putty - Grep a strange acirc character

I have this character appearing in places in some files I have: Â (if you can't see it or it looks like a question mark it's the Acirc character (capital A with a circumflex over it))

I simply want to grep replace this char with a space, however when I do this:

grep --color -ri  myproject.php

Putty gets very confused, as does grep.

As I understand it there's probably a way to use an escaped hex code with grep.. does anyone know how?

EDIT:
The character is showing up on my web page as a weird . The http headers for the page specify utf-8 as does the meta character set and I still see the strange character. In putty it appears as a space (putty also set to utf-8.) When I copy from vim and paste into grep it simply doesn't find it.

Cheers,
John