Season 05 Episode 05

Will preaches while, elsewhere, a man runs through the streets with a bloodied face, hiding from pursuers, and when cornered offers them his money. At the police station the same man, Walter Burrows, reports a robbery and will not say how much was taken or who took it. Will collects Geordie for the charity boxing match at Vic Morgan's gym, with Leonard along. Vic tells Geordie the programme has worked. Geordie spots Ellie Harding in the crowd and Will asks him not to call her over; Leonard explains that the romance has faded.

In the dressing room Will finds Marie Morgan with both fighters, Matthew Butler and Lucas Rawlings, who are nervous. Vic makes a speech in the ring about the boxing programme and the boys it has saved, and Will embraces him in front of the hall. Matthew dominates the first round and does not fight back in the second, losing on points. In the bar afterwards Geordie says it looked as though he threw the fight, and Will admits he proposed to Ellie and was refused.

Will and Vic return to the gym to find a note on the door warning them not to enter and to call the police. Inside, Matthew and Lucas are unconscious in the ring. Both are taken to hospital and Lucas dies. The door had been locked from the outside and the key was missing.

A receipt found in the lockers leads to a personal advertisement in the Cambridge Echo placed by a man seeking a young male companion, spelled badly. Geordie and Will trace it to Walter Burrows, who admits he answered it and met Lucas, and that Matthew followed them, beat him and took his money. Geordie then notices a story in the same paper about a man who faked his wife's suicide, his point being that when two people attempt suicide and one survives, the survivor can be charged with manslaughter.

Matthew wakes and Will sits with him. He says he and Lucas had agreed to kill themselves, and asks about the suicide letter, which Will has not heard of. When Will touches him he panics, and when Vic comes into the room he screams at him to get away. Will tells Geordie that Matthew will only talk without Vic there. Matthew says Vic told him he was special and his favourite, bought the boys things to win them over, and that Lucas had decided they should take money from him because Vic was going to abuse them anyway.

Will confronts Vic, who admits buying the boys magazines, denies everything else, and says it will be Matthew's word against his. Will goes to Marie Morgan, who denies having been at the gym and then hands him the suicide note, and tells her she is the only person who can stop her husband. She comes to the station to make a statement. Geordie interviews Vic, who says Will only believed it because he is the best of men, and that this has broken him. Geordie punches him. Matthew's mother refuses to believe her son, calls him a liar and leaves him, and he strikes Will and is taken to a cell.

Leonard, asked by Will to keep an eye on the Chapmans, tries and fails to broker a reconciliation between Jack and Sylvia. He then tells them he will not speak to either until they settle their differences, since neither is going to leave the other. Jack writes to Tariq Hassan offering financial support and tells Sylvia he has a past he is not proud of but that he met a woman who made him want to be better, and they kiss. Leonard and Daniel walk together and Daniel agrees to read the letter from Leonard's father.

The episode is the most uncomfortable of the series and the one it is most careful with, because the man the audience has been invited to admire for an hour is destroying the boys he claims to have saved. The suicide pact is the false explanation, and the fight thrown in the second round opens the case, since a boy who wins the first round and will not fight the second has already been told something. Marie Morgan's statement closes it, and Matthew's mother calling him a liar and leaving him is the part the episode is really about.