Episode Descriptions

Part 1
Sunday, October 3, 2004, at 9 pm - 90 minutes
St Anselm's is a select High Anglican ecclesiastical college and retreat situated on a remote part of the Suffolk coast. When theology student Ronald Treeves is found smothered under a pile of earth and sand on the beach nearby, he appears to be the victim of a fall. However, his father wealthy industrialist father, Sir Alfred Treeves, is convinced that the college authorities have glossed over the truth to avoid a scandal. He demands that Scotland Yard reexamine the verdict of accidental death.

Commander Adam Dalgliesh knew St Anselm's as a boy and anticipates nothing more than a nostalgic return to old haunts and a straightforward examination of the evidence. No sooner has he scratched the surface than Margaret Munroe, the laundry woman, is found dead. Worse is yet to come. Archdeacon Matthew Crampton is among several outsiders visiting St Anselm's, intent on closing the college and selling off its assets, news that is met with anger and fear by the tutors, staff and ordinands. On the morning after his arrival, his body is found savagely beaten in the chapel before one of the church's treasured painting of The Last Judgment. Dalgliesh now has a major murder inquiry on his hands.

Part 2
Sunday, October 10, 2004, at 9 pm - 90 minutes
From the senior student to the handyman's helper to a researcher on the domestic lives of the Tractanans, Dalgliesh uncovers a wealth of suspects for the Crampton murder. Almost everyone, resident or visiting St Anselm's, had a motive. Father John, however, had an added reason to hate Crampton: he had been instrumental in sending him to prison for child-molestation. Then there's a visiting police Inspector; convinced Crampton murdered his first wife. And what of odd job man Eric Surtees? Did Crampton know of Surtees' incestuous relationship with his half-sister? Glamorous tutor Emma Lavenham, one of the few women at the retreat, also arouses Dalgliesh's attention, and not just as a potential murder suspect. In the closed and claustrophobic atmosphere of the college, Dalgliesh slowly unravels his most complicated case to date, discovering an unholy litany of incest and illegitimacy, that includes academic plagiarism, a will that might have benefited the four old priests to the tune of £l0million, the marriage of a woman on the point of death in a hospice to an unknown bridegroom, the disposal of an Old Master altarpiece, and, finally, the existence of a papyrus allegedly containing an instruction by Pontius Pilate to his guard to dispose of the body of Jesus Christ -- a bombshell that could fatally undermine the story of the Resurrection.

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