Season 03 Episode 04

Sidney preaches against temptation, saying temptation is the source of all suffering, in the week he has begun sleeping with Amanda. Leonard catches the two of them together and tells Sidney he is the one lying to himself.

Geordie and Phil Wilkinson are called to a factory, where Josephine Sutton lies injured below an open hatch, dressed for a night out with a bottle of gin beside her. Her employer, Ezra Garston, suggests she fell while drunk. His son Gideon says the women use the factory at night for meetings. Ricky Masters, who found the body, says Josephine was not there at midnight when he did his rounds, and that she was found two hours later. Geordie notices her wristwatch; Josephine gasps when he moves her, and she is taken to hospital, where she touches Sidney's hand and dies. The watch stopped shortly before midnight, which is enough to bring Ricky in for questioning, and he keeps to his story. Josephine's mother, Maud, says her daughter had left Ricky because he was violent, and that Josephine's most recent boyfriend rode a motorbike.

At the vicarage, Mrs Maguire meets her husband Ronnie Maguire, who disappeared ten years earlier. He says he has carcinoma and has not long to live. She has recently accepted a proposal from Jack Chapman, and is therefore not free to marry. Geordie is given tickets to the policeman's ball by Margaret Ward and buys her an expensive necklace. Superintendent John Baldwin arrives to ask whether Phil would suit the vacant sergeant's post, and Geordie says he would not. Josephine's body shows she was thrown from a moving vehicle. Maud is brought in to identify a suspect in a line-up and picks out a man other than Gideon, then is got at and changes her mind. At the ball, Phil is announced as the new sergeant. Geordie sees Baldwin's ring and recognises the Masonic handshake, and Ezra Garston is a Mason too, and Phil is one. Sidney and Amanda's table makes an early exit. Hilary tells Leonard she is a virgin and would like children; he cannot swear he wants to marry her, and she takes off her ring and leaves. Phil tells Cathy about Geordie's affair with Margaret. Geordie punches Phil, and later faces Cathy in their bedroom, who asks him whether he bought her a food mixer and bought Margaret a necklace, and whether he loves her. He does not answer. Amanda tells Sidney that by concealing Geordie's affair he has shown himself to be a hypocrite.

Leonard writes a letter and takes a razor into the bathroom, and Sidney finds him and talks him down. Sidney also tells Mrs Maguire that Geordie has looked into Ronnie's background and that Ronnie is not ill at all. Before that, Ronnie has taken her locket, her purse and her savings and gone. Sidney confronts the archdeacon, Gabriel Atubo, about a church that instructs everyone else to be perfect while its own leaders are not, and about other clergy calling Atubo an Uncle Tom. Atubo tells him to pray. Sidney goes to the church, takes off his clerical clothing and walks out of Grantchester.

Gideon Garston took Josephine out on his motorbike, crashed it while showing off, and left her injured at the factory to make it look like a fall. His father's Masonic contacts, Superintendent Baldwin and Phil Wilkinson, who is promoted rather than disciplined, keep the case off Gideon, and Geordie is ordered to leave the Garstons alone. Phil then hands Geordie the evidence of the motorcycle, and a map and the bike are found.

The episode is the point at which the series stops keeping its two halves apart, because the case is resolved by a policeman's lodge rather than by evidence and the same hour ends with a vicar walking out of his parish and a detective being asked in his own bedroom whether he loves his wife. The Masonic material is the most direct statement the series makes about institutional protection, and the fact that the evidence arrives from the officer who benefited from it is the episode's bitterest touch.