'The Gold' Recap: Season 1 Episode 3

The Gold airs Sundays at 9:00 pm on WTTW and is available to stream on the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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Boyce has assigned men to watch Ken Noye’s house and determine the routine of Brian Reader, who has been transporting the stolen gold from Ken to the gold merchant Scadlynn’s. Ken’s estate has three underground bunkers dating from World War II, leading the records for it to be sealed under an official secrets act. If he knows they’re there, that’s likely where he’s hiding the gold.

Brian noticed a telecoms worker on a pole outside Ken’s house, and asks Ken if his phone service was out. It wasn’t. They guess that the worker may be a detective surveilling them – he was – and try to be more careful. When Boyce’s men try to trail Brian after he leaves Ken’s house, he goes off track and then shows them he knows they’re following him. 

They guess he’s taking a train instead, and send Tony and Nikki to board with him. The pair manages to follow him without detection to Scadlynn’s, thus determining the next step in the gold’s process from stolen asset to seemingly legitimate wealth.

John Palmer, who owns Scadlynn’s, has a fraud record. And Scadlynn’s has reported a huge increase in profit this quarter, which they’re hiding behind vast purchases of gold and a fake importer certificate. Boyce needs a court order to look at Scadlynn’s records, but acquiring one would inform Palmer the police are onto him. 

So Boyce sends in Archie Osborne from Customs instead, for a routine examination of Scadlynn’s books. While there, he determines that John can’t read, and that the importer certificate says all the gold they’re getting comes from a single mine in Sierra Leone.

Sierra Leone has a lot of gold, and the corrupt government is willing to sell it to anyone. But Archie says the mine supplying Scadlynn’s likely doesn’t exist, so Boyce sends Tony and – after some convincing – Nicki to Africa to investigate. 

They find locals looking for gold on an empty plain near a newly planted sign claiming a gold mine. The deed says the land is owned by Constantino Precious Metals, the importer supplying Scadlynn’s with its paperwork. But there’s not actually any gold, or a mine, there – it’s all fraudulent. The armed men who planted the ownership sign appear and shoot at Tony and Nicki to get them to leave.

Back in London, Nicki visits her ex-criminal father, who tries to pry into what she’s investigating, to no avail. When she leaves his apartment, she notices a car with people inside watching her. They drive away when she approaches.

Garth, John’s assistant at Scadlynn’s, is getting nervous about all the gold and money they’re moving. But John tells him that, now that they’ve started, they can’t stop until they’ve sold all the gold. When Garth goes into the bank for a final time to withdraw a huge sum of money, the bank branch reports it and is ready to prevent access to the money – but managers allow the withdrawal to go through. 

That money is deposited into a Swiss bank account by Jeannie Savage. With Ken suspecting police surveillance, he has started sending her to multiple banks on her own instead of accompanying her. On one of her runs, she nervously drops a wad of ten thousand pounds outside her car, only realizing once the bank counts her money. When she returns to her car, the wad is gone.

She unthinkingly reports the loss to the police, to Ken’s horror. She was in a posh neighborhood, she says; maybe someone turned it in. She’s right, but Ken fears that the police now suspect her. No; they allow her to retrieve it with barely any questioning. But Ken learns from a police connection that the lost money will have been logged in a computer system. Fortunately, barely anyone knows how to use the computers.

From the Swiss account, the money is being funneled into real estate investments by Edwyn, who has teamed up with the broker Sienna to find properties to buy. She suggests some in the Cote d’Azur – but says she would have to accompany him to buy them. He offers a dinner date.

He is in the process of divorcing his third wife, who has decided that she wants to take all of her family’s money back from him, even though he floated the idea of maintaining the marriage in public for appearances’ sake. 

He and his partner Gordon have now bought up a swath of industrial wharves in London and are rezoning them to be developed. Now that they have a river of money coming in from the stolen gold, they can no longer develop them themselves; they have to sell them and keep the money moving to further obscure it. Edwyn visits one of the sites, near where Gordon grew up, and takes off his gold wedding ring, burying it in the mud for working class kids like Gordon once was to find.

Edwyn is late to his dinner with Sienna, but they nevertheless kiss and spend the night together. He tells her they should go to France after all.

John’s wife Marnie has booked a trip to Tenerife for their family – John is working too hard, and needs a break. But he tells her he can’t stop until the job is done, even snapping at his kid. Marnie makes it clear the damage he will do to their relationship if he doesn’t join the vacation.

Boyce is ready to move in on the criminals, setting up four separate surveillance teams and acquiring discreet search warrants. Since Ken is connected to the police in Kent, Boyce won’t liaise with the local department there – which means the team there can’t have weapons. 

Boyce needs to nab Ken, Brian, and the gold all together when his team moves in. If any of the four teams makes a move, they all need to. 

The men watching Ken’s house start to approach but are spotted by Ken’s dogs and attacked. Boyce sends everyone else in as an urgent call for an ambulance goes out. Garth and the importer are arrested, while Nicki and Tony move in on John’s backyard smelter – only to find a stable boy working there. John has gone to Tenerife.

Boyce arrives at Ken’s mansion to see one of his men being carried on a stretcher to an ambulance, and Ken handcuffed.