Season 03 Episode 05

Sidney, who left Grantchester at the end of the previous episode, hitchhikes and finds the camp where Ronnie Maguire has been living since he disappeared. He confronts Ronnie about Mrs Maguire's savings. Ronnie deflects, and Sidney is introduced to the camp, including Freda and Luella, and to Cora Maguire and her two young children, Ronnie's second family. He also sees a pamphlet about illness, which makes him doubt that Ronnie invented his cancer. Leonard covers Sidney's absence with a story about a seaside holiday, which nobody believes; Geordie gets the truth out of him and follows. Cathy has packed Geordie's belongings and told him to leave.

At the camp, Abraham, who is to marry Luella and succeed her father Pal as head of the camp, quarrels with Ronnie. Sidney gets drunk, dances with Freda, and talks to Luella about her wedding; she is unsure of it and says the family intends to move away after it. Ronnie finds Sidney's bible and a photograph of Amanda in his bag and tells him that they are alike, both running from something. Ronnie then announces Luella's engagement at the gathering, and it emerges that Cora is his wife. Sidney confronts Ronnie, who says Cora knew, that Mrs Maguire would never have given him a divorce, and that he simply vanished. That night Sidney sees a shadowed figure in the woods, hears a cry and finds Ronnie dying on the ground. Pal refuses to call the police and says the community deals with its own. Sidney and Pal struggle and Cora separates them. In the morning Sidney fetches Geordie. Pal admits the figure was probably Marcus, the landowner's son.

Sidney discovers that it is Cora, not Ronnie, who is ill: she has cancer and no money for treatment, which is why Ronnie took the savings and why the community does not use conventional medicine. Luella has gone, and the money with her. Geordie breaks the news of Ronnie's death to Mrs Maguire and falters; Leonard takes over and tells her plainly about the second family. Mrs Maguire travels to the camp, is hostile to Cora on sight, and later concedes that she knows why Ronnie wanted Cora well. Sidney and Pal find Luella at the forge with Marcus Ruskin; she admits she wants to marry him and not to be a Romani wife, that Ronnie knew and had agreed to speak to Pal after the party, and that she found Ronnie dead and took the money to escape.

Abraham killed Ronnie Maguire. He had gone to Ronnie's house that night to be told the truth about himself, was laughed at or dismissed, and killed him in a rage; Sidney works this out from Abraham's anger and the fact that Abraham is not, and knows he is not, capable of leading the camp. Abraham holds Marcus at gunpoint at the forge and gives up the rifle when Sidney tells him Ronnie was right. Cora returns the money to Mrs Maguire, who gives her half of it for the children, and the two women reach an understanding. Jack Chapman watches Sylvia Maguire take off her wedding ring. Geordie tells Margaret Ward the affair is over. Sidney returns to Grantchester and visits Amanda, who tells him he must choose between her and the church, and he is left without an answer.

The episode is the series' most unusual, because it takes its central figure out of the parish, out of his clothes and out of the plot he has been in, and puts him in a travelling community where his own marriage is being discussed by strangers. The two families and the two women are the whole design, and the episode is careful to give Cora and Mrs Maguire the exchange that the men cannot have, with half the savings handed over between them. Ronnie's death is solved by a vicar reading a man's unfitness for a job rather than by forensic work.