Season 06 Episode 03

Leonard is interviewed by Larry Peters with Geordie present. He is told he is accused of an act of gross indecency with another man, shown the photographs Bryan took, and asked whether he is a homosexual. He refuses to answer and is released. Daniel is interviewed separately and says he danced with Cathy Keating that evening, was back in his chalet by ten and denies being in Leonard's chalet. Both are released.

Will is drawn into the parish council election. Reeny McArthur is standing for the seat her husband Derek held, and he had been found drowned with his death recorded as suicide. Maurice St Martin is standing against her, arguing for the council to cut red tape for local businesses and in particular for his cousin Phillip's building plans, and suggests to Will that Derek's suicide says something about what else he might have been capable of. Reeny shows Will a letter from a property firm approving Derek's purchase of a holiday home, which she says contradicts the idea that he killed himself, though Geordie treats the death as closed. Will points out that the closing words of Derek's suicide note are the same as the closing words of a letter Derek had written to a constituent about a blocked drain, and the two conclude the bottom line of a genuine letter was cut off and used to compose the note. They find the property in the correspondence empty, with the post uncollected, so the note cannot have been put together by anyone who did not know the house was vacant.

Meanwhile, Sylvia Chapman is interviewed as a potential witness and says she cannot recall Leonard leaving the dance hall and never saw him show affection to another man. Will is asked by Geordie for an exonerating statement and refuses to lie, and Sylvia pleads with him to lie to the police, saying she cannot lose her boy, which Leonard overhears.

Maurice St Martin runs from Will and Geordie when they find him watching the candle warehouse from a house across the street, and is arrested. The surveillance journal and the cigarette butts turn out to have been planted, and he is released once he explains he was arranging for Derek to buy a house in Hove and would not kill a man he was earning from. The story does not fit him. The solution is Robert Waterhouse, the novelist who has been helping Reeny's campaign. He had been in love with Reeny for twenty years and had served in the war, and his publisher describes his work as having military accuracy. Derek had beaten his wife, and Reeny confirms violent moments and a domestic incident five years earlier that left her injured. Robert assembled the false suicide note to make Derek's death look self-inflicted, and when Will reads a passage of his new book aloud in the interview room, it reads as a confession. Robert admits he loved Reeny and that Derek beat and broke her, and says he believes he did the right thing. Geordie tells him he murdered the man in cold blood. Reeny is left having lost her husband and her oldest friend, and says Robert had made it his job to save her without asking her.

The election is derailed at the hustings, where Maurice raises the allegations against Leonard in public. Will nearly attacks him and calls for his disqualification, and Leonard leaves the hall. Leonard goes to the station and confirms that Bryan's allegation is true, while denying the other man was Daniel. Geordie charges him with gross indecency, Leonard pleads guilty and is taken to a cell, and the episode ends with him locked in.

The episode is the best of Series 6, because the parish council election and the prosecution of a curate are the same story about what a town will tolerate. The forged note is found by comparing the last line of a real letter with the last line of a fake one, the most convincing piece of document detection in the run. Robert Waterhouse is the least obvious killer the series has had, since the case against him is his own prose, and the election ending with Leonard in a cell refuses to let the two plots resolve separately.