Season 09 Episode 01

Carson's Circus comes to Grantchester. The vicarage party and the Keatings take a night out: Will Davenport, Bonnie, the baby James, Leonard Finch, Mrs Chapman, Jack Chapman, Geordie Keating, Cathy Keating and the children. Leonard tells a story about the dog. Mrs Chapman is delighted and Geordie is not, and says so. The show is run by Pogo, the ringmaster and head clown, whose real name is Jerry McAllister, and it is owned by Nanna Carson, a retired high-wire performer. Her granddaughter Anita performs as Feathers, the magician's assistant. The magician is Errol Macabre, real name Eric Mowbry. In the first trick Feathers escapes from a locked box but is still handcuffed, and when she calls a policeman up from the audience Geordie finds himself handcuffed to her to the crowd's delight. Errol's second trick, in which an arrow is fired at Feathers from a gun, goes off cleanly. A boy called Nick Jeffries is working at the circus and takes money from customers, which he passes to a woman who puts it under her chair, and Geordie remarks that the tax man will not see a penny of it.

Errol is found dead the next day in the position Feathers occupies for the trick, shot with a real projectile, and Jerry reported it. He insists nobody in the troupe killed him, because the circus is built on trust, and he and Nanna refuse to cancel the performances. Larry Peters tells Geordie and Will that the troupe had gone by eight, that they had all eaten dinner together out in the field, and that this was their one day off, and most of them had gone into town while Errol had not and was last seen before dinner. Anita says the gun in the trick is plugged and never fires, and Geordie finds that this one fired. She says she thought it was going to be a trick, and that Errol had lost his edge through drink. She had been a trapeze artist before Errol took her on as his assistant, and she admits she and Errol were planning to leave. Two bus tickets to London for the following Thursday are found in Errol's tent, along with a vial of a drug.

Will is wrestling with complacency. His congregation is shrinking, Leonard is skipping church, and Bishop Aubrey Gray tells him the world is changing, that people used to look to the church and now they look at the television set. The bishop offers Will an inner-city position in Newcastle, in a bigger parish with greater need, and wants an answer within a week. Will says no because of the baby and because they are happy. Geordie, told about the offer, says he would not want to move with a baby in the house, and Bonnie is upset that Will decided without her: she and Ernie have moved a lot, she feels cloistered in Grantchester, and she asks whether he wants to leave. Geordie has his own trouble at home, since Esme has applied for and been offered a job doing office work at Harrison and Sons without telling her parents. Geordie congratulates her on her initiative, Cathy feels betrayed and tries to write to Harrison and Sons as Esme to turn the job down, and Geordie argues they cannot control her.

Nick Jeffries does not come home, and Will finds him sleeping in the church pews with clown paint still on his face. Interviewed, Nick says he was going to audition for the circus, and that Errol asked him to help rehearse because Feathers had complained about Errol's missteps. Errol told him the trick was completely safe, Nick fired the gun and Errol died, and he ran. That establishes the question the investigation turns on: if Errol had not rehearsed, the next firing would have been during a show, aimed at Feathers, so someone removed the gun's plug and put in a real bullet.

The thefts widen the case. A woman reports a locket containing her husband's ashes stolen while she was at the circus, and there are similar reports from Little Shelford and, it emerges, from the towns the circus has already visited. Someone from the troupe has been slipping away before the audience gets home. Geordie puts Miss Scott and Larry on a stakeout at the next performance while he and Will search the tents, and they find a bag of money and a pawn shop receipt hidden under a false bottom in a crate. By the following morning the atmosphere between Miss Scott and Larry is awkward, since they spent the night together, and Miss Scott tells Geordie it was a mistake and that she will tell Larry so. Jerry is found rifling through Errol's tent and admits Errol supplied him with opium. He was a champion gymnast who narrowly missed the Olympics, and a back injury years ago left him able to perform only with a painkiller; he has no other skills and cannot imagine beginning another trade. Nanna is more aware of the circus's secrets than the troupe thinks, but she has one of her own: she is retiring and selling the circus, most likely to be stripped for parts.

Jerry's alibi had a hole. Only one person could tamper with the gun during dinner, when Jerry was in clown make-up entertaining the children, and that person need not have been Jerry, because Nick had borrowed Jerry's clown look as part of his audition. Facing the sale of the circus and resentful that Feathers had a future waiting for her, Jerry first tampered with her handcuffs before the act Geordie saw, which she turned into a triumph, and then tampered with Errol's gun intending to kill Anita, so that the act would end with a dead assistant and no sale. Errol died because he had chosen that night to rehearse with a boy who had borrowed the clown's face, and the trick that killed him was meant for the woman with the bus ticket to London.

The episode's best trick is structural, since the alibi that clears the guilty man is a costume rather than a person, and the audience has watched the clown make-up change hands without noticing what it was for. The plugged gun is the physical clue and it is deliberately reversed, since this is the one firing that was not supposed to be a trick. The handcuffs are the detail that identifies the motive, because tampering with those first shows a man working through the troupe in order of who was leaving.