Season 10 Episode 04

A foundling home for orphaned and disadvantaged children is being closed as the state moves towards foster families, and its residents are angry and frightened about the change. Its head, the Reverend Stuart Potts, who has run the place for around forty years, asks Alphy to come and speak to the children, and Leonard is left in charge at the vicarage.

When Alphy addresses the children, a doll smeared with red paint is pinned to the chalkboard, and Potts says odd things have been happening since the closure was announced. That night Alphy finds dolls of Potts and of Nurse Butcher, who helps run the home, in his bed. He is woken by chanting and finds the children in the middle of a ritual which Nurse Butcher tries to stop and which the children end themselves before going back to their rooms. Later he hears creaking in the corridor and thuds, and finds a boy, Joshua, dead at the foot of the stairs.

The local police officer rules it an accident and will not investigate, so Alphy calls Geordie. Potts also believes it was an accident, since Joshua sleepwalked and had been ill that night, vomiting and talking strangely. Alphy finds a Ouija board surrounded by candles at the foot of the stairs, and he and Geordie go to Joyce, a girl who had given Alphy a candle of the same kind. She says she was trying to speak to Joshua through the board and that another girl, Rita, gave it to her. Rita says she loved Joshua more than anyone in the home, that she urged Joyce to use the board so she could learn the truth and protect herself from Potts and Butcher, whom she believes want to close the home because they dislike the children. She tells the detectives to read Potts's notes on the children. Alphy resists and Geordie reads them anyway, and in the notes Potts had written of Joshua that there were doubts he would survive in the wider world and that it might be better if God took him. Alphy defends Potts, and then tells Geordie the truth: he grew up in this home, was left on the doorstep and does not know who his parents were.

A resident named Oz stumbles down the stairs muttering and is caught by Geordie, and Nurse Butcher, who was at the home when Alphy was a child, thinks Oz has swallowed something poisonous and takes him to bed, and says that she was with Potts, seeking comfort, when Joshua fell. When Oz wakes he learns that the parents who were going to adopt him have withdrawn after hearing about Joshua's death, and he tells the detectives that Joshua gave him a potion before he died, saying it would help him meet a sporting hero, and that it made him hallucinate.

Alphy knows that each resident has a hiding place, and he and Geordie search them. In Nurse Butcher's room they find a bag of flowers, identified as wolfsbane, which causes vomiting and hallucinations. She denies knowledge despite having been seen gathering plants on the grounds, and says she was collecting helicopter seeds for the children as she did when she and Alphy were children there. She says she loves the home, and that Rita's account of her and Potts hating it is Rita looking for someone to blame.

The published recap's account is that Rita runs when the detectives approach her, and that it was she, not Potts, who thought Joshua would not survive outside the home. She poisoned him and hid the wolfsbane in Nurse Butcher's room. She had intended him to die peacefully and he fell down the stairs instead, and she was planning to poison all of the residents and then herself so that they would be together in heaven.

With the case explained, Alphy, Geordie and Potts bring Oz's prospective parents back to the home and reassure them. They are impressed by Alphy himself as a product of the home and agree to adopt Oz, and Geordie, who has grown fond of the sporty boy, feels guilty about wanting him while already having a son he is worried about. Butcher gives Alphy a doll that had been his as a child. When Alphy sees Potts hand the new parents a box of things left for Oz by his birth parents, he asks whether his own parents left anything, and Potts gives him a letter and tells him to open it only when he is ready. Alphy does not say goodbye to Potts, wounded that the letter was withheld, and on returning to the vicarage he puts it in a desk drawer. In Grantchester, Cathy resigns from Swinnerton's after her manager refuses to take her seriously, and Mrs Chapman, who has been made to feel the same way, suggests she go into the clothing business herself. Mrs Chapman had visited Leonard at the vicarage and found him drunk, and when she tried to raise it he said something wounding, and she went back to Cathy and told her she would join her in a new business. Geordie's difficulties with David continue, and he has said nothing to him about the dress.

The episode's answer is the child the adults had already decided to blame, and the clue that carries it is a bag of flowers hidden in the room of the woman who was seen picking them for innocent reasons. The detail that makes the case is the hallucinogen, since a boy who saw things before he fell gives the police a poison before they have a suspect. The letter in the drawer is the season's best ending, because a man who has just been handed the thing he has wanted his whole life puts it away unopened rather than forgive the man who kept it from him.