Season 05 Episode 02

Will rides out to his mother's house to meet St John Gurney-Clifford, the man Amelia has taken up with. Over lunch the pair laugh at Will's salary, and St John breaks the news that he has proposed and Amelia has accepted. At the vicarage a television set has arrived, to Mrs Chapman's alarm, and she answers it with scripture.

Will and Leonard are walking in the village discussing the television when a car speeds past and strikes a man carrying white orchids. The man dies in the road. Will did not see the driver but has registered the number plate without being able to recall it. Geordie takes the case. The dead man is Richard Astor, known as Dickie, who owns a finance company at Waterbeach. Larry Peters finds the flowers worth pursuing, and is keen on the reporter Ellie Harding, who is at the scene and is told nothing.

Astor's widow, Jacqueline, tells Geordie she has been with her husband since he was nineteen and that he swept her off her feet. At Astor's office Geordie finds a hidden book while the receptionist is out of the room. Outside, Will's memory of the plate surfaces: GSK 786, registered to Elliot House on Way Lane, and Mrs Chapman knows the road and directs them. At the house the brothers who live there are unwelcoming. Graham, who answers, orders his brother John back upstairs and shows the police the car under a tarpaulin, saying it has barely been used in twenty years. The cover comes off to reveal a dent on the bonnet.

John Graham turns out to be a distant cousin of Astor's and a former investor. He tells Geordie that Astor ran a swindle, that he bled the brothers dry through John, and that Astor had begun working on the equity in their house. Asked whether he killed Astor, John says nothing. The interrogation shows John to be a man damaged by war: he has not driven anything in years, and Geordie confirms with his brother that he has shell shock. Ellie and Will climb the wall of the property. Will accuses John, and Ellie takes over and gets him talking about the flowers and the statues in the garden, until he reacts badly when asked whether Astor had been at the house before he died. When John is arrested after smashing his own statues, Larry brings in the flowers from the shop, and they prove to have been ordered for a woman named Rosalind. She is found at Astor's office and runs, with money in her bag. She admits the affair and says they were going to London and that Astor was going to tell his wife. She cannot drive.

Geordie and Will put the killing to Jacqueline Astor, who does not deny it. She says that as a middle-aged woman her choices were limited, that she borrowed the car with John Graham's help, and that once she was in it she could not lift her foot from the pedal. She says she is not sorry, but that she is sorry for what the two of them had become, and asks Geordie to tell the brothers so. In her earlier scene with Will at the church she had already said she did not love her husband.

Elsewhere, Leonard and Daniel spend a night together at the vicarage while Mrs Chapman stays with the Chapmans, and Will keeps her talking when she returns early so that Daniel can leave unseen. Cathy is made shop steward for ladies' wear at Swinnertons and argues with her mother, who says she should not be working. Geordie takes Diana's side and tells Cathy to keep the job. Will tries and fails to talk Amelia out of the marriage, and preaches on family.

The episode is the best of the run for a solution offered without protest, because the woman who drove the car tells the police exactly what she did and why and refuses to be sorry, while the wrecked man the investigation spends an hour on is collateral damage. The number plate surfacing in the vicar's memory is the quietest piece of detection in the series, and the flowers bought for a mistress and carried past a wife who was already in the car is what makes the whole thing cohere.