'Whitstable Pearl' Recap: Episode 1

Whitstable Pearl airs Saturdays at 8:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the following episode. 

It’s a chilly afternoon in the bay just off the small British coastal village of Whitstable. Pearl Nolan – restaurateur, amateur private detective, and attractive single mother – is piloting a motorboat through choppy waters while on her phone trying and failing to reach her friend and oyster supplier, fisherman Vinnie Rowe. Finding Vinnie’s fishing vessel abandoned, Pearl notices the anchor has been lowered. She cranks it to the surface and to her shock and horror, Vinnie’s lifeless body surfaces – hands behind his back and one ankle caught in the anchor chain. Hyperventilating, she steers both vessels back to the dock in the gathering darkness, bathed in the flashing lights of waiting police cars. Unseen, a man with binoculars scrutinizes her approach.

A gruff police detective, Chief Inspector Mike McGuire, arrives from London to investigate. He meets with a traumatized Pearl, who insists to him that Vinnie’s death couldn’t have been an accident. Mike implies that she could be a suspect in his death and she angrily explains that Vinnie was late with an order and when he didn’t answer his phone, she took her boat out to his vessel to investigate. Mike thinks she should have called the Coast Guard instead of destroying evidence by bringing the boat with the body back to shore. “He’s got two small kids,” she protests – she couldn’t just leave him out there. That seems like an acceptable excuse to Mike, who hands her his card and walks out.

Leaving the police station, Pearl encounters her sympathetic mother Dolly – apparently half the town knows she was being questioned by law enforcement. Dolly was a rabblerouser in her youth and had numerous run-ins with the police herself. Back at home, Pearl’s teenaged son Charlie, speculating about Vinnie’s death, asks his mother about a man who hired her in the past to investigate Vinnie. Pearl admits that she didn’t tell the police about that; she’s not sure why. She’s clear on one thing, though – the police are “a bunch of idiots.”

Later, approaching her restaurant, Pearl observes a shouting match between her young employee Ruby Williams and Ruby’s boyfriend Max. Max later brings his wealthy parents to the restaurant, and Max’s father seems oddly interested in the circumstances surrounding Vinnie’s death.

Pearl then goes to visit Vinnie’s frazzled partner Connie, who reveals that Vinnie was heavily in debt to the moneylender Stroud and being threatened. A motive, perhaps? Pearl tries and fails to reach Stroud by phone.

Unpacking in a local hotel, Mike gets the results of Vinnie’s forensics report: his death was an accident. He goes to the restaurant to tell Pearl, who vehemently disagrees with that conclusion. Pearl then lies to Mike that Stroud had contacted her to do a financial check on Vinnie, telling Mike about her former experience as a police officer and about her fledgling detective agency. Mike is deeply skeptical of her story – she’s the only person anyone can place on Vinnie’s boat before he was found dead. So she is still a suspect in his eyes. Pearl insists that Vinnie had already finished for the day and boxed up his catch, which he couldn’t have done if the anchor hadn’t already been lowered. So there was no way Vinnie’s leg could have gotten tangled in the chain and been dragged overboard. Mike is dismissive.

Arriving home that night, Pearl finds her front door ajar and discovers Vinnie’s ex-wife Tina, wracked with guilt and drowning her sorrows in wine. She claims to Pearl that Vinnie’s death is her own fault – she had been in a relationship with Stroud and urged him to loan money to Vinnie. Tina believes Stroud is capable of murdering Vinnie. Pearl expresses concern about Vinnie’s kids, but Tina insists that Vinnie always paid his life insurance premiums, no matter his financial situation. As a sloshed Tina is leaving, Pearl hands her Mike’s card and suggests she tell her story to him. Tina doesn’t trust cops, though, and probably won’t go through with it.

