Season 09 Episode 03

Geordie is drinking with Leonard in the Blue Ball Inn because he has nobody else to drink with. Mrs Chapman runs in to say that a swarthy gentleman is breaking into the vicarage. Geordie, Leonard and Mrs Chapman hurry over, Geordie tells the other two to guard the door and goes in alone, grabs the man from behind and puts a box of crockery on the floor, and the man hits him hard in the face. He is the new vicar, the Reverend Alphy Kottaram, unpacking his belongings in his own house. Geordie apologises, Alphy asks what was said about him and hears the word swarthy, and Geordie leaves.

Alphy reads the notes Will left him. He goes to swim in the pond on the neighbouring estate and is told by Rachel Baron that he is trespassing. She is friendly once she knows who he is, admires his physique, and tells him her father, Albert Baron, has just died by suicide, shooting himself with his rifle in the field behind them. At the funeral Rachel and her brother Harvey are the only mourners until Lionel Walker and his son Jamie Walker walk in, Harvey punches Lionel and orders him out, Lionel tells the coffin he will see Albert in hell, and Harvey shouts at Lionel to admit what he did while Lionel says Albert took his own life.

Harvey tells Alphy, and then Geordie, that his father was murdered. The rifle found with the body was not Albert's: it is the same model, but Albert notched the stock by hand for every deer he killed and this one has no notches. Harvey has a second complaint, which is where the case's history is: he says Henry VII gave his family the field in 1545, and Lionel says it was a gift to his own ancestor, the king's mistress, and the two families have been arguing about that field for centuries. Jamie says listening to it has been hell.

Geordie asks Alphy to help and is refused. Alphy tells him he has no faith in the police and calls them morally bankrupt, power-hungry, violent thugs. Geordie wins the first concession by saying he has learned empathy from Alphy's two predecessors, which allows him to examine the body before burial. At the station Larry Peters takes Alphy's statement and Miss Scott introduces herself, notices he wears no wedding ring and offers to show him the village, which embarrasses Larry. Geordie's own contribution to the case is physical: Albert was right-handed, and a right-handed man cannot easily shoot himself in the right side of the chest with a long rifle.

Alphy has a pre-wedding appointment that Will arranged, for Rachel Baron and Jamie Walker, who are marrying despite the feud so that once married they can sell the disputed field and end the argument. Rachel kisses Alphy as he leaves. He then sees Jamie and Harvey talking together in the field, and it does not read as two men settling a boundary dispute. Leonard comes to the vicarage with a gift and an apology for the break-in, and Alphy asks him about the families. Leonard says he never took Jamie for the marrying sort, at least not to a woman, and then tells Alphy that he is homosexual. The two of them find common ground in being unlike the village and in having read Dostoevsky. Leonard also introduces him to Dickens, the black Labrador who comes with the house, and defends Geordie against Alphy's description of him as a judgmental right-wing tyrant, saying he is more tolerant than he looks but that the village takes time to soften towards anything different.

Alphy is drawn into the field and climbs the oak at its centre, where Jamie left love letters for Rachel. The note he finds is from Jamie and it is addressed to Harvey. Both families report him for trespassing, so Geordie finds him in the tree and Alphy shows him the letter. Geordie interviews Rachel, who says she loves Jamie and he loves her, and then interviews Jamie and Harvey, who are frank about the arrangement: Jamie and Rachel marry for practicality and to dispose of the land. Lionel comes to the church and tells Alphy he will miss Albert and that he should have done more, and Alphy takes that to Geordie as a confession, but Geordie has an alibi for the whole family: a photograph shows Lionel and the children in the Blue Ball Inn at the engagement party for Rachel and Jamie at the hour Albert was shot. Alphy points out that the pub clock is an hour slow, so the alibi proves nothing. Lionel is brought in and asked to empty his pockets, and he produces a bloodstained handkerchief with his initials on it and says he has never seen it before.

Lionel then tells the truth about the shooting. Albert had asked him to come to the field because he wanted the wedding stopped: he knew Jamie and Harvey were in love and he wanted it out in the open. Lionel refused to believe it. The two men argued, the rifle went off and Albert was hit, and Lionel tried to staunch the bleeding and ran when he heard someone coming. Albert was still alive when he left, and the handkerchief was left there with him.

Rachel Baron killed her father, in the sense the law cares about. She was the person who came across the scene and she did not help. She sat with her father while he bled to death, then took Lionel's handkerchief and planted it on him at the funeral while he and Harvey argued. Her motive was the marriage and the money the land would raise, and she could not afford for the truth about Jamie and Harvey to come out. Her kiss with Alphy, which she explains as wanting to be wanted, is the same impulse. The photograph in the engagement announcement gives her away, since the handkerchief is in her pocket. Confronted, she says she let him die so that she could have some peace, and states that she will still marry Jamie and have children.

The episode's personal strand resolves. Cathy comes to the station because Esme has not come home, Geordie introduces her to Alphy, and he and Alphy walk the town looking for her, which is the first time the two of them talk as equals. They find Esme at The Hope and Anchor with friends. Esme's behaviour at home, and Sylvia Chapman calling her a disrespectful minx, and the quarrel that follows over the state of the floors, is left unresolved. Alphy takes his first service and greets every member of the congregation individually, making them uncomfortable with his friendliness while Leonard enjoys it, and afterwards he and Geordie share a pint. Geordie asks whether he has a tragic past or a secret, as both his predecessors did, and Alphy says no, he just likes football.

The episode has to do two jobs at once and does both, since it introduces a vicar with no faith in the police and then hands him a family that has been litigating the same field for four hundred years. The notchless rifle stock is the clue that turns a suicide into a shooting, and the wounds are decided by which hand the dead man wrote with. The pub clock being an hour slow is the neatest reversal in the episode, because it destroys the alibi that had just been used to close the case. The killer is the only person who was neither in the field nor in the pub, and her motive is the one nobody in either family would admit to.