Season 10 Episode 03

Alphy is cooking dinner for Meg at the vicarage with Mrs Chapman's help, and Mrs Chapman shows no sign of leaving once Meg arrives. When the two of them get a moment they agree a pact: if the evening is a disaster they will part amicably and think no more of it. Mrs Chapman interrupts again. David Lane, the vicar who tried to take the Grantchester living from Alphy, is outside asking for sanctuary with a woman he introduces as his niece. Meg knows Lane and does not like him.

More people arrive. A second woman, Kitty Greenfield, followed by Geordie and by Stanley Farthing, the doorman and barman of a strip club. There has been a death at the club: the owner, known to everyone as the Madam, slumped forward in the middle of Joan's act. Nobody touched her, so it was taken for drink, but she was dead. The cashbox beside her was empty and there was a bloody mark on the back of her neck. Lane has been a regular at the club and describes himself as a helper of the women there, assisting them with their performances. After the death he took Joan, whose real situation he had concealed behind the word niece, and told Kitty they would be at the church, and Kitty left the club by bicycle and Geordie followed her to the vicarage with Stanley in the car. Leonard arrives with a flask, having argued with Daniel over the length of Daniel's stay with his parents, and stays. The food meant for Alphy and Meg is eaten by the room.

The interrogation is a roomful of suspects. Joan says the Madam was horrible to Stanley and disliked by customers, but that she never forced Joan or Kitty to sleep with patrons, and that she gave Stanley work when nobody else would, since he can barely read and Lane has been teaching him. There was one way in and out of the club and nobody was seen to touch the Madam. A rival club owner had argued with her about drunken men outside her premises and about her dancers, since Kitty was dancing at both clubs. Lane, left alone in the office, is caught trying to start Alphy's car and flee, and admits he goes to the club and helps the women and Stanley as a way of managing what he calls impure thoughts.

Leonard, waiting for the car, decides to reconstruct the death. Working through it with the props, Alphy notices that the wound on the back of the Madam's neck would have been under her collar while she was sitting upright, and that the collar was not torn, so she was stabbed after she slumped. Everyone left the club when she collapsed except a man who had passed out. Joan had gone back for her clothes. Geordie finds the club's missing money in her coat and she admits taking it, thinking the Madam already dead, and lashing out with the high heel she was carrying when the Madam opened her eyes. The autopsy shows the heel wound was superficial and that something else killed her. Geordie smells the glass that fell from the Madam's hand and identifies laudanum. There have been complaints about men drinking at the club and waking outside with no memory and no cash, and a bottle of laudanum sits at Stanley's station by the door.

The published recap's account of the killing is that the Madam had been drugging and robbing well-off customers. Stanley was told to give men with full wallets a VIP ticket with free drinks and a conversation with the dancers and then to drug the drink, and she passed out, took their money and left them in the street. She had instructed Stanley to do this to David Keating, but David had been kind to Stanley and had taught him to read, and the Madam mistreated Stanley and the dancers. Stanley killed her by giving her an overdose of laudanum and asked Geordie to spare Joan and Kitty any punishment.

Geordie, meanwhile, has become convinced that David Lane killed the Madam for Kitty's sake, and has everyone taken to the police station. Cathy and Mrs Chapman, planning a clothing business, discuss the expense of starting up and how women are expected to absorb the cost of men's failures, and Mrs Chapman works out a way to get a loan without a man's permission. Larry, still stung by Miss Scott's refusals, behaves coldly towards her and accuses her of having no heart, and then listens and agrees to marry in secret. Alphy checks on Leonard, who is asleep on the sofa and has been sick, and Meg, still there and helping tidy, tells him so and then leaves by taxi, pausing to kiss him and confirm another date.

The episode is a farce with a body in it, since a dinner for two becomes a vicarage of evacuees and the case is solved by the people who could not leave reconstructing where everyone was standing. The collar that was not torn is the detail that moves the wound to after the collapse, and the laudanum bottle sitting openly at the doorman's station is the answer that has been in front of the police for an hour. Stanley is the strongest guest figure of Series 10, and the man who is barely literate being the one who decided the Madam had gone far enough is the best thing the episode does.