Project Aphrodite: Part 1

A car bomb explodes outside the home of Louise Roach. Later the same evening, across town at the Mid Yorks University Biosciences Department, her son Declan Roach, a PhD chemist, suffocates to death in a sealed laboratory. The BBC's episode guide gives both incidents as the opening of the story, and the death cause is given as nitrogen poisoning in the streaming and database synopses, with the post-mortem confirming death from nitrogen intoxication. The possibility that the death was an accident is left open at the opening of the inquiry.

Louise Roach tells the police that she and her husband Kieran, who has Alzheimer's disease, have been targeted by animal rights campaigners because of Declan's work. That gives the inquiry its first shape: a scientist killed in a controlled laboratory, a family under attack, and an organised opposition to his research. At the university the administrator Adam Bolt confirms that the department has had trouble with animal rights activists. Layla Jadwin, a colleague and friend of Declan's, tells Constable Spicer that Declan had made a formal complaint against their supervisor, Dr Fran Cunningham. Questioned, Cunningham denies any knowledge of the complaint and describes the work Declan was doing with her as a project to slow the ageing process.

A payment of twenty thousand pounds into Declan's bank account shortly before his death, made by the local pharmaceutical company Eternus Biotech, opens the second line of inquiry. The company's managing director, Joe Furst, accounts for the money as a golden handshake, because Declan was about to leave the university to work for him. Furst shows Dalziel and Pascoe around the trial of a cream based on Cunningham's research, presented as a product that will restore lost youth. Declan's public position complicates the family's account of him, and the inquiry is left with a scientist who was being paid by a cosmetics company, a supervisor whose account of her own work does not hold together, and a department under attack from campaigners.

No published source located in this pass states how the case resolves, and the second night is dealt with separately. The episode is the third of Series 12 and the first night of the story about Project Aphrodite, and its interest is the setting, because the series has not used a university science department or the cosmetics industry before and gets a great deal from a world in which research is funded by the people who will sell what comes out of it.

The animal rights strand is the first explanation and the wrong one, which is the structure the series uses most often in its late run, with a plausible political motive standing in front of a commercial one. The car bomb at the beginning belongs to the family rather than to the science, and the episode is careful to establish that the son and the mother were attacked on the same evening without establishing that the two attacks are connected.