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Reigning Queen of Home Farm, Kim Tate (Claire King), has such vast experience in scheming, but she’s struggling to keep her last plot under wraps in Emmerdale.
Joe Tate’s (Ned Porteous) sheer grief over the cataclysmic death of Dawn Taylor (Olivia Bromley) has hardened his heart to obscene levels, even more so than even someone with the propensity for sheer iciness as Kim could’ve ever imagined.
Before she passed away, Dawn gave birth to her and Joe’s baby boy, and rather than holding his son close as a reminder of the woman he loved, Joe has been utterly unwilling to form any sort of relationship with his son, insisting on the baby being adopted and kept far away from any of the Tate family.
Despite the pleas of Kim, herself having given up a baby for adoption – and currently unaware that said daughter is plotting her downfall, and his surrogate father, Graham Foster (Andrew Scarborough), Joe vowed to have the baby taken away.
So, what did Kim and Graham do? They went along with Joe’s plan, on the surface anyway.
With Graham levelling Joe with a threat that he would leave his life forever should he have the baby taken away and Joe sticking to his guns, Graham left Home Farm, and took the baby with him, with Joe believing that he’d be handing the child over to social services…
…except he didn’t.
Graham moved into a cottage with the baby, and his been raising him himself, with only Graham and Kim knowing about the set up.
Next week sees Kim determined to keep the arrangement under wraps, knowing that should Joe discover the truth, he’ll have the baby handed over to social services immediately and see to it that Kim and Graham can never find him.
Spending time with her bestie, Lydia Dingle (Karen Blick), Kim listens as Lydia talks about the recent drama facing the Dingle clan, namely, the impending release of Samson Dingle (Sam Hall) and the feud it’s provoked in regards to Moira (Natalie J Robb).
When Kim offloads about the baby and the adoption, she’s unaware that her aforementioned vengeful daughter, DS Thea Ramsden (Chelsea Edge), is listening intently to every word, and very soon, has come to her own, very dark conclusion.
‘She thinks that the baby is absolutely being sold,’ Chelsea previously explained.
‘But she’s a police officer, she knows there has to be evidence, so she is looking for evidence, she also wants to know where the baby might be being taken.
‘If it is illegal, she needs to track that because then it doesn’t just become kidnap, it becomes an entirely new set of crimes that she needs to be on top of. She’ll want to find that baby at the end of it.
‘The reason that she became a police officer is that she does care deeply about people.
‘Her sense of justice has been a bit skewed here because of feelings towards the Tates as a family, but at the end of it, she cares about the baby’s welfare, and making sure that a, he’s safe and b, he’s not being sold into God Knows What.’
And would you believe it? Not long after Thea has decided that Kim has arranged an illegal adoption – which, technically, she kind of has – a social worker rocks up at Home Farm, wanting to speak to both Kim and Joe.
Kim’s ability to get out of a tight squeeze when her carefully laid plots go awry is almost mythical at this point – besides that six year stretch she did in the slammer, but with a social worker breathing down her neck and her house of cards about to collapse, is it all over for the Queen Bee?