Demons on Our Shoulders: Part 1

In a suburban house on Halloween, Guy Hamilton shoots his wife Jean dead in their bedroom with a shotgun and then disappears. The murder is found on the same night Dalziel and Pascoe have other business, and the BBC's own episode guide begins the story there and gives the couple's names.

Dalziel and Pascoe visit the Hamiltons' daughter, Katherine, and her husband, Oliver Taylor. What they establish from the family is that Guy had killed Jean once before, in exactly the same way, on a television show staged by the illusionist and hypnotist Lee Knight. Knight's act had used the couple to demonstrate that a person can be made to do anything, including commit murder, with the killing staged as an illusion. Guy had done it for real on stage a year earlier, and a year later he did it for real at home. Confronted, Knight is shocked at the news of Jean's murder and says he de-programmed Guy after the show. His account gives Dalziel a suspect and a defence at the same time, and the search for the missing Guy runs alongside a close examination of Knight's act, his methods and his technique.

A second strand runs through the Hamilton family. Katherine is involved with David Sargent, the family solicitor, and the BBC's guide records that the two of them perform ritual sex magic watched by her husband Oliver and six other people. A long ritual is held at a nearby castle. The night after it, Katherine's remains are found with the entire left side of her body missing. Dalziel's own circumstances run alongside the case, because he is trying to give up smoking and is receiving hypnotherapy. Reported rather than documented, a viewer's account describes the murder being reported while Pascoe is at a birthday party to which he had not invited Dalziel, and Pascoe spending the opening stretch of the episode keeping the party from him.

The first part closes on Dalziel acting on a premonition at midnight, which takes him to the place where Guy's body has been left. The whole right side of the body is missing. No source consulted states how the case resolves, and the second night is dealt with separately.

The episode is the first of Series 12, which was filmed back to back with Series 11 and billed with it as one series everywhere except the United Kingdom. Its interest is the occult material, which the series has not used at all before and which arrives here as the substance of the case rather than as atmosphere. The staged murder repeated for real is the idea the story is built on, and the two halves of the bodies being kept apart is the detail that turns a series of killings into a single design.

The strongest thread in the first half is the ambiguity about Knight, because his act is the reason the police look at him and also the reason they cannot be sure he is responsible. Dalziel's hypnotherapy is the second thread and the one that matters most by the end, since the treatment he is receiving for his smoking places him among the people the story is examining.