Season 04 Episode 05

Leonard has disciplined a girl, Jessica, for stealing money from the church collection, and Will has let her keep the coin and said nothing to her father. They argue about it at the vicarage, and Will tells Leonard that his anger is really about Mrs Chapman, who is still refusing to see him. Will visits her and is told she prays for Leonard's soul. Will takes a telephone call from one of the maids at his family's house. She says it has happened again and this time she will report it. Will goes to her house with Geordie and they find Eli Roper, the Davenports' elderly gardener, badly beaten. Will visits Eli and is told to leave it alone. At the house, a decaying manor, they are invited to lunch by Will's father Thomas, his mother Amelia, and Thomas's friends Eddie and Meredith. Thomas mocks Will's wages and his job, calls him a constant disappointment and raises Will's youthful dalliance with a prostitute, and Amelia tries to turn the conversation. Thomas explains Eli's injuries by saying he caught him stealing and punished him, and calls Eli in to confirm it, and Eli, threatened with dismissal, says he is a thief who deserved it.

Over a drink afterwards Will tells Geordie that the family is no longer rich, because the estate is too large to keep up and they cannot pay the bills, which they will not admit. Geordie says he believes Cathy is having an affair, having seen Anthony Hobbs's manner around her. Before Geordie leaves, Meredith comes downstairs covered in blood: Eddie is dead in bed from a head wound. Meredith was sleeping beside him, so suspicion falls on her. Her marriage to Eddie was unhappy and both had affairs, hers years earlier with Will, and she became pregnant; the pregnancy ended and Eddie never forgave her. Thomas blames Eli, and a search of Eli's home turns up Eddie's cigarette case. Geordie finds pawnbroker's receipts among Eli's things, and Eli's wife Sally tells Will to ask his mother about them. Amelia admits she has been giving Eli her jewellery to pawn.

Geordie notices a broken nail tip on the floor by the bed and matches it to a nail projecting from a wall in the stables. Will, watching his father handle photographs of the horse, realises the Irish thoroughbred Thomas and Eddie were buying does not exist: the saddle in the stables has been on the estate since Will was a boy, and Thomas invented the horse to get money out of Eddie. Eddie had gone to look at the stables where the horse was to be kept, worked out that he was being cheated, and fought with Thomas, who pushed him; Eddie fell back onto the nail and the broken tip stayed in his skull long enough for him to walk back and get into bed, where he bled to death. Confronted, Thomas agrees to go to the station, asks for a moment alone, walks into the trees and shoots himself.

Elsewhere, Leonard has reported Will to the archdeacon for his absences and for the business with the stolen coin; after the archdeacon leaves, Leonard tells Will what he thinks of him and uses the phrase a constant disappointment, which is his father's phrase for him, and Will punches him. Will apologises and Leonard leaves to stay with Daniel. Geordie asks Cathy whether she is having an affair. She tells him, haltingly, that Anthony Hobbs assaulted her. Geordie gets up and walks out while she tells him not to do anything, because it is her fight.

The episode is the hardest of Series 4 and the best constructed, because the case and the family are the same thing and the murder is committed by the man hosting lunch. The non-existent horse is the detail the whole solution rests on, and it is found by a vicar recognising a saddle he has known since childhood, which is the sort of answer the series reaches when it is working well. Leonard's use of his father's phrase, and Cathy's halting account of what Hobbs did, are the two scenes the episode is built around in its second half.