Season 07 Episode 03

Mrs Chapman is not herself. Geordie finds her in the yard at the vicarage staring into space with a pie burning in the oven and the vacuum and a tap left running. She believes God is punishing her for the illness diagnosed in the previous episode, and she has told nobody but Leonard, so Geordie knows nothing.

Leonard arrives to open the Cherry Orchard, the cafe he has set up with Jack Chapman's money, and finds a dead man on the doorstep. He is the third homeless man found dead in a doorway in recent weeks, and like the others he has been covered with a blanket. Leonard had seen him before and done nothing, and he attaches himself to the investigation out of guilt. The man carries a book of Tennyson poems with the name Robin Fellows written inside it, and letters and numbers Leonard recognises as a room number at St Margaret's College.

Will has his own distraction. Mrs Chapman has berated Ernie Evans, Bonnie's son, for carving initials into a church pew, and Bonnie is furious with the boy. Will takes Ernie out to work on his motorcycle and finds Ernie will not talk about his late father, and he works out the initials on the pew are the father's, not Ernie's, and carves the man's years of life alongside them, turning the vandalism into a memorial. Ernie talks about missing his father, and Bonnie later gives Will a bicycle bell Ernie had admired on his own bicycle, saying she had begun to doubt her son would recover from the death. Feelings between Will and Bonnie are established here while Will is still mourning the end of his affair with Maya.

Leonard goes with Geordie to St Margaret's College, where Robin's fellow student Jim Baker says Robin left at the end of the previous term, that there were rumours he had lost his mind, and that his parents took him away for a seaside recuperation. The dead man is not Robin and cannot be identified at all. Geordie then notices that the handwriting in the Tennyson book matches that of a card sent to the police station carrying only a Tennyson quotation: all things must die. Robin's tutor, Professor Edith Larson, a lecturer with a low opinion of bleeding-heart liberalism, tells them she has also received a note bearing a Tennyson quotation about death. She says Robin had been writing a thesis about the destitute and often helped homeless men along with Jim, intending to rehabilitate them.

Geordie and Leonard visit an encampment of homeless men Robin used to help, and most will not talk. Danny Smart, who has been arrested often enough to know Geordie, identifies the dead man as Barney and says he disliked him, since Barney had recently stolen his whiskey and they fought about it, after which Barney went into town, which Danny says was dangerous given the other deaths. Geordie orders a post-mortem against his superior's wishes and finds all three men were strangled, though they had been recorded as deaths by misadventure. Robin's parents tell Geordie and Will they have not seen their son for a week, having tried to look after him themselves rather than have him committed. When Miss Scott brings Geordie dinner and a clean shirt at the station, the last piece falls into place: all three men had been washed and shaved, and Robin cleaned them up before killing them, which his dormitory room, with a washbasin and sketches of the men, supports.

Robin is not in his room. He comes to the Cherry Orchard before it opens, Leonard recognises him and telephones the station, and Robin tells Leonard he did not want the homeless men to suffer any longer and says he wants to make it stop before embracing him. Geordie arrives, Robin takes a knife from the counter, and Geordie talks him down and arrests him. Geordie has by then established the pattern: the first killing coincided with Professor Larson failing Robin's thesis, and the second with a lecture at which she told him he had a saviour complex and threw him out. Robin is taken away by a doctor to an institution.

The case closes with the men it was about rather than with the killer. Jim Baker tells Leonard he hopes to become a vicar and feels guilty for not recognising Robin's distress. Will conducts Barney's funeral, and the only mourners are Geordie, Leonard and Jim. Geordie takes blankets and a bottle of whiskey to Danny, and Leonard decides the cafe should run a soup kitchen.

Mrs Chapman, meanwhile, has lost her purpose along with her faith. She takes Leonard to a restaurant and storms out after a waiter condescends to her, insulting the other diners and the staff on her way, and tells him she is ashamed and that she was wilder as a girl: she became pregnant as a teenager, had an abortion and promised God she would change. She kept the promise and has never been able to have children. What she has now is anger, and she stands in the church and tells God that if he turns his back on her she will turn her back on him, then retreats to the vicarage kitchen to weep.

The episode is the darkest of Series 7 and the one that comes closest to the series' own subject, because a student who wanted to help the destitute ends up killing three men out of pity and washing them first. The washed and shaved bodies are what makes the case, and the detail arrives with Miss Scott bringing a clean shirt. Danny Smart is worth more than his handful of scenes, since his account of what the men were afraid of is the only thing in the episode that treats them as people with a view.