Season 10 Episode 05

Leonard has been drinking. He causes a disturbance in the pub, Larry is called and arrests him, and Leonard is not subdued by it. When the custody sergeant, Floyd, refers to his previous prison sentence and calls him son, Leonard loses his temper and lashes out. He falls unconscious and wakes to find Floyd dead in the cell with him, with no memory of the night. In the next cell a young man, Micky Goodwin, is having an asthma attack and shouting for his father, Donny.

Alphy is confident Leonard is innocent. Geordie is less willing to avoid what is in front of him, since Floyd was found dead in a locked cell in the company of a man who had threatened him, and Floyd's keys are missing. Alphy and Geordie take Donny's arrival with Micky's inhaler as the chance to get the medicine to the cell, and hear Leonard shouting for help. Floyd has bruising consistent with having been choked.

Leonard tells them in the interview room that he remembers nothing, and then that he has been drinking heavily because his father died and did not want him at the funeral. He asks Mrs Chapman why she has stopped speaking to him and learns he insulted her while drunk without remembering it, and he begins to wonder whether he did kill Floyd. Alphy finds something pushed down Floyd's throat: a handwritten betting slip for the horse races. The horse won at good odds, and the pub Larry took Leonard from is next to a bookmaker's. Leonard, prompted, remembers the race on the radio and a fight between Donny and Floyd. Nothing else helps, because the body was in a locked cell with Leonard.

The men sit down to talk. Leonard admits that what he is grieving is a loving father he never had and that drink is the only relief he can find. Alphy tells him he was an orphan. Geordie says he is worried that he is a bad father to David, whom he suspects is gay, and is advised to tell the boy he loves him more often. Mrs Chapman, who has been at the police station all night, is the person who takes Leonard's request for help seriously when he asks her for it.

The published recap's account of the death is that Micky Goodwin killed Floyd. He faked the asthma attack to make Floyd open the cell, then choked him. His father Donny induced the two men in the waiting room to fight as a distraction while Micky dragged the body across the hall into Leonard's cell, unlocked it with Floyd's key and locked it behind him, then returned to his own cell still holding the key. When Donny arrived with the inhaler, he took the key from his son and threw it into Leonard's cell while everyone was occupied. The reason was a bet, since Donny was due to win substantially on the races but Micky was too drunk to hand in the slip, and Floyd saw it in the pub and placed his own bet on the same horse. Donny thought the winnings were his, and Micky wanted to prove himself to his father. Alphy works it out from a newspaper in the waiting room with the winning horse's name circled, which Mrs Chapman identifies as Donny's paper, and the betting slip found in Floyd's throat is in Micky's handwriting.

Two threads run alongside. Larry has been behaving coldly towards Miss Scott since she refused his proposal, and finally accuses her of having no heart, which breaks her composure. When he listens to her she agrees to marry him, on condition that they do it in secret, that her parents are not there and that she keeps working. Cathy and Mrs Chapman have found that starting a business is beyond their means, and Mrs Chapman has already set up a loan meeting at a bank under the name of a fictitious man, because women cannot borrow in their own names, and both are now worried about being found out. Geordie cannot bring himself to tell David he loves him.

The episode is a locked-cell puzzle in which the answer is a second locked cell, since the murder is done by a man who was never in the room and the body was walked across a police station hall during a fight the police were watching. The betting slip in the dead man's throat is the best clue of Series 10, and it arrives because a man grieving a father he never had can recognise the noise of a race on the radio. Leonard's confession about his father is the scene the character has been building towards for years.