Season 11 Episode 06

CeCe's Boutique has secured a coup: the model Tilly Mayflower will wear one of its dresses. Tilly cannot come in for a fitting, so her manager, Clarke Barron, asks Cathy to bring the dress to Tilly at Sady's, a new club. Mrs Chapman had planned to go with Cathy but changes her mind about dinner at the last moment, and the accountant Peter Switch goes instead, raising Mrs Chapman's suspicions about his intentions towards Cathy. Sady's is closed for Tilly's privacy. Present are Tilly, Clarke, the club manager Malcolm Riley and the hostess Kara Quenn, and Tilly likes the dress and champagne is opened although she is eager to leave, and Clarke gives her a pill to take with it.

After several bottles Cathy goes to leave and feels Switch's hand on her back, and at the coat check she finds Malcolm dead on the ground. Geordie arrives and is shocked to find his wife at the club. Malcolm's watch has stopped at 8.45, and in his pocket is an envelope marked K containing cash. Tilly nearly breaks down when told nobody can leave until they have been questioned, and Clarke gives her another pill, explaining that they are for stress-induced hallucinations. She remembers little, which she says is a side effect, and Geordie gives her a sandwich meant for his own meal, since she cannot remember when she last ate. Geordie works out that Clarke is having an affair with Tilly, and Clarke turns suspicion on Kara on the grounds that her relationship with Malcolm looked frosty. Kara says the cash was her wages and denies knowing anything else, and she does not mention an illegal poker game that Geordie finds in progress in a back room. Among the four players is Alphy, drunk on Scotch. Geordie sends him home and tells him to come to the station in the morning as a witness rather than as a detective. The other players say they saw Malcolm only when he brought them to the room that afternoon, and one of them, Leighton Pugh, says Malcolm was an old friend and weeps at the news.

The next day Geordie asks Cathy about the evening. She is defensive but says Tilly seemed to need help and that Clarke never let her out of his sight. A press report of Tilly pushing a photographer, and an investigation into Clarke for fraud that cleared him, both surface, and the only person who left the room was Kara, who was in and out. Alphy has little to add: he met one of the players in the park and was invited to the game. Malcolm did not come into the room after letting them in, but Kara did, which contradicts her account. She also made a show of cleaning up a spill on Alphy and added ice and lemon to the players' whisky, which is odd, and Geordie works out that she was helping Leighton cheat by reading Alphy's cards during the spill and signalling with the ice cubes.

Geordie then notices that the clock in the gambling room is half an hour slow. Leighton had kept the other players from knowing how long they had been there. Kara admits that Leighton asked Malcolm to help fix a game and that she took part, though she had not met Leighton before. Malcolm was nervous about the illegality, even though he wanted the money to buy his mother a house. One of the other players says Leighton went to the bathroom around 8.15, which with the half-hour lag on the clock is 8.45, the time Malcolm died. Under questioning Leighton weeps again. He fixed the game because he has been desperate for money, Malcolm became nervous and wanted to end the game and return the stakes, and Leighton attacked him and killed him, and says he regrets it.

The second thread is the future of the CeCe's business and of the people who work there. Mrs Chapman and Jack investigate CeCe's accounts, find discrepancies, follow Switch and see him meet a woman and take papers from her to the bank, and Mrs Chapman concludes he is defrauding the woman. Cathy explains that he is helping his sister obtain a loan, and her anger at Mrs Chapman for interfering is cut short by the arrival of Tilly, who wants to choose her own clothes without Clarke. When he appears to retrieve her, Cathy and Mrs Chapman stand up for Tilly, and Tilly fires him. Miss Scott's pregnancy is about to become visible, which raises questions at the police station, since married women are not permitted to work there and her marriage to Larry is a secret. She resigns reluctantly, though she does not want to give up her career, and Geordie laments the loss of his best employee.

Alphy is visibly unravelling. He bristles when Geordie raises his drinking and gambling, and Leonard finds him closing the church early and is shocked when Alphy shrugs off Raymond Hayes as not his problem. Leonard takes Daniel to check on the family, and Daniel is unexpectedly eager to give Raymond breakfast when he says he is hungry, and buys a Black Forest cake for Raymond and Marcus when Raymond says it is his father's favourite. Leonard, now also worried about Alphy, goes to Geordie and the two visit the vicarage together, and Alphy is hostile to both and lashes out when Leonard tells him he is neglecting his priestly duties and when Geordie again raises the drinking and gambling. He asks them to leave, Geordie tells him he is on his own and that he is done trying to help, and Alphy sits down and cries alone.

The episode is a murder solved by a clock that is half an hour slow and a hostess improving a drink with ice, which is the most satisfying piece of misdirection the series has built. The poker table is the engine, since the detective on the case is sitting at it drunk, and the dead man's watch is only correct once the room's own clock has been checked against it. The other half of the episode is a woman being written out of a job she is good at because she is pregnant, which the programme declines to dress up as anything else.