Season 03 Episode 06

Sidney tells Archdeacon Gabriel Atubo that he has lost his faith in a church that will not let him marry the woman he loves, though he keeps his faith in God. Atubo, heavy-hearted, tells him to go and write his resignation letter to the bishop. Sidney tells Amanda, who is delighted and surprised that he has chosen her over the church; Leonard takes the news quietly and Mrs Maguire does not hide her anger, and tells Sidney that people need him.

Archie Reilly, a boy, is confronted by a man in the fields while walking past the photographer Daniel Marlowe's house, runs, falls and cuts his head. He gets to the church, where Sidney is rehearsing Mrs Maguire's wedding to Jack Chapman, and is taken home. His father, Richard Reilly, who teaches and whose family keeps a maid, Sally, dismisses the story, saying Archie has a vivid imagination. Sidney is not convinced. Geordie is sleeping at the station after Cathy threw him out, and tells Sidney that he is going to lose him now that he is happy.

Geordie finds that a young woman in the street wears a scarf of the kind Archie described, and that it belongs to Girton College, where Richard Reilly works. Then Archie's brother Jacob disappears while the two boys are playing hide and seek in the field. The village searches. Richard accuses Daniel Marlowe, and Leonard answers for him. Richard has had affairs with his students, which his wife Charlotte admits Sidney into knowing, and Sally, the maid, was one of them. Jacob's bag is found and contains food and a comic; Sidney concludes that the boy was not abducted but taken, and looked after. Archie will not name the man who gave him the food. Geordie goes to the college, where Mark Davies, a teacher, has a photograph of his son and a glass of milk and a comic on his desk. A second scarf is found. Davies is arrested. He maintains his innocence and says Sidney knows him. Geordie suggests that Sidney's friendship with Mark is a hindrance to the investigation. Geordie then loses control in the interview room, throws glasses against the wall and becomes violent with Davies; Sidney arrives and pulls him off. Margaret Ward confirms that Davies's son, Oscar, died in a car accident and that Davies has been unable to accept it.

Mark Davies took Jacob and hid him. He was not a kidnapper: he believed the Reillys were neglecting the boys, having left food and comics for them for weeks, and he was keeping Jacob safe in the aftermath of his own son's death in a road accident. Sidney talks Davies into giving the boy up and Jacob is returned to Charlotte. Geordie has meanwhile been talking to Sidney about how long he intends to punish himself for his affair, and Sidney comforts him; the two are reconciled.

Sidney confronts Amanda and tells her the church is part of who he is. She blames herself and says she knew he could not leave, and she is angry that he will not be there for Grace. He has missed the deadline for the deposit on the house they had chosen, and she finds his resignation letter still at the vicarage. The episode ends with Mrs Maguire's wedding to Jack Chapman, with Leonard officiating after a swallow of something stronger than communion wine, and Sylvia Maguire asking Sidney to give her away. Geordie and Cathy dance and begin to reconcile; Leonard kisses Daniel Marlowe and tells him they should be honest with themselves. Sidney cries at the wedding.

The finale is the strongest of Series 3 because it resolves every thread the series has been running in the same hour and does it at a wedding, with a vicar who has decided to stay and a detective who has decided to go home. The case involving the Reilly boys is deliberately the least of it, since the man who took a child did it out of grief and the village's instinct was to blame the one man in it who was openly gay. The last image is a man crying at somebody else's wedding, which is where the series leaves him before the recasting that follows.