'The Marlow Murder Club' Recap: Season 2 Episode 6

The Marlow Murder Club is available to stream via the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the previous episodes.
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Tanika doesn’t believe that a boat collapsed on James Wyckham at Harry Tynham’s boatyard by accident – not when Harry is a suspect in the murder-disguised-as-an-accident of Kit Harcourt. Harry’s daughter – and Suzie’s friend – Jackie says the boat shouldn’t have fallen. She also shares that she found a letter from the parish council in the trash: the boatyard had been condemned and Harry was being forced to sell it. The applicant behind the action was Kit.

Judith asks Mrs. Eddingham, who is on the parish council, to look into the details of the application. It turns out that Kit wanted riverfront property and Harry’s boatyard was in the way, but Harry refused to sell. Then, out of nowhere, James Wyckham reported structural issues with the boatyard. 

The detectives determine that one of the struts holding up James’ boat was deliberately sawed to weaken it. And Judith has learned that, while regular sailing club members wear red jackets, executive members wear blue. The person seen walking away from Kit’s body in drone footage was wearing blue – and Harry kept his blue jacket when he was kicked out of the club, James’ wife Hayley tells Judith. (She’s lying, not that Judith knows that.)

But there’s another suspect who also had a blue jacket, and a cap delineating his rank in the club: Gregg Cooper. And his uniform, which he typically keeps at the club, is missing. 

Suzie has finally found Gregg, however, noticing bottles of his favored liquor on an abandoned houseboat along with a bed that has been slept in. The police find him at the closest pub, and he tells them he’s happy that Kit is dead. Gregg was meant to become vice commodore of the club and Kit lied and cheated to keep him from getting it. 

Gregg can’t explain why a sailing bag with his possessions was seen floating away from the murder scene; he keeps it in his locker at the club with his uniform. 

Judith, Suzie, and Becks have laid a trap to catch the thief stealing expensive boat motors, with Judith placing an order and Suzie making it known that Judith lives in an isolated area. The trio waits in the woods overnight near a hole covered with leaves, and catches… Harry. As his accomplice tries to start a van to get away, they stop him and find Jed Hawkins, who works at the pub. 

Harry tells the police that his business was failing after he was accused of stealing from the sailing club; he needed money. Jed had the same motivation: the pub is behind on rent and due to close. The pair stole motors from the club the night before Kit was killed, and then Jed returned to the club around the time Kit was killed to retrieve an identifying sweatshirt he had left; that’s when he picked up an antique gold watch he found on the ground and stepped in oil that Judith tracked to near Kit’s body, but that’s just a coincidence. Jed didn’t see Kit’s body or anyone else.

Jackie tried to call Suzie while she was staking out the trap that caught the thieves, but Suzie had left her phone inside. Jackie’s message says she knows who the murderer is, and that she’s sending proof now – but then she’s cut off. Suzie rushes to the boatyard and finds Jackie unconscious on the floor with a generator running. Someone knocked her out with ether and then tried to kill her with carbon monoxide from the generator. An email is open on the computer in front of her but the text is gibberish. 

Becks knows a watch specialist and asks him about the watch that Jed found at the club. He recognizes it as belonging to Michael Liddington, the husband of the club’s Ursula – but Michael has been dead seven years. And DNA from the watchlink found by Kit’s body has found a match in the police database: a fraudster named Darren Benson, who hasn’t been heard from since he was reported missing in 1996.

Ursula tells Judith and Becks that Michael left the watch to James Wyckham in his will. But Ursula saw James wearing it today. James uses a building on her property for sailing club business, and runs her accounts for her, despite having retired from his job in finance. But Judith and Becks find a secret office hidden in a closet in that building, with financial programs running on computers. Inside a locked closet is an invoice for the same make of watch Michael gifted to James, dated from the day Kit died – even though James lost the watch at the club that day and Jed picked it up, he bought a new one so that no one would know. There’s also a photo of a group of traders from the 1990s that includes Darren Benson.

Ursula has called her bank and learned that James stole all of her savings. And Judith realizes that Jackie was losing consciousness from the ether when she typed her email, so her hands were in the wrong place. If you shift the position over, her email says that James was the killer.

Jackie discovered this because James left his car at the boatyard after the boat fell on him, and Hayley asked Jackie to search it for his phone. Instead she found Gregg Cooper’s club hat in the trunk. Jackie figured out that James had killed Kit, dressed as Gregg to shift blame, and so James tried to kill her too.

And he has another person he’s trying to keep quiet at this very moment. He overheard Suzie telling Ursula at the club that she was trying to find Jackie’s phone for the proof of the killer that Jackie told Suzie she was sending: a photo of Gregg’s hat in James’ car. So James stole Suzie’s dog – there have been dog-nappings recently – and left her a ransom note, telling her to leave her phone at home. He led her to an isolated boat, where she found her dog – and then he locked her and the dog inside and started filling the boat with water. 

Fortunately, Judith and Becks have ended up following Suzie after she stopped picking up her phone, using a tracking app on Suzie’s left-behind phone for Suzie’s dog – Suzie has the collar with the tracker in her bag, since James took the collar off the dog when he stole her. They see James leaving the boat on a bike from afar and hide in some trees with a dog leash stretched over the path to clothesline him. He flies off his bike; meanwhile, the police have come to rescue Suzie from the boat, thanks to a call from Judith and Becks.

James explains that he is Darren Benson, but had to disappear when his fraud at a bank started to be found out. He built a new life in Marlow. But Kit worked for the same bank he once did, and recognized Darren as James when a trader died and the obituary had an old photo – this is why Kit had a younger photo of James and other club members in his house. Kit also discovered that James, not Harry, had been defrauding the club, and vowed to reveal everything about James – unless he helped him get Harry’s boatyard via the council and resigned from the club. Kit gave James seven days. 

Then there was a stormy morning, and James knew that Kit would be the only one trying to sail in the bad weather. So he took the opportunity to kill him at the club when no one else was there, dressing up as Gregg and putting Gregg’s sailing bag of possessions in the river to frame him. For extra security, he also framed Harry, going to the boatyard and sawing the strut supporting the boat so that it would collapse on him. His wife Hayley didn’t know any of this, but feared that James would get in trouble and so lied to Judith about Harry still having his blue sailing coat. 

The sailing club decides not to press charges against Harry and Jed for stealing the motors, so they’re sentenced to community service instead – and Harry’s name has been cleared of stealing from the club. Even better, ancient coins worth a lot of money have been found at the site of the archaeological dig on seemingly worthless land owned by the pub operator – so she now has money to keep the pub running. 

Judith is getting back into archaeology after her retirement, joining the handsome and accomplished professor Darius Gifford to survey another possible dig site. 

And Tanika is not losing her role as inspector, as she thought – she’s being promoted to it permanently.