'Patience' Recap: Episode 4

Patience airs Sundays at 7:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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Patience loves the crime writer Harry Franklin, having been exposed to him by her late father, but when he’s found dead in his apartment, a small part of her is delighted: it’s a locked room mystery, an intriguing puzzle. But in her eagerness she touches Franklin’s manual typewriter, which has the beginnings of a letter to a Lottie in it, receiving a rebuke that sends her fleeing the scene.

Patience has already determined that Franklin was killed by cyanide, however, noting that it smells like almonds and he was having a glass of almond-flavored liqueur. But there’s no trace of poison in the liqueur bottle itself or any other receptacle in Franklin’s apartment, or even outside within reach of any of the windows. The cyanide must have been in Franklin’s glass, but it would have evaporated if it had been there for long.

And Franklin doesn’t seem to have left his apartment for the last three days. The caretaker hasn’t seen Franklin or any guests visit him since Franklin gave him a letter to post three days ago. Franklin had recently contracted for a substantial fee to write a memoir for a new publisher, Pardona, but Pardona’s Kelvin Fitzwalter had never met him. They had only talked on Franklin’s landline; the author didn’t have a cellphone or computer. Fitzwalter is the one who got worried about a lack of response from Franklin and reported it to the police, who found him dead.

Fitzwalter is surprised to learn that there’s no trace of a memoir in Franklin’s apartment, not even notes. Franklin had promised an explosive reveal in his memoir that would shock the literary world, as well as an accounting of the fire that damaged his left hand and almost killed him. Fitzwalter identifies the man in a photo from Franklin’s apartment as another author, Edmund Lennox, although he doesn’t know the woman who’s with them.

Patience figures out how Franklin was poisoned: there was cyanide in the ice cubes he used. But who put it there?

A possibility is Franklin’s former publisher, Pippa Junor. She says the last time she saw Franklin was about a year ago, when he delivered the manuscript in which he killed off his popular detective Fortnum. She last talked to him a month ago, when she tried to convince him to bring Fortnum back and sign a new contract. But CCTV footage shows she went to his apartment in the past few days looking angry. She says she was, because she was the only publisher who accepted his first Fortnum manuscript, and it was she who fixed it up to make it a bestseller. Now he has dropped her for another publisher. But she says Franklin didn’t answer and she left.

Patience finds a newspaper article that identifies the woman in the photo with Franklin and Edmund Lennox. Her name is Lisa Newman, and she died in a fire at the writers’ retreat where the photo was taken – the same fire that injured Franklin, while Lennox was unharmed. A man named Aldous Tate ran the writers’ retreat and owned the cabin that burned down.

Franklin had recently requested the police report on Lisa’s death, as well as her postmortem, which had inconclusive findings but stated that the fire could have been intentionally set.

Lennox owns the same model of typewriter as Franklin – the two friends urged each other to buy them and keep at writing. Lennox has become known for literary fiction, including a book called “Lisa and Lottie.” Lisa had a twin sister – the “Lottie” to whom Franklin had begun a letter in his typewriter.

Lennox says that Tate, the manager of the writers’ retreat, hit on Newman, who found him scary. Indeed, Tate was charged with assault more recently when he attacked the boyfriend of a student who accused him of unwanted advances. Other women came forward with stories of sexual harassment and Tate was fired from his university job. Franklin called Tate four times recently. And Tate shows up on the CCTV outside Franklin’s apartment.

Tate says that Franklin wanted to talk about the fire, but won’t say anything else without a lawyer. Traces of cyanide are found on Tate’s clothing, but his lawyer says that he won’t answer any more questions, so the detectives reluctantly charge him with murder.

Patience has been stuck on another puzzle: she has read Lennox’s newest book and found that the style is so similar to Franklin’s Fortnum novels that they must have been written by the same person. Confronted by this accusation, Lennox admits it, saying that Franklin wanted to prove he could write something other than detective fiction. They were going to reveal the ruse after critics reviewed the book, but then it was shortlisted for a prize, so they decided to wait to see if it won.

But then Patience doubts herself: Franklin had a weakened left hand from the fire but wrote a whole series of books on a typewriter? Maybe Lennox actually wrote all the Fortnum books, as well as his own. A look at the manuscript for the first Fortnum novel, which Franklin’s publisher still has, confirms this. Whereas the letter Franklin was typing to Lottie for information for his memoir has faint left-hand key marks, the Fortnum manuscript does not. Patience’s mistakes make her doubt whether she’s cut out to help Bea in her investigations.

But the detectives are focused on making the charges against Tate stick. They fail when his lawyer argues that cyanide is naturally occurring in many plants that Tate’s wife grows at their home. Tate is released.

Then he’s found dead of cyanide poisoning in his car, with apparent notes for Franklin’s memoir in his trunk. But Bea believes, and Patience confirms, that the notes for the memoir were typed by a different typewriter and person than the Lottie letter – they were typed by the machine and person who typed the Fortnum manuscript.

Lennox is brought in. He admits that he wrote the Fortnum books despite despising crime fiction – but it made him money, which he used to subsidize Franklin through an offshore account. He learned at a dinner with Fitzwalter that Franklin was publishing a memoir with an explosive reveal and worried that it was about him – because he, not Tate, killed Lisa Newman. New technology scanning the images of her postmortem reveals that she was stabbed before the fire. Newman told Lennox that she preferred Franklin romantically and Lennox fell into a blind rage, killing her and then setting the fire to cover his tracks. Years later, he killed Franklin to prevent him from outing him. He then framed Tate, typing up fake notes for Franklin’s memoir and making it look as if Tate had killed himself after killing Franklin in the same manner.

But Franklin always believed that Tate, not Lennox, was responsible for Newman’s death, as the letter he had the building caretaker post before his death shows. His new publisher has received it, and it explained that the explosive reveal in his memoir was that Lennox wrote the Fortnum books. Lennox’s reasoning for killing his friend was based on an incorrect assumption.

Patience allows Bea to come to her rooms at her godfather’s house. Bea notices a puzzle box and asks about it. Patience has never opened it, to Bea’s surprise. It came from her mother, Mathilde Hendricks, who left when she was young. Patience has never wanted to contact her.