Season 10 Episode 01

Alphy Kottaram has organised an Easter fete and egg hunt for Grantchester ahead of his first Easter mass, and most of the village has taken it up. Reg Wait, a local man, sits outside the church with a homemade placard objecting that Christianity has been commercialised. He lets his fiancee Mavis Andrews put an Easter bunny head on him for the children, but refuses to come to the service. Complaints arrive from several directions. Mrs Chapman is put out that her hat did not win the hat contest, in which every other entrant was a child. Cathy Keating is being replaced in part of her payroll job at Swinnerton's by a computer. Leonard Finch is uneasy about Daniel Marlowe's plan to visit the parents who once threw him out. Alphy tells each of them to take up their own business rather than have him speak for them.

During the mass a gunshot is heard. Alphy and Geordie find Reg dead on the ground with the bunny head over his face and a gun within reach. His low mood makes suicide the first reading, but there are two cartridge cases on the ground and only one shot was heard. Mavis says the argument Geordie and Alphy saw between her and Reg at the fete was about getting him to seek help. Reg was wealthy, having built up a business, and his next of kin is his sister Eliza, who identifies the body and describes her brother as a decorated war hero and a man who always suffered from dark moods. Geordie finds her account hard to square with the mild birdwatcher, and the house contains a note to buy birdseed and military medals but no Military Cross. Jack Chapman's cinefilm of the fete shows Mavis hiding something in the graveyard, and Geordie recovers a pocket knife marked S.J. and Alphy finds a bullet hole and a bullet in a fete sign. Mavis is seen kissing another man in a billiards bar, insists she loved Reg and says she took the knife off him because she feared he would use it on himself. Alphy believes her and Geordie does not.

Records confirm the Military Cross was won for carrying men out of enemy fire, but the newspaper photograph of the man who won it is not the dead man. It is the man from the billiards bar. Eliza is brought back and, on seeing him, attacks him, because he is the real Reg Wait, her brother. He and Silas Jennings met after Reg's army service, both unhappy with their lives, and swapped identities. The dead man is Silas, hence the S.J. knife. Eliza identified Silas as Reg because their mother has died and the will is held up by Reg's absence, and declaring Reg dead would settle the estate.

The published recap's account of the killing is that Reg and Mavis had schemed to trap Silas and get at his will, but Mavis fell in love with Silas. When the real Reg turned up at the fete in a suit like Silas's and put on the bunny head, she argued with him and told him not to hurt Silas, then shot the bunny-headed man, using the church bells to cover the sound. The bunny head had by then made its way back to Silas, so she killed the man she loved. Reg sent her back to the church with Silas's knife to hide, giving her an alibi, then fired at the sign to make the death look like suicide.

Two threads carry the season. Leonard lets Daniel go to his parents, and then takes a telephone call telling him his own estranged father has died of a stroke; the funeral has already happened and his father did not want him there. A flask among his father's effects is sent to him and he drinks it. He tells Daniel to go and see his parents before he misses his chance, and keeps his own news to himself. Alphy, meanwhile, has a reputation for one date at a time, and Geordie has taken to calling him the Reverend Love-Em-And-Leave-Em. Sent to the library on the case, he asks the librarian for her number and is refused, on the grounds that she does not think he would call. He returns to leave his own number with her so that the calling is hers to do, and she leaves him waiting and then finds him in person.

The episode is built on a swap that the whole village takes at face value, since an identity exchanged between two unhappy men after the war defeats the sister, the fiancee and the police until a newspaper photograph of a medal citation is compared with a face. The two cartridge cases against one shot is the detail that rules out the suicide the scene is dressed as, and the bunny head is the device that makes the mistake possible, since the woman who fired was aiming at the man inside a costume that had already changed hands. Leonard's flask is the quietest scene in the episode and the one that carries the most.