'Ridley' Recap: Season 2 Episode 7

Ridley airs Sundays at 7:00 pm on WTTW and is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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When Tara Dunning fails to pick up her five-year-old son Leo from school, her husband Rob gets a call. Finding her car gone and their house empty, Rob reports Tara missing. The small town outside of which Rob and Tara live on a farm is soon abuzz, thanks to an online forum moderated by the pub owner Simon Beamish. The police quickly prioritize the case because of all the attention.

Rob last saw Tara when he left the house in the morning; he was gone and distant from the village all day. Leo was supposed to go to a friend’s after school, but that family never heard from Tara.

Rob reluctantly admits that Tara takes medicine because she’s bipolar – he worries she’ll be slandered as an “unfit” mother if that fact comes out. Tara was popular in the village – except for with Rob’s sister, Sarah who works at the pub. Sarah tells the detectives that Tara had threatened to leave Rob before and never thought he was good enough. But Rob says that Sarah never liked Tara and is just stirring up trouble.

Tara worked part-time at the cafe in town run by Celia Machin. Tara was off the day she disappeared. Celia says Tara hadn’t been herself; she had stopped taking her medicine a few days earlier, but made Celia swear she wouldn’t tell anyone. Celia says that a man who had recently come to the village, Jason Dover, directed a lot of attention and some inappropriate comments to Tara at the cafe. Celia eventually warned him off.

Celia is unused to all the attention. Nothing ever happens around here, she tells the detectives.

Tara’s car was spotted out in the moors in the afternoon, and the police eventually find it driven off the road, seemingly at speed. The windshield is cracked, the rear axle is broken, and there’s some blood that is eventually identified as Tara’s. But the car is empty. Tara’s phone is found, out of battery, under the seat. There’s a palm print on one window and another pair of tire tracks, but no evidence of a collision.

Tara’s bank accounts show that she had bought a train ticket to be used three days ago to go to Renton, some 30 miles away. She’s bought the same ticket three times in the last three months, using her debit card to pay at the train station.

Rob explains that Tara liked to drive up in the remote moors to clear her head, and that she had been volunteering at a charity shop in Renton. He insists she didn’t – and wouldn’t – stop taking her medicine.

The detectives briefly question Jason Dover, who bothered Tara at the cafe, at the pub. He has prior charges for sexual assault. Simon Beamish, the owner of the pub, looks into Jason after seeing the police speak to him and learns of his criminal background. When Jason shows up the next day to a search party organized by Simon on behalf of Tara, Simon and Celia get in an altercation with Jason and bring up his past in front of the village.

The detectives learn from phone records that Tara called Celia at home the day she disappeared, but Celia didn’t mention that to them. Darren goes to ask her about this omission and finds her dead at the bottom of her stairs. She could have been pushed.

It seems that Celia took a while to die. Her office is ransacked and the lock on the back door is broken. But it doesn’t seem to be a burglary: her pearls were left, and the kitchen has been disinfected. Jason’s card is in the kitchen, as are his prints, which are also on the back door.

Jason admits that he did some garden work for Celia, and came in once or twice for a cup of tea. But he was with Sarah, Rob’s sister and Jason’s girlfriend, the night Celia died.

When told that neighbors saw his van at Celia’s, Jason admits that he stopped by to apologize to her for the altercation at the search party. Her and Simon’s revelation of his criminal past in front of the village was also news to Sarah, and he was hoping that if he could mend things with Celia, Sarah might also accept him again. But Celia only spoke to him on the doorstep and threatened to call the police, so he left.

Jason says Celia seemed jealous of his conversations with Tara at the cafe. Sarah says that Jason asked her about Tara, and she shared more than she should have, because of her dislike of Tara. Sarah had recently found herself in fear of Jason when she told him it was too early for him to move in and he lost his temper.

However, the palm print on Tara’s window doesn’t match Jason, nor do the tire tracks found by her car. And Jason does claim to have been working when Tara disappeared.

Ridley is thinking about moving away. Now that Annie has Harry helping her with the club, there’s nothing keeping Ridley in the area. But Annie is chafing at Harry and his decisions about the club – and his flirtations with other women. She calls Ridley and leaves a message: it’s been a while since she’s seen him.

Ridley is avoiding the club and ends up having a drink with Darren, who expounds on money problems: he has another kid on the way, and finances are tight. He asks Ridley for a loan of five thousand pounds, and Ridley reluctantly agrees, asking for assurance that Darren’s not in trouble. Despite his promises to Ridley, Darren has been gambling on horse races.

Another acquaintance of Ridley’s did find himself in trouble: Jack has been assigned 200 hours of community service after the Oliver Grant case.

Despite Rob’s belief that Tara was volunteering at a charity shop in Renton, she’s never been seen there. Darren finds that she had been calling a psychiatric unit in Renton, including two days before her disappearance. Turns out she was due to visit that unit but never showed up.

She visits her mother, Mary Jane, there every month. The unit is high security; Mary Jane is there because she has schizophrenia and now early dementia – and she killed her husband by lighting their house on fire while he slept. He had abused both her and Tara for years.

The presiding resident, Dr. Assi, allows the police to speak to Mary Jane. She says something was troubling Tara and that she seemed frightened during her last visit. Dr. Assi cuts the interview short, and Mary Jane quickly shows the detectives bruises on her arms.

Outside the interview room, Dr. Assi says that the bruises are self-inflicted. He also says that he discussed Tara’s own psychiatric condition with her, and advised Tara to stop visiting Mary Jane because it upset her mother.

Tara suffered from psychosis after the birth of Leo and spent time in a psychiatric unit. She recently went off her medication for good reason: she was pregnant.