Season 01 Episode 02

Sidney is pressured by his sister Jennifer into attending Amanda Kendall's engagement dinner at the Kendall house, a gathering of the school friends who once made Jennifer feel poor and small. Among them are Daphne Young, who talks about sex at the table and describes her lodger as a homosexual, and William Calthorpe and his wife Lilian, whose marriage is tense. Amanda's father, Sir Edward Kendall, tells Sidney to keep away from his daughter. Amanda's fiance Guy Hopkins is there, and is charming to Sidney in a way that makes plain how little he needs to be.

Sidney drinks too much. Fireworks set off his war flashbacks. Amanda's engagement ring is passed round the table, goes missing in the confusion, and the guests turn on Jennifer's boyfriend Johnny Johnson, a black jazz musician, as the thief. Sidney asks Amanda why she is marrying Guy, and she says, because he asked.

The next morning Geordie calls Sidney to a body. Lilian Calthorpe is in the water below the bridge, still in the dress she wore to the dinner, and her husband William, who reported her missing, is sitting on the bridge in his coat. William says she often walked at night, and mentions a pregnancy that ended badly a year earlier. Johnny is arrested after some of Lilian's jewellery is found on him, and the case looks closed.

Sidney does not accept it. The killer is William Calthorpe. He and Daphne Young had been sleeping together, Lilian worked it out at the party and said so in the argument that followed, and the confrontation turned physical, with Lilian's head struck on the stairs before her body was put in the water. A servant had lied about the night, which is what allowed the arrest of Johnny to look sound. The engagement ring is recovered from where it had been hidden inside a torch and returned to Amanda, and Leonard Finch, Sidney's new curate, arrives and is needed for the last piece of the investigation.

Runcie's second story is a New Year's Eve dinner party in London at which an expensive ring disappears. The television version moves the party to Amanda's engagement dinner and adds a murder, a change documented from the Bloomsbury event in December 2014, where the author and the writer discussed the adaptation in public and the audience was told the missing-ring story came from an anecdote Runcie's mother told him about a dinner party she had attended and that a murder was added to it for the programme.

The episode's real subject is the wedding Sidney has agreed to conduct for the woman he loves. He says it would be his honour and then drinks all night over a photograph of the two of them, and the case runs underneath that. The theft at the dinner is the mechanism that turns a party into a police matter, and the detail that matters is that the guests convict the only black man at the table on no evidence, hours before the husband is found sitting on the bridge in his coat.