Season 09 Episode 04

The church needs about two thousand pounds of repairs. Alphy has secured a dinner invitation at the estate of the Marwoods and intends to ask for a donation. Mrs Chapman, who has reinstated herself as housekeeper at the vicarage without asking him, tells him the Marwoods are snobbish and seldom give, and that there is a sister living in the house who should be avoided at the table. Geordie's morning is spent watching Cathy and Esme argue: Esme wants her independence, Cathy wants to protect her, and Geordie's advice to let it blow over is dismissed.

At the manor, Lord Marwood is cold and, once Alphy mentions money, hostile, and his questions about Alphy's background, whose parents came to England just before the war, are not neutral. Lady Marwood is the opposite: welcoming, flirtatious, and clear about the arrangement in the marriage, since her family has the money and her husband's has the title. She offers to fund the church and tells Alphy they can discuss the detail later, because there are games to be played. Her sister Beatrice Groves, a dress designer, sits next to Alphy and interrupts, and Lord Marwood is contemptuous of her clothes and of her talk of orphans. Alphy charms the rest of the table and makes Lady Marwood laugh, which earns a toast to his church.

After dinner the party plays hide and seek. Alphy accidentally startles Lord Marwood near the servants' quarters and hides in the basement, where he finds a body in a pantry. The dead man is Dennis Lacey, twenty-five, the estate's gardener, stabbed several times with something that leaves a distinctive wound, and in his pocket is a note demanding one thousand pounds to keep a secret. Geordie arrives and treats Alphy's presence as inevitable, since Alphy has become the third vicar to arrive at a corpse.

Questioned, Lord Marwood answers for his wife and his sister-in-law and overrides them when they speak. It emerges that Dennis left, or was dismissed, after only three weeks because he wanted more money, and that Marwood shouted at him on his last day. The household's maid, Leah Carpenter, is deferred to by everyone and answers questions for nobody, and Alphy and Geordie resolve to speak to her alone. Alphy also tells Geordie the donation is coming, and Geordie warns him that money from the Marwoods is dirty and comes with expectations. Leah has known Lady Marwood since they were girls, because her mother worked for the Lady's mother, and she has worked at the estate since she was sixteen, and she confirms that Lord Marwood screamed at Dennis the day he was due to leave. Marwood's account is that Dennis had become over-familiar with his wife and that he dismissed him for it, and Lady Marwood says her husband is a brute, and also weak, and that he could not have killed anyone.

Mrs Chapman brings Alphy flowers, and the flowers are what solves the case, since cutting them prompts him to see that Dennis's wounds were made by scissors. At Beatrice's workroom a pair of dressmaking scissors carries blood at the tip. Beatrice denies knowing anything about the blood and volunteers that she and Lord Marwood were having an affair, and she has photographs. Lord Marwood denies it until shown them, then says his wife is not interested in him in that way and that he was providing a service rather than conducting a romance. Dennis had found them together and written the note, and Marwood scraped together the thousand pounds from money he could get at, had been checking that Dennis had actually gone when Alphy startled him near the servants' quarters, and had taken his money back when he found it still there. He insists he did not kill Dennis and could not have, since he never managed to kill a man during the war either, which he offers as proof of cowardice rather than decency.

Alphy has been getting pages torn from a Bible with passages circled, and one night Dickens's barking wakes him. He goes downstairs, finds the front doorknob turning, shouts, and opens the door to nobody. Mrs Chapman's visits are the less alarming form of the same thing, and he tells her he does not need a housekeeper, and she replies that she was more than that to his two predecessors, which was a friendship and not a job. She shows him the small piece of jewellery Sidney Chambers gave her.

That jewellery, and Leah's gold bracelet, are the same kind of object. Leah cannot afford a bracelet like hers, so it was a gift from someone she loves, and Alphy takes the thought to Geordie: perhaps Lady Marwood loved Leah rather than the other way round. Questioned, Leah admits she has loved Lady Marwood since they were children, that the bracelet is from her, and that she had noticed Lady Marwood enjoyed Dennis's advances even though Dennis did not love her as Leah did. Leah thought at first that Dennis was forcing himself on her ladyship and then realised that Lady Marwood was allowing it. She took the scissors and killed him. Have you ever loved anyone like that, she asks the two men as she is taken away.

Lady Marwood gives Alphy a cheque for three thousand pounds, a thousand more than he expected, and tells him flirtatiously that more could follow if he keeps coming to dinners and events at the estate, and Alphy hands it back. Geordie buys him a book on building repairs instead, they agree to share a beer, and Alphy makes him keep the promise of a ride in the Triumph.

The vicarage household has two other threads. Leonard watches Sam White, the street preacher he took in at the halfway house, work on Daniel Marlowe in front of a group, telling the men that they need to forgive themselves and asking Daniel what he is holding on to. Daniel speaks about a family he can no longer be with, and later asks Leonard whether talking to Sam might be beneficial. Leonard says it is a wonderful idea and privately begins to feel that Daniel has not come to him. Daniel then tells Leonard he wants to speak to Sam alone, shows Sam a photograph of his parents that he has shown nobody else, and says he hurt them but loves them, and Leonard watches the two of them laughing from another room. At the Keatings' the quarrel ends worse than it began: Esme announces that a friend has offered her somewhere to live and that she is moving out, Cathy refuses at first, then loses her temper, tells her daughter she hates her and to go. When Esme is packed and ready, Cathy will not come to say goodbye, and Esme asks Geordie whether her mother meant it. He tells her no.

The episode solves its killing with a pair of scissors in a dressmaker's workroom and a bracelet that a maid could not have bought, which is as tidy a pair of clues as the series has produced under a new vicar. The dinner party is the real achievement, since a house where the husband is bought and the wife does the buying, and the sister is despised for talking about orphans, is the whole of the class arrangement in one table. Leah's question as she is taken away is the only line in the episode that anyone could answer honestly and nobody does.