'Patience' Recap: Episode 1

Patience airs Sundays at 7:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the following episode. 
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When Aadesh Chopra douses himself with gasoline near his car on the roof of a parking lot in York and then lights himself on fire, the death is treated as a suicide. CCTV footage reveals that he was alone. Nevertheless, Detective Inspector Bea Metcalf’s boss Calvin Baxter wants her to investigate, even though it’s below her pay grade. Chopra played bridge with the Chief Constable, so Baxter wants his death well covered, and Bea has the highest clearance rate of any detective.

She assigns Will Akbari to watch days of CCTV footage of the parking lot, then goes to the mortuary, where she sees Chopra’s widow. She asks the widow some questions, learning that Chopra had been the happiest he had been in a long time recently, after some years of darkness following a crisis. Their son married last month, and Chopra was considering retirement from his career as a psychiatrist, pondering using his pension to buy a second home. Another oddity if his death was a suicide: he withdrew eight thousand pounds in cash right before his death, but he always used a credit card, in order to rack up airline miles. The cash has not been found. (Chopra deposited it in a trash can in the parking lot, but the police don’t know that.)

Bea vaguely recalls the unexpected death of another psychiatrist deemed a suicide a few years ago and turns to her colleague Jake Hunter to remember more. Jake has an encyclopedic memory of crime in York, and remembers the man’s name was Neal Jamieson. Jamieson was no longer working as a psychiatrist, and his wife had given birth to their first child less than 24 hours before his death. Like Chopra, he had withdrawn thousands in cash before his death. He was found with slit wrists in the bathtub of a hotel room behind a locked door.

Bea requests the file on the Jamieson case from the Criminal Records Office and is surprised to receive two files, one on Jamieson and the other on Brendan Clark. She opens Clark’s file and finds similarities. So she goes to find Patience Evans, the woman who brought her the files. Another worker tells her that this is not the first time Patience has brought the wrong file, and that she’s difficult to deal with.

Bea sneaks into the records area and finds Patience to ask her about the files. Patience noticed a pattern and so brought Bea both files: both men were psychiatrists, both withdrew cash before their apparent suicides, and both died on a Friday, the fourth of the month – as did Chopra. Clark had just signed a book deal before his death; it was unexpected, like the others.

Bea is beginning to doubt that the deaths were suicides, and a bank manager’s testimony that Chopra seemed under the influence when he withdrew cash might provide a clue.

And Patience has more information to share with Bea. Patience is autistic, so social interactions are difficult; she plots out a phone conversation with Bea but is derailed when Bea doesn’t say what she expects; Patience hangs up, panicked. Instead she meets Bea at the station in the morning, decrying the detective’s tardiness. She asks if Chopra was intoxicated, then gives Bea a file showing that Clark also seemed to be inebriated before his death. Patience tries to follow Bea as she walks, reading, but gets nervous in the full elevator and leaves. Bea finds her later, and Patience explains that there are a number of cases that have been linked to a drug that puts someone in a suggestive state and can cause memory loss and even psychosis. While it didn’t show up in postmortems of any of the psychiatrists, their toxicology reports were taken too long after their deaths to detect it.

The pathologist is skeptical, but Patience notes that the drug can be difficult to find and suggests a new test on Chopra, which shows traces of it. Despite her successes, Patience becomes overwhelmed when Bea includes her in a briefing about the cases and flees.

Patience has always been fascinated with crime; her father was a police officer. She now lives with her father's colleague, her godfather Douglas Gilmour, in her own separate quarters. Douglas recently ran into her boss, who was complimentary but also noted that a coworker complained that Patience “interfered” in cases. He worries that she will become overwhelmed if she gets too involved.

Bea decides to let Patience cool off and waits until the end of her workday to find her and ask how she is. She asks Patience out for a drink, but Patience drinks neither alcohol nor coffee. Bea insists on at least giving her a ride. She then trails Patience into a support group for autistic people, introducing herself as there for someone else. As she listens to people speak, she begins to wonder about her own son, Alfie.

Bea is divorced, and her ex-husband has custody of their son, given that Bea is prone to forgetting to pick him up from school and spoiling him with unhealthy meals. Alfie has behavioral issues, but Bea has as yet failed to actually meet with his teachers about them.

Given Alfie, Bea is now protective of Patience, defending the young woman to Jake when he and Baxter question her involvement in the case.

She and Jake go to the hotel where Jamieson died, despite it being years since the death. He stayed there multiple times in the year before he died, even though he didn’t live far out of town. A manager suggests he worked late and missed the train, but a cleaner says he would check in during the afternoon. Bea and Jake look at the room where Jamieson died and compare it to the crime scene photograph, noting a half-smoked cigar near his body despite the smoke detector.

A cleaner enters and flees when they flash their badges. They follow her and another cleaner explains that the woman was traumatized by the case because she was there when the body was found. She also barely speaks English and may be in the country on an expired student visa, and was scared when she had to give fingerprints after Jamieson’s death. The detectives let her go.

Bea then goes to speak to Jamieson’s wife and learns that they had been trying for a child for years, and Jamieson seemed ecstatic when they finally had one. Bea gets the wife to admit that Jamieson frequented sex workers, using the hotel; he even gave her an STD. He was being treated for sex addiction, which is why he had stopped practicing as a psychiatrist.

But there’s another new development. Will has spotted Patience on CCTV footage of the parking lot where Chopra died, examining his car less than 36 hours after his death. Jake reported it, and now she’s in an interview room as a subject – especially because Clark was her psychiatrist when she was a child and misdiagnosed her as having schizophrenia, then over-medicated her and tried to have her father institutionalize her, saying in front of her that it was unlikely she could ever live independently or be a “useful” member of society.