Season 04 Episode 04

Will is working on his motorcycle while Mrs Chapman frets about a meeting with the archdeacon. He arrives late and unprepared, is told the Bishop of Ely will preside at his installation, and tells the archdeacon he has never been more certain of anything. The bishop swears him in. Cathy is cooking for Geordie and the children and talking about a doctor's appointment; she cannot get a note for another week, and the doctor has said something about her nerves.

A small boy walks into the police station with blood on his shirt that is not his own, a Bible and bruises on his arms. He will not answer questions. Geordie plays darts with Sean Donovan, Larry Peters brings the boy in, and Sean suggests putting him in a cell. Geordie asks Will to read the page the Bible is open at, and then to talk to the boy. Will tries a treat, Sean breaks a cup by accident to see if the boy flinches, and nothing works until Will signs to him. The boy's name is Adam Carter.

Adam's home is a farm, and the family are strict Mennonites. Ernest Carter is preaching over the body of his wife Miriam, who fell from the hayloft, and Adam was not allowed in the loft. Ernest blames him for the death and says he will be punished for his sin. Will argues with him, and Geordie tells Will to keep his temper during an investigation and searches the loft himself, finding one lens from Miriam's glasses and a red ribbon. Miriam's cruelty emerges from the family's own accounts: she believed Adam's deafness was a mark of the devil and made him kneel on rock salt to pray, and she burned the sign-language book his sister Hannah bought to teach him. Hannah says the red ribbon is hers, but she believes red is the colour of the devil and Will catches the lie. She was protecting her sister Esther, who is pregnant and was going to run away with the farmhand Paul, and Paul gave her the ribbon. Miriam had discovered the pregnancy. Esther was saved from immediate punishment by going to market with her father and Hannah, and when they came back Miriam was dead. When Will and Geordie put the accounts together, Adam tells Geordie he pushed his mother.

Will does not accept it, and works out that another member of the household was in a position to intervene: Ernest's mother, Clara Carter, who was appalled by what Miriam did to the children and by her son's silence while it happened. When Miriam turned on Adam, Clara threw a rock at her and pushed her out of the hayloft, killing her, and the missing lens came out during the struggle. Clara is arrested. Ernest tells Will his wife became cruel and so did he, and is persuaded to change, and he gives Adam a sign-language book so the boy can learn to speak.

In the parallel strand, Mrs Chapman decides she cannot go on at the vicarage while Leonard is carrying on with Daniel, and leaves, and Leonard is left alone in the house. Cathy returns to the department store, is cornered again by Anthony Hobbs, reports him, and is told by her manager that she must have given him the wrong idea and that the matter is closed. Will Davenport takes his installation as vicar in this episode.

The episode is the strongest of Series 4 and one of the best in the run, because the cruelty done to a deaf boy is the whole of the case and the killer is the only adult in the house who tried to stop it. The point where the child confesses and the vicar refuses the confession is the series at its most careful, since Adam's guilt is real to him and entirely false, and the sign language is what allows both the investigation and the child to work at all. Cathy's complaint being closed down by her manager is played without comment and is the more effective for it.