Season 02 Episode 05

November 1954. Amanda has organised a petition for a reprieve for Gary Bell and tells Sidney the signatures are coming in. Sidney takes Gary sports cards in prison and promises to stand by him, and the village makes its disapproval known, including a noose left at the vicarage. Sidney argues with Harding Redmond about it and gives Agatha Redmond a letter from Gary.

Geordie and DC Phil Wilkinson visit Rita Jones in hospital after another beating from her husband Eddie. Rita will not make a complaint because the family needs a wage. Her eldest son lets the two detectives into the house, where they find recently stolen goods and arrest Eddie. Eddie fights Phil and goads Geordie as he is taken to the cells, and Dicky Evans, another prisoner, taunts Geordie on the way. Geordie goes to Eddie's cell alone that night. The next morning Cathy calls on Sidney, because Geordie did not come home. At the station Eddie is dead on a stretcher and Geordie's knuckles are bruised. DCI Benson questions Geordie's account and Sidney defends him, but Geordie cannot say where he was and no one can confirm it. Geordie takes leave. Margaret tells Sidney that Geordie kissed her, and tells him that she saw Geordie leave the cells with a bloody hand. Sidney's confidence in his friend begins to go.

Sidney finds Phil and Rita kissing. Working through the papers, he establishes that the stolen goods had been recovered by Geordie months earlier and were later found at Eddie's house, and that the butterfly pin from the haul was on Rita's coat. Phil had access to the recovered property and framed Eddie, and Phil also planted the noose. Sidney extracts the case file from Phil with a threat and takes it to Geordie. The crime scene photographs show four abrasions on Eddie's head that match the bolts in the cell floor, and the bedroom at the Jones house holds a chemical mixture and blood on the pillow. Eddie had been poisoned with rat poison taken from the household supply and had a seizure before he was moved, and Eddie's son demonstrates the poison for the rats. Rita murdered her husband. Geordie tells her he could have helped her, and she wants only to know her children will be cared for. The episode does not show her charged, and Geordie's response to Phil's conduct is that he is a copper. Gary Bell is hanged, and Sidney is with him for the last hours and prays with him while Agatha Redmond waits outside.

The episode is the series at its bleakest and the one that does most with the arrangement between a policeman and a vicar, because the policeman's own conduct is the case and the vicar is the only person who can clear him without believing him. Rita's poisoning is documented in forensic detail and the episode refuses the comfort of a charge, since the woman who killed a violent husband has killed the family's wage and the man who framed her is left in the force. The hanging at the end, and the reprieve campaign that failed, is the series stating that the two men's work has limits.