'Miss Scarlet' Recap: Season 5 Episode 2

Miss Scarlet airs Sundays at 7:00 pm on WTTW and is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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Mr. Potts has received a promotion, and he is treating Ivy, Eliza, and even Clarence to dinner to celebrate – albeit with some parsimonious ordering. But the table’s drinks are supplemented by champagne sent by another guest to Eliza. She joins the men who paid for the champagne: Edmund Fletcher, who has been the chair of the Guild of Private Detectives for years, and his deputy Archibald Spilsbury.

They are finally extending an offer to Eliza to join the guild – but only if she accuses the new detective inspector Alexander Blake of harassing her while they were alone. Blake won’t hire private detectives for police work, and the guild wants to change his mind.

Eliza of course refuses.

She goes to Blake to warn him that the guild is out to get him – and to score some brownie points for herself. She’s determined to prove herself to Blake and get him to hire her for jobs.

So when he returns from a meeting with the guild’s Fletcher with a job for her, she takes it – even though it’s just conducting background checks and interviewing female candidates for a new clerical office Blake is setting up at Scotland Yard. Blake found a similar office helpful in Bristol, where he previously worked, and decided to blatantly frustrate the guild by hiring a detective who is not a member. Fletcher threatened Blake’s daughter Sophia, of whom Blake is very protective.

Eliza feels setting up the clerical office is beneath her but wants to forge a relationship with Blake. Ivy points out that the work is still better than her own job cleaning and cooking; plus, Eliza is helping young women get a job.

Watching Potts’ promotion and Eliza’s progression in work, Ivy is feeling stuck in place. While at the market, she stops into a building advertising a secretarial position – and is laughed at by the other candidates and dismissed by the interviewer because of her clothing and age.

At Scotland Yard to herself interview candidates, Eliza hears Fitzroy ordered to a crime scene and recognizes the address as that of the Guild of Private Detectives. She convinces Fitzroy to let her join him, to Blake’s annoyance. Fletcher is dead, seemingly by poison through a small syringe wound in his hand. A smashed bottle of wine is next to him – even though he told Eliza at dinner that he doesn’t drink due to an old illness contracted while serving in Africa that causes a hand tremor.

Even though that information is valuable to Blake, he threatens to cancel Eliza’s contract with the clerical office if she doesn’t leave the crime scene, so she reluctantly departs.

Spilsbury tells Blake that Fletcher was seeking re-election as chair of the guild – although he always won. Spilsbury will run in his place, to honor his old friend who saved his life while they both served in Africa. The only other candidate is Thomas K. Malone, an American detective who freely criticized Fletcher’s leadership.

Eliza has also found her way to Malone. The best candidate for the clerical office is Cynthia Quinn – but her three previous employers are fronts that lead back to Malone’s detective agency, where she works. Malone has recently moved to London and taken over Nash’s offices – and Eliza already knows him. He’s the detective she and Nash ran into on a case in a hotel in France.

Eliza tells Blake this and follows him as he goes to speak to Malone, convincing him that she might be helpful since she already knows Malone. She disregards Blake’s conditions to keep quiet during the interview, but both she and Blake notice that Malon has in his office a bottle of the wine found broken next to Fletcher’s corpse.

Blake still refuses to include Eliza on the case, however, so she’s fortunate when Mr. Potts brings up Fletcher’s postmortem. Eliza manages to ferret out that Fletcher died of a rare poison derived from the Calabar bean. If ingested with food or drink, it takes hours or days to kill someone and is undetectable. But when injected into the bloodstream, as it was for Fletcher, it is instant and obvious. And it comes from the area of Africa where Fletcher and Spilsbury served together.

Eliza sends Clarence to Gibson, a dealer in stolen goods whom she has encountered severaltimes. He has recently taken up trading in other illicit things, and accepts a bribe from Clarence – but then says he doesn’t know anything about the poison, sending his enormous “secretary” to intimidate Clarence away. But Clarence does some digging and learns that Gibson is living under an assumed name; his wife believes he is dead. Threatening to expose him to his “widow,” Clarence manages to get Gibson to share who bought the poison.

Meanwhile, Eliza has snuck into Spilsbury’s office to see if he is the killer. Blake, there to search the office himself, catches her. They hear a cry for help and find Malone tied to a pipe in the basement. Spilsbury invited him over then knocked him out and tied him up so that he would miss the vote at the guild that evening and win by default.

Spilsbury admits to assaulting Malone – but he’s not the one who bought the poison that killed Fletcher. That was Cynthia Quinn, the woman who applied to work at Scotland Yard but is in Malone’s employ. Her father served with Fletcher, who helped her mother after her father’s death. Cynthia worked for Fletcher, and he asked her to get a job with Malone in order to find dirt to keep him from winning election in the guild. But all Cynthia learned was that Malone drank a bottle of wine a day.

So Fletcher decided to dispatch Malone. He had Cynthia steal a bottle of wine from Malone and buy the poison, intending to inject it through the cork. But his hand tremor caused him to slip, leading him to inject the poison into himself. Cynthia took the syringe and hid it to prevent suspicion from falling on herself. And she applied for the job at Scotland Yard on Malone’s orders, so that we would have an inside source at the police.

Blake tells Eliza she did a good job on the case. She gives him Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for his daughter, who answered the door when Eliza visited Blake at home to share information. Eliza saw that Sophia loved Treasure Island and wanted to give her a book that she herself loved after Blake shared that Sophia was having difficulty adjusting to her new life in London. Eliza relates to the girl, who lost her mother young – just like Eliza.

Eliza also completes her job hiring for Blake’s clerical office, finding the best and brightest – including Ivy.