Under Dark Stars: Part 2

The second part follows the two cases to the point where the police, the families and the partnership all run out of room. Pascoe goes to the garage. Mark Croft has Wheeler tied up and gagged, having taken the man the court acquitted to a place of his own choosing, and he has called Pascoe rather than the police to witness it. Pascoe begs him to let Wheeler go. Croft tortures a confession out of Wheeler that he killed Croft's son, and then, as the BBC's own summary puts it, in a fit of madness stabs him. Wheeler's dying words are Dean Bennett, and those words do what the confession could not, because they leave Pascoe certain that the man he had just watched die was responsible for the disappearance of the boy who had testified against him.

Pascoe then conceals it. The body is moved and the traces are removed, which the streaming synopsis describes as his attempt to cover up all trace of the crime. A homeless man finds the body. Dalziel shows little sympathy for the dead man, which is consistent with everything the audience has seen of Wheeler and is the last time the programme allows Dalziel to be simply right about somebody. The phone calls to the Crofts continue after Wheeler's death, which is the detail that breaks the explanation Pascoe has settled on, because the man he watched confess and die cannot still be making them. Pascoe begins to wonder whether Wheeler was innocent after all. When the calls are unscrambled the police establish that a young woman may also be involved, and Perdy, the girl Wheeler had abused into his way of thinking and who was locked in a cell with Dean Bennett at the end of the first part, is the figure that material points to. The sources do not name her as the caller and no identification of the caller is asserted here, and Dean Bennett's own fate is not recorded in any source consulted.

Dalziel works out what Pascoe has done. The programme ends with the partnership at the point it has been heading for since the first series, with the senior officer knowing what his partner has concealed, and that is where the published record leaves the two of them. How the concealment is resolved, what happens to Mark Croft, and what becomes of Pascoe are not stated in any source consulted.

The story is the sixth of Series 12 and the last episode of the programme. Its construction is the inversion of the series' usual one, because the crime the police are investigating is committed by the family of a victim and the officer who conceals it is the one who has spent the series insisting on procedure. The two cases are joined by a single dying word, and the detail that makes the ending work is that the confession was extracted under torture and the words spoken afterwards are the ones that carry the weight.

The final image of the programme is of a partnership in which one man knows something about the other that cannot be undone, which is where the first series began and where the last one ends. Warren Clarke's Dalziel is given almost nothing to say about it, and Colin Buchanan's Pascoe is left with an act he cannot take back, and the programme finishes without resolving either.