'Grantchester' Recap: Season 9 Episode 5

Grantchester airs Sundays at 8:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes and other seasons. 
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Esme has moved out – but she still returns home to have her mother do her and her roommate Mae’s laundry. Cathy begrudgingly does the chore, even if Esme barely speaks to her. But laundry can also reveal secrets, like a crumpled prescription for birth control in a dress pocket.

Cathy rushes to the police station, where she tells Ms. Scott what she has found. Ms. Scott breaks the news to Cathy that Geordie is out on a murder investigation – at the very company where Esme works.

Esme found Mae dead in the storeroom, seemingly of an allergic reaction. It was Mae’s 19^th birthday, and the office had just celebrated with cake, so Geordie take the dessert to be tested for almonds – Mae had a severe allergy.

Earlier in the day, Esme had again found Mae in the storeroom – this time alive, canoodling with Malcolm, the second-in-command at the office. He’s an aggressive womanizer who hits on every female clerk, 16-year-old Esme included. He tells her there’s a ghost named Iris in the storeroom.

Ms. Cheadle, who runs the office and oversees all the clerks, tells the detectives that the men who work there see all the girls as sport, classifying them according to their willingness to flirt.

When Geordie finds out about the birth control prescription Cathy found, he puts Esme into an interrogation room and lays into her. But she doesn’t even seem to know what birth control is, as Alphy points out to Geordie after he storms out of the room. He’s afraid for his daughter.

Alphy speaks to Esme alone and she admits that the prescription was Mae’s – she just found pills in Mae’s handbag. She also reveals that Malcolm and Mae were having a fling, even though he is married.

Birth control prescriptions are only available to married women, so Geordie suspects that Malcolm posed as Mae’s husband to get it for her. But Malcolm dismissively says that Mae’s not the kind of girl you’d introduce to your mother.

Alphy has been stuck with a mother of sorts against his will, as Mrs. C has reinstated herself as the vicarage’s housekeeper. She wants to sit in on his meeting with the bishop, but Alphy denies her. The bishop tells Alphy that Grantchester’s church will be merging with Newnham’s, given declining attendance, and Newnham’s vicar will take over both parishes. Alphy will simply hold a caretaker role for a few months, until that happens.

Alphy is furious. He goes to Leonard’s halfway house and begins drinking, so Leonard brings in Geordie to act as a friend. The street preacher Sam overhears their conversation and tells Alphy that the church betrayed him.

Alphy later goes directly to the bishop and asks him why Alphy was assigned to a parish months before it was going to be shut down. Is he a scapegoat, a convenient South Asian vicar who can be blamed for running Grantchester’s church into the ground? The bishop’s lack of response is answer enough for Alphy.

Mrs. C is desperate to know what is going on and asks Leonard, but he refuses to break Alphy’s confidence. Alphy explodes at her when she pries, and blurts out the truth, to her shock. Mrs. C goes on “strike” to protest Alphy’s rudeness. He tells her he doesn’t need her or any housekeeper.

Cathy is also angry at someone in her house: Geordie, for letting Esme take a job. The workplace is dangerous for young girls, as the detectives begin to see when they dig into Harrison and Sons, the company where Esme works. An 18-year-old name Jane Goldman who worked at Harrison’s died of a botched abortion.

Wondering if there’s a connection to Mae, Ms. Scott offers to get a job at Harrison’s in order to better observe the office. Geordie refuses, but Ms. Scott is on leave starting the next day and so gets the job anyway, leaving the police station in chaos without her unrecognized organization and contributions.

She learns that Harrison keeps a close eye on every individual purchase, and so is surprised to find some substantial sums paid for “cleaning” in the accounts. They’re in addition to the regular payments to cleaners, and classified differently.

While looking through the accounts in the storeroom, she is accosted by Malcolm, who flirts and brings out a bottle of liquor and glasses he has hidden in there. Ms. Cheadle comes in and intervenes – not that Ms. Scott can’t hold her own.

Back with the detectives, Ms. Scott matches one “cleaning” expense to the hefty sum Jane Goodman paid for her botched abortion. The company paid for her abortion – and seems to have done so for other girls as well.

When asked about this, Harrison claims that he doesn’t pay much attention to the accounts and that Malcolm is slowly taking over the company. He says the girls try to entrap the men into marrying them, blaming the young women instead of his predatory male employees.

Ms. Scott finds through more digging that another woman died at Harrison and Sons a decade ago: Iris Buchanan, the “ghost” Malcolm likes to mention. Her death was ruled an accident, resulting from carbon monoxide poisoning due to a faulty chimney. A “cleaning” fee was paid to her as well, but Harrison insists it was for the family’s loss, not an abortion.

Testing of the cake served for Mae’s birthday reveals no trace of almond. But then Ms. Scott finds almond extract hidden with Malcolm’s liquor in the storeroom. Ms. Cheadle enters, and Ms. Scott lays out what she has discerned: Ms. Cheadle is the one who has killed all the girls, without Harrison’s knowledge, in order to protect the company when they had affairs with some of the male employees. She made the deaths look like accidents: closing the ventilation in a chimney, sending Jane to a dodgy abortion doctor, helping Mae get birth control and then tainting it with almond extract.

Ms. Cheadle attacks Ms. Scott, who fends her off as Geordie, Larry, and Alphy burst in and arrest her.

Now that Ms. Scott has worked with Esme, she befriends her and takes her for a drink. Meanwhile, Cathy goes to a specialist and tells him she doesn’t feel like herself. He prescribes mood stabilizers. Cathy explains to Mrs. C that she’s worried about Esme, and afraid she’ll end up like her “mad” mother.

Back at the vicarage, Alphy apologizes to Mrs. C, and gives her a hug when they make up. She tells him she doesn’t want him to leave.