Season 02 Episode 01

Summer 1954. Sidney Chambers, Geordie Keating, Geordie's family, the curate Leonard Finch and the housekeeper Mrs Maguire spend a day by the river, and Sidney and Geordie swim in the Cam. Walking home, DC Phil Wilkinson arrests Sidney and tells him the charge is sexual assault. The complainant is Harding Redmond, a doting father who has read an account of an affair with the vicar in his fifteen-year-old daughter Abigail's diary. Abigail has disappeared, and so has the diary. Sidney is questioned by DCI Benson, who does not believe the charge, and the Archdeacon sends Sidney's old friend the Reverend Sam Milburn over from the neighbouring parish to keep an eye on him.

At the village youth club Sidney learns that Abigail had recently spent time with the photographer Daniel Marlowe. Sidney and Geordie find Marlowe's studio deserted except for Abigail's body, and Marlowe has vanished. Geordie and Sidney question Gary Bell, a young mechanic whom Harding Redmond had previously accused of behaving improperly towards Abigail. Sidney establishes that Abigail was pregnant, and her medical state, along with the absence of any autopsy work by the police, is raised by the press reviews of the episode as an implausible gap. Mrs Maguire works out from an empty bottle of turpentine that Abigail had tried to end the pregnancy herself. The diary is recovered, and Sidney finds that the affair it describes was with a vicar, but not with him, because the father of the child is Sam Milburn. Milburn's pastoral visit was in effect his own confession. Abigail's death was not murder. Gary Bell, trying to help her, used turpentine in the belief that it was an old remedy, and she choked.

The bishop moves Milburn to another parish rather than expose him, and the diocese treats the matter as closed. Gary Bell is charged with Abigail's murder and held for trial. Sidney's accuser is left without a case, but the village has already made up its mind about him, and the charge against him is only the first of the series' quarrels about law, mercy and the Church.

The episode opens Series 2 by turning the series' own method on its central figure, because the vicar who has spent six episodes solving other people's crimes is arrested on his way home from a picnic in front of his friends. The two men who might defend him are a policeman who does not believe the charge and a fellow clergyman who is the guilty party, and the programme is careful to let the diocese choose the second. The reviews' complaint about the missing autopsy is a fair one, because the episode's answer depends on medical detail the police never obtain, and the episode supplies it through Mrs Maguire and a turpentine bottle instead.