Giles Armitage is a character appearing in the episode Death in Chorus of the ITV crime drama Midsomer Murders.
Giles married a woman named Carolyn and ran their mutual estate with her. When the magic was lost in their marriage and home, which continued to gather bills, Giles turned to drinking, infidelity, and gambling to cope or to find more excitement. He racked up thousands of pounds in debt, finding fellow indebted players Leo Clarke and Connor Simpson at the games and bonding over their shared dilemmas. Giles had valuable paintings he could sell to pay the fees, so with Simpson's past incarceration for art forgery, they all hatched a plan. Giles swiped the paintings under the lie of "reframing" them, then gave them to Simpson to imitate over a matter of weeks with carbon copies. Clarke would broker the paintings, Giles would bring the forgeries back to mount.
But Simpson double-crossed his accomplices by keeping a valuable portrait of Bach to sell, as he wanted to leave the village with his mistress, Ellen Barker, and needed the money for it. Clarke and Giles sent a threatening letter tacked to a wall with a pig's heart, then Clarke personally confronted him after their choir practice and said he'd only sell Simpson out. Simpson laughed since he'd easily give them all up, resulting in Clarke bashing Simpson about the head with a fire iron, before Stephen Latimer found him dead. Giles' former estate manager, Sam Judd, took pictures of the trio to get revenge for Giles firing him for cutbacks. When Judd was to show the photos to Carolyn at her barn house, Clarke shot him dead and moved him to the graveyard. Carolyn saw the scene, but Giles snatched her and dragged her back to the house. They continued to drug her with rohypnol so she'd never remember or have a testimony to provide.
Carolyn got out once and stumbled back to the church, but Giles and Clarke caught her when she recognized Clarke and pointed at him. Taking her back, they agreed to kill her, so Giles tried to force her to drown in their lake. Ben Jones arrested him, and Tom Barnaby narrowly saved Carolyn from death. Clarke was arrested when he tried to get the Back painting back, and Giles numbly confessed about his own depression that drove him to his crimes. But Barnaby said he was in no position to excuse his own wrongs and harm to people around him before processing him.
Victims[]
- Carolyn Armitage - Abducted and dragged back to their manor, where she was held captive and drugged repeatedly with rohypnol with the assistance of Leo Clarke; she escaped to the church, but she was kidnapped and drugged again; later attempted to drown in the lake at their estate, but she was narrowly saved by Tom Barnaby.