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'Grantchester' Recap: Season 10 Episode 7

Daniel Hautzinger
Cathy, Alphy, and Geordie stand in a meadow
Drama threatens to derail the opening of Cathy's store, leading Alphy and Geordie to get involved. Credit: Kudos, ITV, and Masterpiece

Grantchester airs Sundays at 8:00 pm on WTTW is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes and other seasons
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Mrs. C and Cathy have acquired a storefront out of which to run their clothing business, but now they need to clean and prepare it for an opening this weekend – and conduct a photoshoot for ads that need to be submitted to local paper tomorrow. They have a photographer, Tony Parker; two models, Pheline and Grace; and clothes by the designer Kate Ashley.

But Kate supplied more modern, unusual clothes than Cathy requested out of a desire to stand out. Cathy sends her home to collect what she ordered, but the models are only booked for the morning. They are convinced to stay longer, and everything seems to work out – except for the disappearance of a feather boa, which Geordie suspects his son David took. Geordie tells Cathy he saw David in a dress, but she’s not worried.

Geordie had the day off work – and so found another mystery to tackle. He noticed the impression of a word on the letter from Alphy’s mother, and shaded it to find “Annie’s.” Alphy doesn’t want to investigate; it’s enough to know his mother loved him. But Geordie calls in a favor to find out more. While he’s at the police station, he tries to advise Larry on the theft of a diamond from a jeweler, but Larry is already on top of it.

The next morning, Tony’s dead body is found at CeCe’s Boutique. He’s missing his wallet, and there’s a bullet from a rifle or revolver embedded in the wall. A neighbor heard a loud crash around 10 pm last night. Tony had promised to develop his photos overnight, and there’s a stack of them in his pocket – but they’re artsy and have weird angles that are unusable for commercial ads.

Everyone left the store around 6 pm the previous day, and the only keys are held by Cathy and Mrs. C. They also gave Tony a spare key. 

Alphy and Geordie visit Kate at home to question her because she argued with Tony during the photoshoot. She’s wearing an eyepatch to cover up a black eye that she says she got from a fall. When the detectives notice a roll of photos, she immediately exposes them to the light to ruin them, saying that Tony can’t have them.

She hated his photos and had taken some of her own arty ones while he was on a cigarette break, and replaced his photo roll with hers during the shoot; her photos are the ones found on Tony’s corpse. When Tony went to develop them and realized what had happened, he visited Kate around 9 and hit her, giving her the black eye. The photos she just exposed to the light were Tony’s originals.

But Kate says she didn’t kill Tony, even though she has no alibi and is a hunter who knows how to shoot a rifle.

With Tony’s photos ruined and Kate’s unusable, Cathy and Mrs. C ask Daniel to take new ad photos for CeCe’s – ASAP. They can’t use their store, which is now a crime scene, so they venture to the meadow by Daniel’s house. Pheline arrives just to awkwardly tell Cathy she can’t stay; she wanted to tell Cathy in person. Cathy already took a statement from Grace, hoping to prevent Geordie from questioning her model and wasting time, but Geordie insists on talking to the young woman. She says Tony took her for a drink after the shoot and told her he would call her the following night. He was going to bring her to London to find modelling work.

It turns out that Tony had photographed the stolen diamond Larry is investigating, so Geordie and Alphy head to Tony’s house, thinking he may have stolen it – and find Pheline and a man named Brian Halliday arguing. Brian pretends he has a gun in his pocket, but when he has a coughing fit Geordie asks Alphy to get him and Geordie a glass of ice water. Geordie takes a sip and pretends to have found a diamond amongst the ice, spitting it out. Pheline and Brian scramble to search for it – and are apprehended.

Brian is a fence for stolen goods. Tony had sent him odds and ends swiped from photoshoots before, but called with a big score the other day: a diamond. They were supposed to meet this morning. Pheline had paid Tony to buy some of the photos from the CeCe’s photoshoot for her portfolio. She went to fetch them from his house after she heard he died, and found Brian there.

But she’s lying. The reason she avoided the photoshoot with Daniel is because she had worked with him before, when he took less savory photos as a sideline. Daniel still recognized her, though he knew her under a different name than the German Pheline. Phyllis, as she’s truly known, heard Tony arranging to meet Brian to sell the diamond and decided to try to charm it off him last night around 7. But he was upset about his ruined photos. And Phyllis has an alibi: she waited tables from 8 until closing time.

The stress of opening the shop amid setbacks creates tension between Cathy and Mrs. C. Cathy's daughter Esme warns Cathy that she can be controlling, and encourages her in the business. Cathy goes to the shop to apologize to Mrs. C and is amazed to see a fashion show being set up – Mrs. C has decided that they can pull that together even if they can’t open on time.

Geordie finds that David did, after all, take the feather boa, and berates him. Alphy asks what’s going on between the two of them.

Alphy also solves the case. Brian mentioned that Tony was planning to go somewhere, and a travel agent confirms that he booked a weekend trip – for just him, not Grace. She was eager to escape the family farm, which sunk into debt after her father left. And a comparison of Kate’s photos and Daniel’s photos from a day later show that a coat Grace was modeling was ripped overnight. It would be the perfect place to hide a rifle, which has been confirmed as the murder weapon by forensics.

Furthermore, there’s a registered rifle at Grace’s farm. But she denies everything, putting on a show of innocent naivete. So the detectives pretend to leave the diamond out near her – and she tries to take it while no one is watching.

She admits to going for a drink with Tony in order to try to charm the diamond off him. When that failed, she visited him at CeCe’s with the rifle to threaten him. After killing him, she stole his wallet to make it look like a robbery.

Despite everything, CeCe’s opens on time with a fashion show featuring Pheline and Esme wearing Kate’s clothes. Tony’s stolen diamond is discovered hidden in a pocket of one of the outfits. Alphy invites his on-again-off-again girlfriend Meg – as a friend. They set up another date for the future – as friends.

Geordie tries to improve his relationship with David, telling his son they should talk more. David explains that he took the feather boa to use as a fishing lure, to Geordie’s relief.

Cathy congratulates Alphy on finding his mom – but Geordie hasn’t told him that he called in a favor and found an address for her last known residence. Alphy is upset that Geordie investigated despite Alphy’s prohibition. The two friends argue and are cruel about each others’ relationships with Meg and David. Alphy goes home and rips up the letter from his mom.