'The Gold' Recap: Season 1 Episode 4

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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One of the agents who descended upon Ken Noye’s Kent mansion in an attempt to catch him transporting stolen gold has been killed, stabbed five times in the front and five times in the back. Boyce promises the team on which the dead man served that they will find all of the stolen gold and arrest every single person involved. There will be justice. 

Boyce’s bosses tell him to get Ken to confess to murder – because it’s a police officer that has been killed, they are going for that more-difficult-to-prove charge instead of manslaughter.

Once transferred to London from custody in Kent, where he has allies amongst the police, Ken asks to speak to Boyce. He tries and fails to bribe him. 

The police can’t find the gold on Ken’s estate, or even the war-era underground bunkers that should be on his land. There are some gold bars without serial numbers and instructions for a smelter, but it’s not enough to prove anything. 

John Palmer, the gold merchant who is selling the stolen gold for Ken, is blissfully unaware that his co-conspirators have been arrested – he’s on vacation with his family in Tenerife, repairing his relationship with his wife, Marnie. 

But then John sees a man staring at him and asks him why. The man hands over his newspaper, which has stories about the raids, the death of the agent – and John’s suspected involvement. A photo of John is included.

Marnie sees the story, too, and cries as she confronts John. The police have been in our house, she tells him. But he denies all wrongdoing, saying he didn’t know the gold was stolen. He then says the same thing in a TV interview with a BBC reporter who had tracked him down in Tenerife. Spain won’t extradite him to England, so he’ll stay there as long as he can. He visited his father in prison once and doesn’t ever want to go there.

Nicki and Tony are busy tracking down the money from the stolen gold. They have found bank statements at John’s store, Scadlynn’s, and bring them to the bank, where a manager tells them that he raised concerns about the amount of money passing through Scadlynn’s account internally, but he can’t give the detectives information without a court order.

Nicki and Tony wait for a bank teller to take a cigarette break and approach her. She tells them that, because John’s colleague Garth withdrew all the money in £50 notes, the bank had to order a special run of the notes. Most of that run went to that specific bank, and most of those notes went to Garth – so the detectives can track the cash by a serial number beginning “A24.” They find some at the driver Brian Reader’s house, at Garth’s house, at Scadlynn’s, and in pubs in Hatton Garden, where an importer falsified paperwork for the stolen gold. But there’s none at Ken’s home.

Ken pleads not guilty to murder, and his trial is scheduled in six months.

While the detectives have closed in on the people behind stealing and selling the gold, they don’t yet have any leads on those laundering the money resulting from the sale. Edwyn has already decided to go to the South of France with his new girlfriend, the real estate broker Sienna; the police raids on Ken and the others only reinforce that decision. His partner Gordon warns him not to hide from their co-conspirators, however – not all of them are in prison. 

Indeed, Gordon is asserting more power over Edwyn. When Edwyn insists on moving the money from their Swiss bank account to one in Liechtenstein, since some of the people arrested have the Swiss account number, Gordon makes Edwyn drive the ten million in cash across the border with him. He knows that Edwyn purposefully put Gordon’s name on the Swiss account instead of his own. You’re not in charge anymore, Gordon warns Edwyn.

When Gordon summons Edwyn back to London from his idyll in France six months later, Edwyn goes to meet with some real estate investors in person. But Gordon has another task: some seven hundred thousand pounds of cash has turned up from Scadlynn’s and needs to be deposited in the Liechtenstein account, but the system set up to do so is no longer in place, given police surveillance. 

So Gordon and Edwyn turn to Keith Potts, an art dealer whose gallery is going to close if he doesn’t make some money soon. He goes to the continent for business, so he can transfer the money across the border to Liechtenstein. He refuses at first; his girlfriend is already close to leaving him, and if he does something illegal she certainly will. But Edwyn convinces him.

Nicki and Tony have found Jeannie, the woman who was depositing the money into the Swiss account. Searching a new police computer database for money with a serial number beginning “A24,” they have come across the ten thousand pounds she dropped and reported missing. They try to get Jeannie to confess and present evidence against Ken, but she refuses. 

But they search banks near where she dropped the money and find the one where she was making deposits. Fearing accusations of handling stolen money, the bank turns over information, showing that Jeannie was depositing the money into a Swiss account. Even though Swiss accounts are notoriously secretive, the detectives are now on their way towards finding the people laundering the stolen money.

They’re trying to hold Ken responsible for the death of their agent now. The circumstances are recounted by Ken, his wife, and the other agent in the courtroom trial. When Ken’s dogs started barking at the intruding agents, he went outside and grabbed a flashlight from his car. He says he also took a knife from the car – he had brought it out to scrape the battery on the car earlier that day and now wanted to return it to the house. 

He set out to look for the disturbance and found the agent in a balaclava. The other agent escaped over the fence and pretended to be a neighbor complaining about the dogs barking, hoping to distract Ken. That meant he couldn’t see what happened.

Ken says the agent hit him first, and Ken struck out in self defense. The prosecutor points out that the agent had five wounds on his front and five wounds on his back.

But Ken’s lawyer convinces the judge to bring the jury to see the property at night, then sets a masked man to jump out at them, scaring them. They return a not guilty verdict.

Boyce immediately arrests Ken again, this time for conspiracy for handling stolen goods, a difficult charge to prove. But Boyce doesn’t want Ken to go free – he wants justice.

Ken’s neighbor had defended Ken to the police as a good man who mowed her lawn. Now she finds a metal box hidden in her garden while she’s digging to put in new plants.

John and his family are still in Tenerife. He has noticed an abandoned timeshare construction site that was to be called El Dorado, and seen an investment opportunity.

The art dealer Keith is stopped and searched at the Liechtenstein border as he tries to drive Edwyn and Gordon’s money across.