Pearl calls local hotels, hoping to discover Stroud’s whereabouts. She is successful, and posing as a food delivery person, she gains entry to his room only to find it empty. Noting that there are binoculars on the desk by the window, Pearl spots the end of a leather belt caught in the top of the closed bathroom door. She struggles to open it and hears a loud thud on the other side. The door swings open and we discover Stroud dead on the floor, with the belt looped around his neck.

Pearl, unnerved after encountering two dead bodies in three days, has a theory. She tells Mike that Connie might have believed that Stroud killed Vinnie, unearthed Vinnie’s life insurance papers and realized Stroud would be back to seize that money, too, so she hired a killer to murder Stroud. Mike, despite himself, is intrigued, but still wants to talk to Tina. Unlike Pearl, Mike feels no emotion about the corpses, and judging from his later flashbacks involving a beautiful woman, is dealing with his own trauma.

Leaving her house the next day, Pearl once again finds her front door unlocked, and glimpses Connie hurrying away. Following her, Pearl watches as Connie meets up with Frank Matheson, Vinnie’s old boss, with whom she is clearly having an affair. She then theorizes to Mike that maybe Connie didn’t need to hire a killer, since Frank was angry with Vinnie for leaving his company, so he might have killed Vinnie. Turns out, Mike already knows about the affair and has done plenty of research on Frank, who has a criminal record. Also, Tina has now gone missing.

The next day as Pearl and Ruby are catering a posh reception, Ruby is clearly feeling unwell. Max and his father, it turns out, are real estate developers and the reception is to announce a new hotel and entertainment complex to be built in Whitstable. Frank is also at the event; condescendingly, he suggests to Pearl that she must be traumatized by the murders and shouldn’t be working; in return, she lambasts him for sleeping with Connie. She then eavesdrops as Max and his father argue loudly and bitterly in Russian. She records their conversation on her phone and later we see her attempting to translate on her computer. She is interrupted by a call from Mike summoning Pearl to the hospital: Ruby has overdosed on amphetamines and opiates. But she’s stable and will be fine. Pearl tells Mike that Ruby couldn’t have injected herself – needles make her faint. Mike isn’t so sure: “We don’t know people as well as we think we do.”

The next day, Pearl is at the dock when she sees Max zooming around on his jet ski, then parking it and leaving. On instinct, Pearl goes down to examine it and spots a streak of paint scraped from it that matches paint she found on the stern of Vinnie’s boat.  Worried about Ruby, Pearl calls the hospital, but Ruby has discharged herself and when Pearl reaches her on the phone, Ruby tells her she’s on the beach by the Old Neptune bar before quickly hanging up. Running to meet Ruby, Pearl calls Mike to share Ruby’s whereabouts, tell him about the paint, and share her belief that Ruby was forcibly injected with drugs.

Confronting Ruby outside the Old Neptune, Pearl tells her that she knows Max killed Vinnie. Ruby tearfully explains that Max, needing money since his father doesn’t give him any, is a drug courier and dealer, going between boats and the shore on his jet ski. One day, he was stranded in the surf and Vinnie rescued him. Vinnie saw the drugs and Max, attempting to cover it up, accidently killed Vinnie. Ruby knows it all, and Max gave her drugs as a warning to keep quiet. Also, Max’s father killed Stroud, who was attempting to blackmail them both.

Pearl embraces a distraught Ruby, but Max runs up, forcibly separates them, pushes Ruby to the ground, and drags Pearl kicking and screaming into the surf, attempting to drown her. Ruby tries to intervene and Max backhands her in the face. Out of nowhere, Max’s father stops it by striking his son in the head with a rock. Mike and the police arrive and take Max and his father into custody, Mike throwing his jacket around a drenched and shivering Pearl.

Pearl assumes that since the case is closed, “big shot detective” Mike will be heading back to London. But no – apparently, he’s staying in Whitstable for a bit longer, he says, because he doesn’t know where to find oyster stout back home.

“I know a seafood place up the road that does a good oyster stout,” Pearl comments, as her son Charlie waits to walk her home.

Deadpan, Mike nods. “I’ll check it out.”