'Patience' Recap: Episode 5

Patience airs Sundays at 7:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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Bea’s son Alfie is getting a behavioral test, and when she picks him up he asks if something is wrong with him. She assures him no. The test results are available the next day, but she puts off looking at them.

Her birthday is coming up, and she invites Patience to a gathering of friends in celebration at the pub. Patience is both excited and nervous, as she tells her autism support group. But she soon has another friend to worry about, when the group’s leader, Billy, receives a call that his brother has died, of a heart attack and circulatory collapse.

Patience accompanies Billy to the mortuary to identify Paul and leave clothes in which he should be cremated. She doesn’t see signs of circulatory collapse in the body, to her surprise. She accepts the clothes Paul was wearing and brings them home to wash, to take one thing off Billy’s mind.

The next day, Billy receives another startling phone call: Paul’s body is gone. Bea and Jake are now involved in the case, and hear from the workers at the mortuary that the embalmer Frank was the only one there. He heard a car engine start but didn’t see anything right before he noticed the body was gone. He had just started the embalming process, using his own proprietary blend that includes cognac.

A postmortem had yet to take place, as the pathologist, Dr. DiMarco, broke his arm and thus was delayed in coming.

Even though Frank says that Paul’s eyes and mouth had already been sewn shut, Billy worries that Paul is still alive. He asks Patience to visit Paul’s flat with him. It’s unusually messy – and there’s a bloody, unconscious man lying on the floor with a tourniquet around his arm above a stab wound. The tourniquet is a distinctive tie that Billy brought to the mortuary for Paul to be cremated in – and that bag of clothes had also gone missing from the mortuary. Billy begs Patience not to tell anyone about the tie, at least for now.

The stabbed man is identified as Sacha Davidson, an executive assistant at a food company called AFT. Paul worked there as a researcher – and it was there that he collapsed and died, at a party celebrating a win in court that saved the company from paying hundreds of millions of pounds to people accusing it of knowingly using additives linked to behavioral issues.

Dr. DiMarco, the pathologist who was to conduct Paul’s postmortem, is the father of a high-up employee of AFT named Anita. The detectives wonder if Paul’s death was nefarious – perhaps he knew something that could have jeopardized AFT’s court win – and if DiMarco was supposed to cover up anything in his postmortem. When the doctor broke his arm and couldn’t do the postmortem, maybe the company stole Paul’s body to prevent the truth from getting out, and sent Davidson to search Paul’s apartment for any incriminating evidence.

Baxter is an acquaintance of DiMarco and questions him. DiMarco is insulted; his daughter hates the company and is about to leave. She’s just waiting for a big stock payout – another reason that the company wouldn’t want Paul making waves, thus reducing its value. She shares a video from the party of the CEO, Bethan Porter, and others rather too jubilant over their class action win.

Porter justifies celebrating the win. But Jake discovers that there’s a lot going on at AFT. Anita was in a relationship with Paul and keyed his car when he broke up with her, but he declined to press charges. Porter is also in a relationship with a colleague, the company’s chef Mason Jenner, who served two years in prison for stealing from a restaurant.

Patience’s guilt has overwhelmed her, so she tells Bea about the tie used as a tourniquet. She suggests that Billy is right and Paul is alive – she doesn’t think the embalmer Frank is reliable, because she smelled cognac strongly on him, not just from the embalming fluid.

Indeed, when Bea and Patience visit the mortuary, Frank collapses on their car, drunk. Under questioning, he admits that he lied about the circumstances around the disappearance of Paul’s body – because he needed time to sober up. The body disappeared much earlier than he said, he didn’t hear a car but did hear footsteps, and he hadn’t yet sewed up Paul’s mouth and eyes because his hands were shaking from drink.

Paul’s fiance is in France, but she tells the detectives that Paul was convinced AFT was going to lose the court case, and that he called her after they didn’t to say he could prove they were lying. Maybe the company was trying to keep him quiet: the video of the party shows Anita DiMarco’s hand over Paul’s drink at one point. She could have poisoned him.

Baxter is skeptical, and angry at his detectives for going on such flimsy evidence. But Patience notices something else in the video: sushi was being served in bento boxes. A Japanese delicacy known as fugu contains a toxin that, if not properly prepared, can cause a person to seem dead long before they are – perhaps that’s how Paul was poisoned. Frank said that his embalming fluid contains activated charcoal, which can counteract the toxin, so pouring the embalming fluid down Paul’s throat could have revived him.

But fugu is illegal in the UK; Patience confirms with the restaurant that provided the sushi that they don’t serve it. There is a private dining club that sources it, however. And Jnner, the AFT chef who is in a relationship with the CEO, has worked in plenty of Japanese and seafood restaurants. But as he is being questioned by the police, the chief constable issues an alert that Paul may be alive, dangerous, and at large, since he may have stabbed Davidson. Jenner is released from custody.

Billy calls Patience to his apartment: it has been torn up as though someone searched it. She asks Billy where Paul is, suspecting that he knows his brother is alive as well as his current hiding place. She convinces him to reveal the location, then sets off for it, avoiding Bea and Jake as they arrive to visit Billy. Jenner, watching Billy’s apartment, follows Patience.

She finds Paul alive – and Jenner does, too, pointing a gun at both of them. The chef demands to know where Paul’s research that could prove AFT lied in court is hidden, pointing his gun at Patience. Paul insists he doesn’t have the memory stick with the research. As Jenner prepares to shoot Patience, Bea rushes in and hits Jenner with a taser.

The memory stick isn’t with Paul: it’s at Patience’s house, in his clothes that she took to wash. Davidson admits that the CEO sent him to Paul’s house to search for the memory stick. Paul stumbled across him in the dark after leaving the mortuary and stabbed him in panic, but saved his life by applying the tourniquet before fleeing. The private dining club confirms that they sent fugu to a PO box in York. Jenner and the CEO seem to have both conspired to kill Paul to shut him up, thus saving their court win and their upcoming stock buyout.

When Patience arrives at the pub for Bea’s party, the handsome young crime scene researcher Elliot Scott is disappointed to see her get there as he is leaving. He asks her on a date, and, stunned, she tells him she has to think about it.

She hands Bea a present: a golden thimble, because it protects you. Jake laughs at the gift and Patience rushes away. Bea follows and tries to comfort her, but she leaves nevertheless. Bea sits down alone in the pub and opens Alfie’s test results.