baby in a wrecked aircraft, a syndicate nobody admits exists and a stud farm's succession. The chlorinated pool is the detail that breaks the alibi, because the pathologist's finding places the body in treated water before it was ever in the sea, and the episode is at its best when it is working from that kind of forensic fact rather than from interviews.

The strongest thread is Posh's, because she is given her first case in the first part and is nearly sent back to uniform in the second, and the series uses her to show what a probationer is asked to do and what she is blamed for. The baby named after Dalziel is the episode's final image of the run's concern with family, and it is a child with no identified parents found in the wreckage of a plane owned by a company registered to the wife of a man who cannot fly it.