Season 00 Episode 01

Sidney Chambers is rehearsing the village children for the Christmas nativity when the rehearsal collapses into noise, and he hands the production to Leonard Finch, who plans a Brechtian treatment. Sidney and Amanda Hopkins, heavily pregnant with her estranged husband's child, conduct an affair in plain sight, watched with disapproval by Aunt Cece.

A wedding is due at the church. The groom's son Felix Davis arrives in a temper, and the bride, Linda Morgan, arrives late and asks for a cigarette. The groom, Bill Davis, has not come, and Geordie is unwilling to treat a missing groom as police business until Bill is found dead in his own office, the safe cleared of money. Linda is the obvious suspect, because she is a burlesque dancer, considerably younger than Bill, whom she met at what the couple called a country club and which turns out to be a strip club. Felix accuses her directly, and Geordie learns that he holds keys to the office and the safe.

The case changes shape when Geordie finds the couple's two wedding rings stuffed down Bill's throat. He has seen the method before, in an unsolved killing from a Christmas shortly after the war, when Gail Tannen's fiance Charlie Parsons was found with rings in his throat on his wedding eve. Geordie's suspect then and now is Gail's father, the toyshop owner Albert Tannen, shunned by the village since, while Gail's daughter Jessica visits his shop window daily without her mother's knowledge. They question Albert, whose alibi is thin, and Gail, who says her father is a man without a heart; he admits he disliked Charlie Parsons because he caught him with another woman. A boy, Neville Grant, throws firecrackers through the toyshop window, and Sidney finds Jessica with him. Albert gives Jessica a teddy bear, and Sidney walks her home and agrees not to tell Gail. Jessica lets slip that Albert was not in the shop on the night of the murder.

Albert is later found beaten on his shop floor beside a slate reading confess, the attacker being Neville, his young assistant, who had not been paid. Sidney notices that one of Albert's tools matches a gouge on the door of Bill's office, and under questioning Albert explains both, that he resented Gail's fiance, and that he damaged the door after Bill refused him a loan and laughed at him. Meanwhile Amanda's father, Edward Kendall, refuses to take her back and forces Aunt Cece to put her out, because Cece's son and husband depend on him for work. Amanda sits on a bench in the snow until Leonard finds her, argues with her about the lie she is telling about a train, and brings her to the vicarage. Her labour begins there, the doctor and midwife are both unavailable, and Mrs Maguire delivers the child, Grace, upstairs while Sidney drinks whisky with Geordie below, who says the situation is the story of Joseph and Mary.

Late that night Sidney goes through old photographs and works out the case. The woman Charlie Parsons left in order to marry Gail was Linda Morgan, then a redhead. Linda killed Charlie Parsons, changed her appearance, married a man who died of natural causes, and later met Bill Davis. She fought with Bill, killed him and took his money. Linda is guilty of both murders, and both men died with the rings forced into their mouths. Geordie takes the club owner, Larry Simpkins, in on a theft charge after Larry picks his pocket, but the murders are Linda's. Sidney works out where she is going and telephones the station, and she is stopped on a bus out of town.

The special is the series' most tightly constructed single episode, because two killings thirty years apart are solved by the same detail and the older one has been in plain sight from the first scene. The Christmas setting is used for the baby rather than the murder, with Grace born in the vicarage while her mother's position there is the scandal of the hour, and Geordie's Joseph and Mary line is the programme's own reading of what it is doing.