Demons on Our Shoulders: Part 2

The investigation settles on Lee Knight. He maintains that he is innocent and that he is being set up, and the police work through the people around him and around the Hamilton family. What they find is that most of the principals in the case are involved in witchcraft of one sort or another, which turns the occult from background into the substance of the inquiry. The bodies in the case are being dismembered, part by part, and the working assumption becomes that the killer is assembling something for a ritual rather than disposing of a corpse. Pascoe comes round to the view that Knight is innocent and that the killer is someone well known to Dalziel. That last point is the hinge of the story, because the person the police are looking for is not a stranger and not a suspect from the occult group, but somebody Dalziel has had reason to trust.

No broadcaster, press or production source located in this pass states the solution. What is available is a published viewer's account of the episode, recorded here as a reported claim rather than as verified fact. In that account the killer is a hypnotherapist, the leading practitioner of the treatment in Wetherton, who had been Lee Knight's girlfriend at university and was left by him twenty years earlier. She is treating Dalziel for his smoking. She has collected a body part from each victim with the intention of stitching a single body together and transferring her own soul into it so that she can kill Knight, and the earlier killing of Jean Hamilton was done by using a second hypnotic suggestion on Guy Hamilton, the same man Knight had used on television, which is what put the police on Knight in the first place. In the account Knight works out who she is and goes to meet her at night in woodland, where the ritual site is prepared. She kills him. The stitching and the attempt to animate the assembled body fail, and when the police arrive she has collapsed mentally, unable to speak coherently, with the police accounting for it as the failure of the ritual breaking her mind. The killer is not named in that account and no source consulted ties the role to a named credited character, so no identification is made here.

The story is the second of Series 12 and the second night of the first story of the final run. Its construction is the one the series uses most often in its last years, with the first night establishing a situation and a suspect and the second night reversing both, and the reversal here is the largest in the programme's history, since the person responsible is the one treating the detective for his smoking habit rather than anyone the investigation has looked at. The dismemberment is the device that makes the case occult rather than merely bizarre, because the parts are being kept and assembled, and the police only understand what they are looking at once they stop treating the killings as a series and start treating them as a construction.

The episode is also the clearest example in the run of the series building a case around what Dalziel does not know about himself. He is being hypnotised, which is precisely the mechanism by which the killings are being committed, and the story's solution places the danger in the room with him rather than in the group the police have been examining. Pascoe's role is the one the series gives him most often in the late run, arriving at the correct conclusion while his superior is still committed to the wrong one, and the fact that the correct conclusion involves someone close to Dalziel is what makes it hard to hear.