Season 05 Episode 03

Will baptises a baby and receives a note from his mother, who is no longer speaking to him. Geordie and Larry Peters attend the Beaumont cinema, where The Ladykillers is showing and where the cigarette girl Betsey Granger reports a break-in. The projectionist, Wyatt Rogers, shows them the booth, where somebody has been sleeping; the vagrant has gone, and the show has to go on. Wyatt says he came back from the Hollywood sunshine and was blacklisted by Senator McCarthy's committee. He is a screenwriter, or says he is. Larry is delighted by him and Betsey is tired of the story.

That night Will takes Ellie Harding to the pictures, with Vic Morgan and his wife Marie, and Matthew Butler and his friends. During the film a brick goes through the window of the Chapman house, where Jack had seen a young man loitering in the garden the night before. The projection stops, and a scream brings Will and Ellie into the booth, where Wyatt has been beaten about the head. He was alive when he changed the second reel, which puts the killing near ten past eight, and his wallet is untouched, ruling out robbery. In his pocket is an army medal inscribed to Aasim Hassan, rank Subedar, of the Indian Army.

By morning Geordie has arrested a suspect, Tariq Hassan, who had been living in the projection booth. He will not speak until he is shown his father's medal, and then says he dropped it when he heard someone coming and ran. He denies throwing the brick. The usher, Edwin Hensler, and Betsey both say a vagrant was in the building. Sylvia Chapman, brought in to identify the suspect, picks Tariq out, though something passes between Tariq and Jack Chapman during the identification. Jack then refuses to press charges, and the timing of the brick, thrown at the moment of the murder, gives Tariq an alibi rather than a charge.

Sylvia takes Tariq to lunch and learns the rest. Jack had been a civil servant in India during Partition and made his money driving families across the new border. Tariq's father, Aasim, was held up and Jack would not wait for him, and Tariq's mother paid Jack with her emerald engagement ring to bring her husband across. Tariq is in Grantchester looking for news of his father. Sylvia takes off her own wedding ring and gives it to him, and he recognises it as his mother's. Jack had kept it and described it to Sylvia as an heirloom, his position being that India was a different time and a different set of rules, and that he gave the woman hope rather than the truth. Sylvia walks out.

Wyatt's room yields a typewriter beaten out of shape, champagne bottles in the bin, and a case of photographs of women including a headshot of Betsey. Under questioning she admits the relationship and says he offered to send her headshot to Los Angeles and fly her out for a screen test. Will and Geordie write to the Remington Partnership and learn that Wyatt was not an American and not a screenwriter; he grew up in the children's welfare system and invented a career, and his sister lives locally. The usher Hensler admits he found the body and put the medal back in Wyatt's pocket, having lied about seeing Tariq. Betsey Granger killed Wyatt: she had learned the Hollywood offers were invention, and when he refused to smooth it over she struck him with the ashtray. She is arrested, and the episode notes that she had already begun using the death to present herself as the woman who loved a great man.

Before the arrest, Will told Ellie the whole of the case over a drink, they dance, and in the alley outside the evening turns physical. Will breaks it off and runs. At the Keating house, Cathy lets Diana take the children to the coast instead of school, they come back late, and Esme says in front of the family that her grandmother behaved embarrassingly in public. Diana raises a hand to Esme and Cathy stops her.

The episode is the most complete of Series 5, because the invented life at the cinema and the invented heirloom in the Chapman house are the same lie in two registers, and the second of them ends a marriage. The medal in the dead man's pocket is what turns a robbery into a war, and the usher returning it is what put the wrong man in a cell. The scene in the alley is the series' bluntest statement of what Will is, and it arrives in the same hour as a woman being told the man she covered up for never had a career to offer her.