Season 02 Episode 03

Margaret Ward's visits to the vicarage annoy Mrs Maguire, who is also lonely and not saying so. Sidney is avoiding both of them when he finds a young man weeping alone in the church with blood on his hands. The man, Theo Graham, says he went to a gambling den and cut his landlord Eric Whitaker from chest to waist with a razor.

Sidney and Geordie go to the boarding house Eric runs and find him alive, dismissing Theo as a fantasist, and Geordie lets Theo go. Hours later, in the street outside the station and in front of both men, a car runs Eric down and drives on. The police find a slash across Eric's chest as well as the injuries from the car. Sidney tells the widow, Vivian, and takes her home, and Theo is found at the house with Eric's teenage daughter Joan, escapes, and slashes Sidney across the shoulder with a razor. Sidney pursues him to a derelict orphanage where Theo is about to cut his own wrist, and talks him into giving himself up.

Sidney's visits to the boarding house turn into something closer to intrusion. He notices that a verse marked on a religious plaque in Vivian's bedroom is almost the same as one Theo quoted. Searching Theo's room he finds a provocative photograph of Vivian, and searching Vivian's room a savings book and a gun. Vivian, who has told the police that she cannot drive, tries to take him to bed, and Sidney accuses her of taking Eric's money and having him killed for Joan's sake. Vivian's lover is Raymond Clark, the quiet long-standing boarder. Raymond was the driver of the car. When Sidney telephones Geordie, Raymond attacks him from behind, and the household begins to pack up to leave. Geordie arrives, Sidney talks Raymond out of killing him by telling him he was used for Joan's sake, Joan escapes the house, and Raymond comes down the stairs and shoots Vivian with the gun. He is overpowered, and Vivian dies outside. The case is closed off screen, because the episode does not follow Geordie's case against Raymond or Joan's future.

Meanwhile Leonard goes to the cinema with Daniel Marlowe. Amanda is stopped for stealing two pairs of gloves, and Geordie, rather than charging her, keeps it from her husband and takes her home to Cathy because she does not want to return to Guy. In the final scene Sidney kisses Margaret in front of the church as Amanda arrives, sees them, and walks away.

The episode is the point at which the series stops treating Sidney's private life as a counterweight to the cases and starts making it the subject, because the investigation is repeatedly interrupted by what he is doing with the people in it. The boarding house gives the series a closed community that is not a village, and the episode is unusual in the run for leaving its aftermath untold, with the shooter taken away and the daughter's fate unrecorded. Margaret's arrival and Amanda's theft in the same hour set up the arrangement the series runs for the next two years.