Season 07 Episode 02

Will is in the church, asking God what to do about his feelings for Maya, who is engaged to DCI Elliot Wallace. He meets her to end it, fails, and they sleep together at the vicarage while Geordie, in the next room, tries not to hear. Next morning Bonnie Evans arrives at the vicarage with her son Ernie and Geordie's children. She is Cathy's widowed niece, staying with Cathy and helping with the children, and she has been doing handstands on the lawn in a dress, which Geordie did not know Cathy needed. He and Will are called out and leave the children with her.

The call comes from the Carmichael house. Melanie Carmichael is scrubbing the front steps when they arrive, and upstairs her husband Lester is dead in bed, drenched in blood, the telephone in his hand. Melanie had collected him after he cut his hand badly on a paper knife, hence the bandage, and he bled out from a pellet lodged in his neck which moved when he turned in his sleep. The pellet is the kind fired by a child's gun, and the Carmichaels have no children. Will and Geordie find scraps of a burned bank statement in the fireplace and large recent withdrawals.

The investigation leads into Lester's private life, which is less spotless than the image he and Melanie presented to the public. He was a regular visitor to a suburban brothel run by Betty Rose. The switchboard operator reveals that Melanie was called not by Lester but by Betty, since Lester had been with Betty when his glass shattered, cutting his hand, and she telephoned his wife. A pellet gun is found among the toys of a boy playing outside the brothel, who says Betty sent him out for sweets that morning, and he is the son of one of the women there. A shot through the window could have hit Lester's glass, cut his hand and lodged in his neck. The gun has been wiped clean, but there are fingerprints on the fragments of the glass: Lester's own and those of the boy's mother, Velma Sawyer.

Velma has a record for threatening her former partner with his gun and is leaving town when Will and Geordie reach her. She says Lester, unlike her former partner, was a good man who was going to give her somewhere to live and put her son through school. Betty was upset at the prospect of losing her, does not trust men, and thought Lester would abandon her, and Melanie resented the use of her company's money, the large withdrawals being for Velma, which makes both women suspects in a joint killing. That reading collapses: the man who fired the shot was Velma's next client, who had seen her with Lester, had his belief that she loved only him destroyed, picked up the boy's discarded gun and fired through the window without meaning to kill anyone. He is arrested. Betty is held for running a house of ill repute and asks Will and Geordie to tell Velma to look under a doll, where a roll of money is waiting, and as Velma leaves the brothel for the last time she tells an approaching client that it is closed.

The episode's other plot is Mrs Chapman's illness. She has been irritable, refusing to kiss Jack and going out to bingo. Leonard follows her, sees her meet a man at the vicarage, and confronts her afterwards to find her drinking and playing jazz, and the man is her doctor. She is waiting for a test result and asks Leonard to go with her to the appointment, where he is taken for her son and she is told she has a tumour and will need radiotherapy and a hysterectomy. She asks no questions, tells no one else, and Jack, sure she is having an affair, is left to guess. Cathy works at a department store, where a colleague, Clive, asks her to take on more work for the Carmichael account, tells her she can talk a nun into a negligee, and later, when she turns down his advance, tells her a woman with children should be grateful he noticed her at all. Geordie, suspicious of Cathy with little cause, gives Miss Scott money for a drink and asks her to watch Cathy at the pub. Miss Scott tells Cathy what he has done, and the two women spend his money getting drunk and complaining about men. The next day Cathy waits at the station to tell him what she thinks, and Miss Scott uses the moment to negotiate a longer lunch hour. Will ends the affair with Maya for the second time, having recognised in the arrested man the same indulgence in a fantasy life he has allowed himself.

The case is built so that the audience is handed two credible killers and a third who fits the evidence better and cares less, which is the point the episode makes about what a respectable man was allowed to do. The pellet is the detail that makes the death plausible as an accident, since a pellet that moves in the neck was never aimed, and the fingerprints on the glass rather than the gun send the investigation the wrong way for an hour. Betty's doll and the money under it is the only kind thing anyone does for Velma, and the line about the brothel being closed is the episode's last word on the subject.