Season 08 Episode 03

Cathy Keating organises an outing to occupy Will, who will not talk about the accident. Modigliani's Reclining Nude is on loan to a Cambridge college and is hanging in the chambers of the art historian Dr Abbot, who has spent seven years writing a paper on Modigliani's nudes. Will, Cathy and Geordie view the painting and then attend a garden reception at which Abbot is speaking.

Three young women interrupt, protesting against the hypocrisy towards women in art by stripping to their underwear. The crowd throws things at them, and Geordie is knocked over as one of them runs past. When one of the women removes her bra, Cathy goes to her and wraps her in the discarded dress, Geordie arrests her and the others get away, and during the disturbance someone shouts that the painting has been stolen. Abbot is furious. At the station the arrested woman refuses to give her name or address and refuses to dress, so Geordie puts her in a cell while his colleagues make jokes at his expense. Larry then telephones from the college: a porter, Peter Delaney, has been found dead in his dormitory, struck on the back of the head with a heavy candlestick lying beside him. Will nearly has a panic attack when he sees the body.

Cathy and Mrs Chapman have brought Bonnie home for a few days, and she and Will are briefly happy, but Will is angry when he realises his friends sent for her and refuses to discuss the accident with her. Porters are not permitted to marry, yet Peter's room contains love letters about an expected child from a woman named Sheila. Geordie finds Sheila Delaney in poor lodgings: they have been married for two years, he took the college job and did not tell her he would have to present himself as single, she lives separately and they communicate by letter, and they came down from the north a few months earlier.

Miss Scott takes tea and biscuits to the cell and gets the prisoner talking. She gives her name, Marianne Robertson, and says she is at Newnham College reading mathematics. She insists that only the protesters knew about the demonstration, so nobody could have used the chaos to kill a man or steal a painting, and that she and her friends had nothing to do with either. Geordie releases her and undertakes not to prosecute the others.

Meanwhile Daniel advertises for a housekeeper at the halfway house without telling Leonard. Martha Williamson, who says she has worked in fine hotels and that everyone deserves the same standard of care, leaves her details after Leonard sends her away. Leonard is angry at Daniel for going behind his back, they argue, Daniel apologises, and Leonard agrees to contact her.

Geordie returns to Sheila, who says she last saw Peter on the day he died: her friend Josephine, a maid at the college, had told her the commotion over the painting would let her slip in and speak to him, and when she did he told her the marriage was over and she should go back to Sheffield. She left in tears and he was alive. Josephine corroborates the timing and says they met outside the college a few months earlier and became friends, Sheila's life being as lonely as it is. Geordie then searches Sheila's flat on the theory that she killed Peter and stole the painting to disguise the motive, and Will spots the painting rolled up in a bin outside. Josephine is brought in and told that Sheila will go to prison either way now that the painting has been found at her home.

Josephine Hanlan killed Peter Delaney. She had watched him break Sheila down and concluded he did not care about his wife at all. She had a key to Abbot's chambers, took the painting during the protest to make the death look like a robbery, and intended to sell it, which would have been impossible for a painting that famous, and she still had it with her when she went to check on Sheila, saw Geordie there, panicked and threw it away. Geordie goes to Abbot and tells him that if he had mentioned that his cleaner had a key, and had treated the college's service staff as people rather than furniture, the police would have got there sooner, since Abbot had been more concerned about the theft than the death. Will tells his friends that the death of the man in the collision does not haunt him and persuades Bonnie to return to her mother, taking Ernie with her. He smiles as the car pulls away and stops smiling as soon as it is gone.

The episode sets its killing inside a college that forbids its porters to marry and treats its maids as furniture, and then makes the killer a maid who watched a wife being humiliated one time too many. The painting is the device that makes the death look like part of a robbery, and it fails for the reason the characters point out, that nobody could sell a picture this famous. Abbot's parting reprimand is the episode's argument stated plainly, that the college's own hierarchy is what slowed the case down.