Season 08 Episode 01

Will Davenport preaches with motorcycles parked at the altar, using the sermon to sell tickets for a charity motorbike race he has organised, and Mrs Chapman disapproves. The competing riders include Carl Taylor, a deaf rider who sketches; Jimmy Weller, whose father Ron Weller owns the local garage and acts as race official; and a late entry known only as Lightning, who arrives with a lightning-flash design on the helmet. A rival club from Newmarket, led by Tommy Wilson, trades insults with the local riders before Ron breaks it up, and Ron has brought a promoter, Frank, to watch. Will crashes into a hay bale. Carl's bike stalls at the start and he drops to last, then works back up to second behind Jimmy. Bonnie, who stayed away from the race, tells Will that Ernie was frightened by the crash, and that Will needs to discipline their son rather than leave it to her.

The next morning Carl is found dead in the field beside the track, head injuries, beer bottles scattered around him and his sketchbook at his side. Ron blames the Newmarket riders. Tommy Wilson is arrested and questioned, insults Geordie's jurisdiction, and eventually offers an alibi: an evening of board games with his landlady. Will examines Carl's bike and finds graphite on the spark plug, enough to short it, sabotage carried out between Ron's inspection and the start, and Carl had rubbed enough of it off to get going.

Will returns to Ron's garage, ostensibly for parenting advice, and finds a hidden leaderboard on which the riders recorded who had done a ton and on which machine. Comparing it with a photograph, he and Miss Scott trace Lightning's Triumph Tiger to a Howard Kidman. Howard turns out to be the father: the rider is Stephanie Kidman, who raced in disguise because women were barred from competing, and only Jimmy and Carl knew. Carl had approved of the club's refusal to admit her and was going to tell Ron she had raced. She denies the killing, and Will takes the view that she is telling the truth, because she had learned sign language for Carl and wanted him to see what she could do. Geordie notices that the last drawing in Carl's sketchbook is the only landscape in the book and that it was made with a harder HB pencil where Carl worked in 5B, so someone else drew it to place Carl at the track at the time of death.

Jimmy Weller sabotaged Carl's bike so that the promoter would see him beat Carl. Carl still took the attention after finishing second, realised who was responsible and confronted him once the others had gone, and Jimmy struck him twice with a crowbar, moved the body to the field and drew the landscape to make the police think Carl had died there. Geordie arrests him, and Ron's response is anger at his son's arrest rather than interest in his reasons, and Jimmy tells him he will never be good enough.

Alongside the case, DCI Elliott Wallace asks Geordie about early retirement at the end of the summer. Geordie says he is not ready and Wallace tells him the offer was not a choice. Leonard has opened his halfway house for men leaving prison and asks Will to minister there on Tuesday afternoons and to write to the newspaper on its behalf, and Will meets the first resident, Keith Pruitt, a recovering alcoholic. When Keith is found drinking and turns violent with a broken bottle, Will punches him and knocks him out. Ernie hides Will's bike keys and that night is caught trying to throw the leather jacket away, saying he is frightened Will will die, and Will promises the bike is going on a long holiday and stops Ernie's comics. Jack telephones: Bonnie's mother has had a stroke. Bonnie leaves for her parents at seven months pregnant, having argued with Will about it, and after she goes Will takes the motorcycle out. A man steps into the road from the verge, Will cannot stop, is thrown from the bike, and finds no pulse.

The episode is the first of a two-part story and it is built to end on the worst possible frame, with the vicar standing over a man he has just killed on a motorbike he had promised to put away. The graphite on the spark plug is the clue the audience sees before the police, and the pencil hardness in the sketchbook is the detail that catches the killer, since the one drawing in the book that is not a sketch is drawn in the wrong hand. Stephanie Kidman is the best invention in the episode and the most badly served, since the woman who raced in disguise to be taken seriously is cleared quickly and then dropped.