Season 09 Episode 05

Esme has moved out of the family home but still brings her laundry back, and brings her housemate Mae Jenkins's with it. Cathy does it and finds a prescription for contraceptive pills in a dress pocket. She takes it to the police station and tells Miss Scott, who has to tell her that Geordie is out on a murder investigation at the company where Esme works.

Mae Jenkins has been found dead in a storeroom at Harrison and Sons, where she and Esme work as office clerks. It is her nineteenth birthday and the office has just had cake. Geordie sends the cake to be tested for almonds, because Mae had a severe allergy. Earlier that day Esme had found Mae in the storeroom alive, with Malcolm Grant, the second-in-command at the firm, who propositions the female clerks as a matter of routine, Esme included, and tells her the storeroom is haunted by a girl called Iris. The office is run day to day by Miss Cheadle, who tells the detectives what the men are like: they rank the girls by their willingness to flirt and call the cheerful ones Marilyns and the rest Doris Days.

Geordie, learning about the prescription, puts his daughter in an interview room and accuses her of taking the pills, and Alphy points out afterwards that Esme did not appear to know what birth control was. Speaking to her away from her father, Alphy gets the truth: the prescription is Mae's, found among her things, and Mae was having an affair with Malcolm, who is married. Contraceptive pills were only available to married women, so Geordie works on the assumption that Malcolm obtained them by posing as Mae's husband. Questioned, Malcolm is dismissive of Mae, saying she was not the kind of girl you would introduce to your mother, and denies the pills.

Alphy's own week is worse. Mrs Chapman has reinstated herself as housekeeper and wants to sit in on his meeting with the bishop. Bishop Aubrey Gray tells him that Grantchester's congregation is never above thirty and Newnham's is barely fuller, that the two parishes are to be merged, and that Alphy will hold a caretaker role for a few months while Newnham's vicar, David, takes over both. Alphy is angry, then humiliated. He goes to the halfway house and starts drinking, and Leonard fetches Geordie to sit with him, and Sam White overhears and tells Alphy that the church betrayed him. Alphy then goes back to the bishop and asks directly whether he was sent to Grantchester as a scapegoat, a convenient South Asian vicar who could be blamed for running the parish into the ground. The bishop does not answer, which Alphy takes as an answer. Mrs Chapman, kept out of it by Leonard, presses Alphy until he tells her the truth and tells her, in the same breath, that he does not need her or any housekeeper, and she goes on strike. Cathy, meanwhile, turns her anger on Geordie for having let Esme take the job in the first place, and when he tells her she has started jumping at shadows and sounding like her mother, she throws his breakfast away and walks out.

The investigation widens. An eighteen-year-old called Jane Goldman, who also worked at Harrison and Sons, died of a botched abortion. Miss Scott proposes going undercover in the office, Geordie refuses, and she arranges it herself on the leave she was due to take, and her absence from the station makes plain how much of its administration she carries. Inside the firm she finds that Harrison monitors every purchase, and that there are large payments logged as cleaning in addition to the ordinary cleaning contract and classified differently, one of them matching the sum Jane paid a Harley Street doctor. Reading further, she finds that another woman died at Harrison and Sons a decade earlier, Iris Buchanan, whose death was recorded as carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty chimney, and there is a cleaning payment against her name as well. Confronted, Harrison says he barely reads the accounts and that Malcolm is gradually taking the firm over, and blames the girls, who are worldly, he says, and set out to entrap the men. Malcolm, cornered in the storeroom with Miss Scott, is the kind of man the firm keeps, and Miss Cheadle intervenes and sends him out. The cake turns out to contain no almond, but Miss Scott finds a bottle of almond essence hidden in the storeroom with Malcolm's liquor and identifies the person who put it there.

Miss Cheadle, the office manager, killed the girls, Iris Buchanan, Jane Goldman and Mae Jenkins, without Harrison's knowledge, to protect the firm from the consequences of its male employees' affairs. She closed the ventilation on the chimney, she sent Jane to a doctor who killed her, and she helped Mae get contraceptive pills and put almond essence into them. Confronted, she says Harrison would thank her if he knew and that everything would fall apart without her. Miss Scott tells her she will be gone soon, that another girl will sit at her desk, and that Harrison will not remember her name. Miss Cheadle attacks her, and Geordie, Larry and Alphy arrive and arrest her.

Cathy's own thread resolves without a crime. She goes to Dr Bennett, says she does not feel like herself, admits to feeling weepy and unable to cope, and is prescribed mood stabilisers with a follow-up in four weeks. She tells Mrs Chapman she is afraid of ending up like her mad mother and becomes afraid for Esme as well, and Mrs Chapman's answer is the speech the episode is built on: that Cathy is not mad but a woman trying to get by in a world that is not made for her, that Esme is now old enough to see it too, and that Cathy did what she had to, moved her hand away and told her daughter how well she was doing, and let her go. Alphy apologises to Mrs Chapman and embraces her and she tells him she does not want him to leave, Miss Scott, who has worked beside Esme all week, takes her for a drink, and Cathy takes the first of her pills.

The episode is the darkest the series gets about ordinary office life, since three women die over a decade because a firm's managers sleep with their clerks and one woman cleans up after them, and the case only opens because a mother read a prescription in a laundry pocket. The almond essence is the detail that moves the suspicion off the birthday cake and onto the storeroom, and the cleaning payments are the clue that ties two deaths a decade apart to the same person. Miss Scott's undercover week is the best use the series makes of her, and her line to Miss Cheadle about the next girl at the desk is the coldest thing anyone says in Series 9.