The Shadow of the Scaffold is the fourth episode of the second season of Father Brown.
When convicted killer Violet Fernsley is given a temporary reprieve from the gallows, she begs Father Brown to prove her innocence. With only three days in hand, can he find the real culprit before it's too late?
Tropes:
- Asshole Victim: Ivan. He beat Violet so brutally she not only miscarried her baby but was also left with so much internal damage she's unlikely ever to conceive again.
- Cassandra Truth: Ethel Fernsley, Violet's bedridden mother-in-law, is steadfast in her insistence that Violet murdered her son Ivan, refusing to retract her testimony even after Father Brown points out that she physically couldn't have seen Violet washing blood off of herself. She turns out to be right — Violet did murder Ivan, but escapes the scaffold after the police lump his murder in with the rest of Ethel's killings.
- Clear Their Name: Violet directly asks Father Brown to do this after she manages to delay her execution.
- Fake Pregnancy: Ostensibly, this is how — at the very last second — Violet manages to delay her execution. Although it's never quite confirmed whether she's making it up or not. This being The '50s, it takes three days to confirm pregnancy test, which gives Father Brown a few days to prove her innocence.
- Fed to Pigs: How the killer disposes of the bodies. This is discovered when a finger bone with a ring on it is discovered in the stomach of a pig being prepared for tripe.
- Let Off by the Detective: After Violet is just barely saved from the gallows, she confesses that she did kill her husband Ivan, and for that she feels she doesn't deserve marriage to the prison guard who she had fallen in love with. Father Brown agrees to keep her secret, because her husband was an abusive brute, and in any case he couldn't do much about it after he was the one who got her cleared and released from prison. But he does suggest that she shouldn't marry her boyfriend if she doesn't think she can trust him with her secret. Violet elects to become a nun instead.
- Münchausen Syndrome: Ethel Fernsley. All of her victims are those who threaten her charade.
- Obfuscating Disability: Father Brown discovers this when he realises that Ethel could not have seen what she claimed to have witnessed unless she were standing up.
- Race Against the Clock: Father Brown has three days (as authorities wait for the results of her pregnancy test to come back) to solve a murder before the woman convicted of the crime hangs.
- Suspect Existence Failure: Father Brown begins to suspect Wilf Fernsley, until he is run over by the family van. Inspector Sullivan lampshades this.
- Taking the Veil: Violet, in the end.
