Season 06 Episode 07

Leonard Finch is serving his six-month sentence. Daniel Marlowe's letters are read over the opening; Leonard avoids a fight in the exercise yard, and his cellmate Joe Davies steals his shoes. Leonard tells the prison chaplain, the Reverend Nick Byatt, that he has begun to think what he did was not a sin, and Byatt tells him to bring his sins into the light. An older prisoner, Elroy Hastings, warns him almost everyone inside is a pansy or will be before they leave, and tells him not to worry about it.

At the vicarage, Henry Jones has produced a six-part parish mission document, which Will compares to a rewritten Bible, and Tamara Gurney-Clifford arrives saying her mother has thrown her out. Daniel is drinking and quarrelling in the street about being blackmailed and asks Will why Leonard will not write to him. Will visits the prison to ask the same thing, and Leonard says he needs the time to reflect on his failings.

Joe Davies is found standing over a soaked Elroy, who is later found in the bath face down and fully clothed. Joe protests that he did not do it and is taken to confinement. Byatt makes the comparison at once: Joe is serving time for killing his mother, who was also found in the bath face down and fully clothed. The governor, James Milton, tells the prisoners there is no room for rumour. Leonard asks Will for help, and Will brings Geordie to the prison. They interview Joe, who is frightened of Milton, and then Leonard's cellmate is beaten by a prison officer, Lynch, who says Daniel has washed his hands of Leonard and that Leonard brought this on himself, and Will and Geordie arrive in time to stop it. Questioned, Lynch admits he takes money to see his family and says the prison is supposed to punish its inmates, that the families of pansies are easy money to threaten, and that he locked Elroy in the bathroom but left him alive.

Leonard is allowed ten minutes in the bathroom and finds the broken mirror and, on the floor, wood shavings. He traces them to the woodwork shop and to a small box that belonged to Elroy, carved with the word veritas and a ring of symbols Byatt says are the phases of the moon. Elroy's mother, Sophie Hastings, visits Leonard. She knew who her son was and cherished him, and what shamed her, she says, was everybody else. She tells Will a man came to her house and threatened to have Elroy hurt in prison unless she paid him, and she refuses to accept that Joe killed her son.

Leonard works out the symbols on the box are the combination to a safe and lets himself into Byatt's room, where he finds a book listing prisoners, their relatives and whether they could pay. Byatt's racket was blackmail of prisoners' families with Lynch as the enforcer. Elroy had worked it out and was going to expose it, so Byatt killed him and framed Joe, knowing the details of Joe's mother's death from Joe's confession. Byatt catches Leonard in the room, knocks over a chair and claims Leonard hit him, and Leonard is put in solitary. Will and Geordie take the last piece from outside the prison. Will asks Arthur Davies about his wife's wedding ring, which she was not wearing when she died, and Arthur breaks down and admits he killed his wife and not Joe. Joe is innocent of both deaths, and Will and Geordie confront Byatt. Leonard is released from solitary.

Geordie's own thread runs alongside and closes the episode. Johnny Richards, who is not charged in the airman's death, continues to work on him, talking about the darkness of the prison camp and the walls closing in, and saying he reached the point of preferring to drive his car into a tree. At the anniversary party Will and Sylvia arrange for Cathy, Geordie drinks heavily, talks over her, dances with Tamara and falls into the table, destroying the album Cathy made from her wedding dress, and she throws it at him. He goes home and offers her a new album and then a new camera; she refuses both, says she knows he was with Johnny and does not like what Johnny makes of him, and asks what they talk about. He asks whether she wants him to drag up the prison camp to make her feel good. She says she cannot remember the last time she felt good, mentions his affair, and turns to go. He takes hold of her arm and comes close to striking her. She walks away. At the prison, Leonard preaches on forgiveness, that it is easy for others to forgive us and much harder to forgive ourselves. Geordie sits at his kitchen table, looks at the tag inside his cap, and pulls out a folded paper listing the men in the camp and how each died. The list keeps unfolding, and he cries.

The episode is the best of the series' prison material because the murder is committed by the man employed to hear confessions, and the racket is built out of the one thing the prison has in quantity, which is information about families. The wood shavings are the clue that matters, since a box with a safe combination carved on it is a prisoner preparing to expose something rather than a prisoner at prayer. Sophie Hastings is the strongest guest figure the series gives any episode, and her line that what shamed her was everybody else is the plainest statement of the series' subject.