Season 01 Episode 03

Amanda and Guy ask Sidney to conduct their wedding. He says it would be his honour and then spends the night drinking over a photograph of himself and Amanda. Mrs Maguire tells him the state of the vicarage cannot continue, and reminds him that his new curate arrives that day. Sidney meets Leonard Finch off the bus. He also meets a couple he is to marry, Arthur Evans and Isabel Livingstone, and visits Isabel's mother, Daisy Livingstone, who is bedridden, difficult and opposed to the match. Daisy tells him Arthur is trying to kill her, and Sidney says it is his job to see the best in people.

Daisy dies. The doctor, Robinson, certifies natural causes, and the body is cremated before anyone can obtain a second opinion, although Daisy had left a written request to be buried under a particular oak. Mrs Maguire, who believes Arthur is a bad lot, goes behind Sidney's back and brings Geordie into it. Suspicion of a fast cremation deepens when Arthur disappears with Isabel's money and jewellery.

Arthur is caught. He admits he is a serial bigamist who marries women for money, but denies killing anyone, and the episode leaves him a swindler rather than a murderer. Daisy's sister, Gladys Sheppard, is then found dead, and the coroner's report shows potassium chloride. Two further threads meet the case. A stranger has been seen at both Daisy's and Gladys's services and around the village, and his fingerprints are on an item from the house. He turns out to be Jack Chapman, Daisy's estranged husband and Isabel's father, who has returned to see the two sisters, and Mrs Maguire knew all three when they were young. Sidney also learns that Daisy and Gladys were both terminally ill, and that both had trusted the same person with their lives.

The killer is Dr Robinson, the local doctor, who has been ending the lives of dying patients. Daisy Livingstone and Gladys Sheppard both died at his hands. The episode does not show an arrest. It ends with Sidney drinking again and Geordie pouring him a second whisky, and with Sidney having agreed to marry Amanda and Guy, written back to Hildegard, and encouraged Leonard's preaching. Leonard's second attempt at a sermon is a reflection on lies and truth, after Sidney had told him an earlier one was pithy when it was not, and Isabel, pregnant and abandoned, is seen in the churchyard with her father.

This is the third of the four stories from Runcie's first book to be filmed. The book's version concerns whether a local doctor is shortening the lives of elderly and frail patients, and one review of the book describes it as not much of a mystery story but an ambiguous tale about morality and how to deal with criminality. The television version keeps the doctor and the mercy killing and builds a family around the victims.

The episode is the point at which the series states what kind of programme it is, because the man responsible is a doctor who believes he is being kind and the police never arrive to take him away. Mrs Maguire going behind Sidney's back is the first time the series shows that the vicarage has its own judgements about who is worth defending, and Leonard's arrival gives Sidney a colleague who is as awkward as he is and rather better at saying so.