Under Dark Stars: Part 1

Michael Wheeler stands accused of the murder of two teenage boys. The case against him collapses on a technicality and he is acquitted. The parents of one of the dead boys, Mark and Bridget Croft, blame Pascoe's investigation for the verdict, and Pascoe takes that personally. The Radio Times billing for the first part states the shape of the story plainly: Pascoe takes it personally when the case against a child killer he was investigating collapses and, against his partner's advice, he gets too close to the family of one of the victims.

What the police had on Wheeler is set out in the background material rather than in the episode's billing: he had kidnapped Perdy, then thirteen, abused her and made her believe his account of the world, and over four years he used her to help him take four boys, all of whom he treated as worthless and all of whom he ended up killing. His last victim before the trial was fourteen-year-old Jaimie Croft, the Crofts' son. After the acquittal he used what he had got out of Jaimie under torture to harass the boy's parents, and the strain of it drove Bridget Croft to kill herself. That detail belongs to the account of the case as a whole and is documented in a fan-maintained character listing rather than by the broadcaster.

A second case opens while the first is ending. The body of a mini-cab driver, Kevin Jennings, is found in nearby woods with a blow to the head. His car is found at the side of a main road, which suggests he had stopped to change a tyre. Dalziel and Pascoe visit his house and a neighbour tells them that his wife, Sandra, had recently left him. They find Sandra with her boyfriend Gareth Bass, described in the BBC's guide as a drugged-up bruiser, and arrest the pair of them. That line of inquiry does not hold. Dean Bennett, the teenager who testified that Wheeler kidnapped him, goes to join his girlfriend, and the first part ends with him and Perdy locked in a cell together.

No published source consulted describes how the first part closes beyond that, and the second night is dealt with separately. The episode is the fifth of Series 12 and the first night of the story that ends the programme, and its interest is the position it puts Pascoe in, because he is the officer whose investigation failed and he knows what the man who walked out of court is. The Crofts' grievance is directed at him personally rather than at the system, which is the detail that makes the second night possible.

The Wheeler material is the darkest in the run, with a child killer who kept a girl for four years and used her to take other children, and the episode's construction places it behind a court verdict rather than in front of an investigation. The mini-cab killing is the second case and the ordinary one, and the interval between the acquittal and the murder of a taxi driver is the space the episode uses to show that Pascoe has not let the first case go.