Season 02 Episode 02

Geordie and Cathy try to find Sidney a wife, without success: the barmaid drinks, the nun is a nun, and the one promising candidate likes jazz but is not Amanda. Amanda Hopkins arrives in Grantchester while her husband Guy is away on business, and Sidney's behaviour with her is observed and disapproved of by nearly everyone, including Mrs Maguire.

Geordie calls Sidney to his old college, Corpus Christi. Valentine Lyall, forty-six, a fellow there, has been found at the foot of one of the turrets of King's College chapel. The body is a mess, and he appears to have fallen in the night. Sidney notices that nobody heard a scream, that the blood was long dry, and that Lyall's rooms were unnaturally tidy. Lyall's widow Mya, who is Burmese and a Buddhist, is certain he was happy, and she is comforted by Kit Bartlett, Lyall's star pupil and close friend, who climbed the college buildings with him. The head porter is Frank Archer. The Master, Giles Montgomery, remembers Sidney from his student days and still resents him for having ended a relationship with Montgomery's daughter.

A student witness saw two men climbing the chapel, talking, and then saw one push the other. Kit Bartlett accounts for his movements by saying he was drinking vodka with his Russian tutor, Professor Raban, who confirms it, with the Marxist student Rory Crompton present. A woman in a beige mackintosh, a government agent, warns Geordie off the case at gunpoint. Montgomery tells Geordie that Lyall was working for British intelligence, hunting a Soviet agent at the college known as the Tsar, and warns him that his family could be harmed if he continues. Geordie's fear of firearms, left over from being shot in the Series 1 finale, returns. Burnt papers and bloodstained handkerchiefs point towards espionage rather than an accident, and Geordie drinks, then proposes that he and Sidney climb the chapel at night to see how Lyall died. They do.

Lyall was terminally ill and asked Bartlett, his closest friend, to kill him, saying it was how he wanted to go, at the hand of a friend. The death was staged so that Bartlett could appear to be a Communist sympathiser and be taken up by the Tsar, which is what brings the Tsar into the open. The Tsar is the college porter, Frank Archer, identified in the closing scenes when he walks in to meet Bartlett and Geordie says, the porter, all this time. Mya is given a cover story.

The episode is the series at its most ambitious, because it puts a mercy killing and a spy hunt in the same college and makes the second serve the first. The Cambridge material is a change of register from the village, since the series' usual closed community is replaced by one with a Master, a porter, a Russian tutor and a government agent in a mackintosh, and Montgomery's warning about Geordie's family is the point at which the case stops being local. Geordie's fear of guns is the continuity thread the episode handles best, because he is a detective who has been shot once and now has to climb a chapel in the dark.