Season 11 Episode 03

Mira has stopped answering and Alphy is tidying the vicarage compulsively. Leonard tells Geordie that Alphy is not fine and calls Geordie over with a case as a pretext. The case is a reported burglary at the home of Lord Worley, who is dying. Alphy has been praying with him and has always been sent to the servants' door by the butler, Briggs, and Geordie ignores the arrangement and uses the front door.

Jonathan Worley, who will inherit, reported the burglary: his mother's jewellery, including a piece his sister Allegra wanted, is missing. The scene is odd, since valuables have been kept in an insecure drawer in a drawing room and a window has been broken with a blue glass paperweight when a door would have done. Allegra and Jonathan arrive and both are hostile to the house staff. Geordie insists on speaking to Lord Worley and goes upstairs, and Worley is dead, and has been for hours. There is a burn around his mouth consistent with morphine in tea.

Jonathan hired the nurse, Hepsibah, who says she checked on Worley every two hours. The children say they visited every Friday morning for tea, though it has been a month or more, and Briggs says they have not visited all year and that he checked on Worley himself, and that the bed pull in Worley's room was broken, like much else in the house. Alphy stays behind with Allegra, who opens a bottle her father told her never to touch, and through a window he sees Jonathan berating Reuben, the gardener. Geordie questions Hepsibah and Briggs at the station, and a train ticket and a cinema ticket in Hepsibah's purse show she went to the seaside and a film instead of attending to Worley the previous day. Briggs describes Worley as a miser who recorded every expense in a copy of Silas Marner kept at his bedside, and in the book Geordie finds notes about his children never answering the telephone, and a note that Reuben the gardener was given a blue glass paperweight.

Geordie returns the next day and meets Alphy leaving. Alphy had danced with Allegra and kissed her, meant to go home, and stayed the night when she asked him to. He has seen packages being sent to an auction house and Jonathan again berating Reuben, who tells Jonathan the family will be homeless if the manor is sold. Reuben tells the police that he and his father gave their lives to the manor, that his cottage is damp and his daughter Lily is ill, and that Worley would not act. Insulted by the paperweight, Reuben threw it through the window, and he took nothing.

A catalogue from the auction house shows that everything Jonathan reported stolen was listed and sold two months earlier. Allegra had been selling the contents and used the broken window to stage a burglary, and the contents were not hers or Jonathan's to sell, since Worley's will leaves everything to someone called Eppie. The police first assume this is a nickname for Hepsibah, who is shocked by the inheritance. Alphy remembers that Eppie is the child in Silas Marner, the girl who saves the title character from loneliness. Back in Worley's room the police note marks from two teacups on the bedside table and that the lamp was lit about eleven hours before death, when Hepsibah was at the cinema, so someone had been keeping him company. Briggs admits that Worley called him Eppie. On the night he died Worley asked Briggs to telephone his children, they refused to come as usual, and Briggs told Worley they would come in the morning to spare him the knowledge that he had been abandoned. He then put morphine in Worley's tea to end his pain and to prevent him learning how alone he was. He expects prison and does not care about the inheritance. The will the family has is not the last, since Worley went to a different solicitor and left the house to Reuben and his family, and Jonathan and Allegra are left with nothing.

The second thread is Leonard's. Mrs Chapman tells him that milk and bread are being taken from doorsteps and the pair set a trap outside the vicarage, and they catch Raymond Hayes. He kicks Leonard and runs, is caught and brought back, and escapes again. Leonard follows him home and finds Raymond's father Marcus wasting away in a chair, calls an ambulance and Mrs Chapman, and is warmed when Raymond calls him vicar. Leonard still gives advice as a vicar does, and Alphy tells him how much his mother's silence has hurt, and Leonard tells him to go and see her for closure, however painful it turns out. Geordie writes a letter accepting the chief inspector's post, Larry is told by Geordie that he is a detective inspector in the making, and Miss Scott gives Geordie a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, the same book Larry has been reading. Cathy, whose accounts at CeCe's Boutique are not adding up, agrees to a drink with Mr Switch.

The episode is a country house mystery in which nothing reported is true, since the burglary was committed by one of the people reporting it and the death was a mercy rather than a murder, and both are discovered by reading a miser's accounts book. The two teacups are the detail that puts a second person in the room after the nurse left, and the paperweight is the object that gives the gardener a grievance and the family an excuse. Briggs telling a dying man his children are coming, and then killing him rather than let him learn otherwise, is the best ending of Series 11.