Season 09 Episode 02

Will is trying to find the right moment to tell Geordie that he has accepted the Newcastle post and that the family leaves in a week. Bonnie tells him Geordie will cope. The moment never arrives cleanly, because the day brings two events at once: a baby is found abandoned in the church, and a man is found dead at the River View Hotel.

The dead man is the hotel manager, Mr Daniels, who broke his neck falling down the stairs. One of his shoelaces is undone and a ring of keys lies on the stairs. The maid, Sissy Attwood, found him. The baby is hours old, left with an apologetic note and wrapped in a blanket with the hotel's logo stitched into it. A Mrs Smith checked in at 9.30 the previous night as the only woman on the register, and bloody towels in the empty room suggest she gave birth there. Will seizes the moment to tell Geordie he is leaving, and Geordie, shocked and hurt, does not engage with it at all and turns back to the case, which is the engine of the episode: the two of them work a murder while the senior of the two refuses to discuss the thing that matters.

The register gives one lead. The hotel operator logs a call made from the room at 9.56pm to Leonard's halfway house. Leonard keeps a record of outgoing calls but not incoming ones, so there is no name attached to them. Ernie is the only witness to the baby's arrival: playing marbles in the garden with Dora, he saw a woman go into the church and come out again, and he thinks she wore a grey blazer with a yellow badge, possibly a lion. At the girls' school the badge turns out to be a phoenix. The headmistress, Eileen Bradley, insists none of her girls could be pregnant and lets them interview the older pupils, and one of them, Lola McCallum, asks whether the baby is a boy or a girl, having lately been withdrawn and not eating.

The handwriting on the note left with the baby matches that on the hotel register and on the school's form registers. The woman who gave birth was not a pupil but a teacher, Rose Shirley. Geordie finds her at the school in pain and sends her to hospital, where the staff put her newborn in a crib beside her even though she has given the baby up. The headmistress visits her and hugs her, since Rose is her niece, and apologises for not having realised Rose was pregnant, and says Rose spent a period speaking to a man on the telephone every Saturday. The halfway house records show outgoing Saturday calls, and the initials SW belong to Sam White. Sam says the baby is not his, and that Rose confided in him that she was pregnant and did not want to keep the child, and that he put her in touch with a doctor who would not judge her. She had not called for some time until the night she went into labour, when she was frightened and said only that they were here before the line went dead, and another guest reported hearing somebody pounding on the door of Rose's room.

Will keeps trying to talk and Geordie keeps refusing to listen, telling him he is being selfish and that he has not thought about the people he is leaving behind. Geordie refuses his blessing outright, then tells the whole household, the Keatings, the Chapmans, Leonard and Daniel, and accuses Bonnie of having put Will up to it. Leonard, who nearly asks Will to stay but does not, tells him to go and be brilliant, and they call each other brothers, and Leonard promises to look after Geordie. Geordie has a second problem, which is his own staff: Larry, who spent the night with Miss Scott in the previous episode, tells Geordie he intends to propose, and Geordie advises him to talk to her first. Larry does not, and proposes with a ring that belonged to his mother, and Miss Scott stops him, saying it was sex, that he does not want to marry her, and that there is a Mrs Peters somewhere who will suit him better than she would.

The investigation turns on Sissy Attwood, who had not mentioned the man hammering at Rose's door. She admits she saw it and that he paid her to keep quiet, and he is a fellow teacher at the school, Mr Warne. He says the baby is not his, that he had been in Dublin until three months earlier, that he helped Rose to the hotel and signed her in, and that when he tried to check on her she would not let him in, so he pounded on the door, and he paid the maid five pounds for discretion. He denies any scuffle with the manager.

The killer is the headmistress. Eileen Bradley had learned of her niece's pregnancy and forced her to carry the baby to term because she wanted a child herself. She had already sent Warne to find Rose when Rose disappeared to give birth, which is who Rose meant by they are here. Eileen then went to the hotel herself, too late, and did not know it, and when the manager confronted her on the stairs she reached for his keys, he fell and broke his neck, and Rose had already gone. Rose tells Will and Geordie that Eileen forces people to do what she wants, and that she would have taken up with Warne because she bullies him the same way. The police find the pair in the countryside and recover the baby, and Eileen has by then taken a year's leave from the school for her nerves. Interviewed, she says she knows what is best for Rose and that she wanted a child and fate intervened, and Geordie puts it to her that she was angry because everyone was defying her.

The episode is the last of the Will-and-Geordie partnership as it has been, and it works because the murder is a woman forcing another woman to bear a child for her, which the series has never gone near before. The handwriting on the register and the form registers is what identifies the mother, and it is the plainest piece of document work in the run. The keys on the stairs are the detail that turns a fall into a killing, since a man who falls does not take a ring of keys with him, and the phrase they are here is a two-word clue that means something quite different once the headmistress is in the frame.