'Moonflower Murders' Recap: Episode 3

Moonflower Murders airs Sundays at 8:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes. 
Recap and stream the previous series, Magpie Murders.
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Everyone seems to think Lance and Maureen Gardner were stealing money from Melissa James while managing her Moonflower hotel and so may have killed her to keep their secret from coming out. But the Gardners present Atticus Pünd with another theory. They show the detective a draft of a letter they claim to have found in Melissa’s office, dated February, that appears to be to a lover. Maybe Melissa’s husband, John Spencer, found out about her affair and killed her.

But there are plenty of other possible suspects. The film producer Oscar Berlin sold everything to produce a film about Eleanor of Aquitaine starring Melissa, but after three years of work, she pulled out just a few weeks before production was to start. Oscar tells Pünd that he went for a walk on the beach after being rejected by Melissa, but Madeline senses that he is lying and so invents a claim that the tide on the beach is too high to allow for a stroll at that time of day. Oscar caves under the pressure and admits that he went to Melissa’s house at 6:05 – 23 minutes before she called Dr. Leonard Collins in terror.

But Oscar says he didn’t go inside. He heard Melissa arguing with her housekeeper, Phyllis Chandler, and left without even knocking. Oscar overheard Melissa kicking Phyllis out, threatening her with the police, and saying that the “hotel was crooked.”

Then there’s Algernon Marsh, Melissa’s financial adviser, who was due to audit the hotel for her. Pünd, Madeline, and Locke have learned that Melissa made a 55,000 pound investment in a company called Day’s End, which builds villas in the South of France. But no villas have been built, and Algernon is the owner of the company, a fact he conveniently failed to mention to Melissa. Day’s End was a Ponzi scheme – and Melissa had just told Algernon that she wanted to sell her shares in it.

Algernon says that he was drinking at the pub when Melissa was killed, however – and he also hints that they were more than business partners. Perhaps he was having an affair with her.

She certainly had admirers – including one who stepped over the line. When the detectives speak to the Chandlers about what Oscar overheard, Phyllis admits that Melissa accused them of theft. (Melissa told Dr. Collins that items were going missing from her bedroom.) Pünd has guessed at another violation, too: he noticed that there was a small hole in the wall of Melissa’s bedroom. On the other side of the wall is a painting of the hotel, covering a peephole. “The hotel was crooked” referred to the painting – Melissa had seen the peephole and realized that Phyllis’ son Eric was spying on her in her room.

Eric also took small items from Melissa to have them close by; the lonely man liked to think she was his friend. Kind feeling towards him is in short supply, given that his mother didn’t want him and has always made that clear. She will be going to stay with her sister, leaving Eric to find his own place to go.

Susan still doesn’t know what any of this material from Atticus Pünd Takes the Case has to do with the disappearance of Cecily Treherne or the murder of Frank Parris. But she’s continuing to follow her own leads, including one that Alan Conway didn’t put in his book. She visits the lawyer Sajid Khan to ask why Frank came to see him shortly before his murder.

Frank had returned to England to sell a house that he and his sister, Joanne Webster, had inherited. Joanne had lived in the house with her husband Martin for 20 years by then, and didn’t want to sell. But Frank insisted, and the only way Joanne could have stopped him was by buying out Frank’s half of the house with money she didn’t have. Sajid found both Frank and Joanne rude, with Joanne especially overbearing and demeaning to Martin.

When Susan visits the Websters, however, Martin is confident and takes the lead in the conversation while Joanne stays quiet. Martin explains that Frank’s company in Australia – Day’s End – went bust, and so he needed to sell the house for money. Joanne was furious and refused, but Martin tried to moderate between the two siblings. Joanne brought up Frank’s “young men” in London to disparage him, but he refused to back down. His death allowed the Websters to keep the house.

Susan finds Martin a bit creepy, especially as he sits close to her to show a photo he took of Joanne and Frank together in front of the house before they parted. It might be the last photo of Frank alive. As Susan goes to her car, Joanne follows and displays the ire that Sajid referenced, angrily telling her that the Websters don’t want to see her again. Susan doesn’t think she’ll return; after all, Alan didn’t even meet with the Websters while writing Atticus Pünd Takes the Case.

Since she’s in the area, Susan also pays a visit to her sister Katie at the garden center where she works. Susan is intrigued that Sajid mentioned that he had consulted for Katie, but Katie says it was just on a matter related to work. Her son Jack now works at the garden center as well – he struggled in college and so is taking a year off. Katie’s husband is once again in New York, and she has construction work going on at her house, so she tells Susan that the next time they meet they’ll have to go out.

After Susan leaves the garden center, Jack tells his mother that she should have told Susan. Katie says she didn’t want to. Anyway, it’s none of Susan’s business.

Lisa Treherne thinks that the hotel and her sister’s disappearance are none of Susan’s business. She worries that the hotel bar manager, Liam, has revealed secrets to Susan. He tells Lisa that he knows plenty, like how much she was paying Stefan Leonida, the handyman who pleaded guilty to the murder of Frank Parris. But Lisa has her own dirt on Liam: no one else would employ you, she threatens him.

Lisa has also complained to Cecily’s husband Aiden about Susan and the substantial sum her parents are paying her to find Cecily. Aiden confronts Susan about it when she asks him about a fountain pen that disappeared on the day of his wedding at the hotel to Cecily. He didn’t think Stefan took the pen, but everyone else did after Aiden said that it was in a room that Stefan entered and gone after he left.

Susan learned about the pen from Cecily’s parents – but they said it was Lawrence’s, lent to Cecily for the wedding as her "something borrowed," whereas Aiden said it was Lisa’s. The disappearance of the pen was just one of the complications that darkened the wedding. Cecily was a perfectionist who read and believed her horoscope every day, and on the morning of the wedding, it said there would be ups and downs. Her mother Pauline got her some pills for her nerves before the wedding, but Cecily didn’t take them.

The stress of everything has led Susan to take up smoking again, after six months without a cigarette. A run-in with Detective Inspector Locke doesn’t help. When he finds out that she’s looking into Cecily’s disappearance, he berates her for once again interfering in and second-guessing his investigation. He defends his arrest of Stefan for the murder of Frank all those years ago and insists that Alan’s book doesn’t hold any answers. He also reveals some bias against the Romanian Stefan, saying the area is full of professional Romanian gangsters. He promises to arrest Susan if he sees her around again.

Fortunately, she’s off to London to speak to a few people about the case and the book. And she has a job interview with a publisher, as she tells Andreas over a video call. He wishes her good luck, and then quickly hangs up on her.