'Bookish' Recap: Episode 2

Bookish airs Sundays at 9:00 pm on WTTW is available to stream on the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the previous and following episodes.
Keep up with your favorite dramas and mysteries by signing up for our newsletter, Dramalogue.

Gabriel suspects Mickey Hall has stolen a precious jade figurine from the newly deceased father of his partner Merula Harkup, so he calls Mickey, a mechanic, in for a house call. Gabriel asks his wife Trottie to borrow the butcher neighbor’s car and pretend it is hers. Mickey flirts intensely while testing the car for issues.

While Mickey is out, Gabriel sends another neighbor, the young Nora, into Mickey’s mechanic shop to fix her bike tires, distracting Merula while Gabriel himself searches the shop. He finds a locked drawer with some black market goods; a chess set with pieces matching the one he found replacing a missing jade figurine at George Harkup’s; and the missing figurine itself.

Mickey is brought in by the police to be questioned by Inspector Bliss and Gabriel. He admits to going to visit George, hoping to try to reconcile with him since Merula is pregnant. Mickey waited outside and saw George’s cleaning lady, Mrs. Dredge, leave, hiding something in her coat. Mickey then saw someone bundled up enter – he says it was a man, but his vision is bad. Once that person left, Mickey tried to go in and picked the lock – George was a man of strict habit, so he should have been home. Mickey found George dead on the ground and decided to take one of the figurines, knowing they were valuable. He didn’t call the police.

There was no sign of forced entry at George’s home, so he seemingly knew his murderer and let them in. 

Gabriel decides to bring Bliss with him to the butcher, Eric Wellbeloved, who played dominoes with George twice a week. Wartime rations are still on, but Bliss uses his police badge to cut the line, and Eric gives his friendly neighbor Gabriel a bone he has saved for Dog. Eric also gives the two men a hint: the warden Baseheart, who also joined the domino game, didn’t get along with the strict rule-follower George: George thought Baseheart had been lax in enforcing the rules during the Blitz. 

Gabriel sends Nora and his new employee Jack to the pub where the domino game takes place to learn more. Jack has “tidied up” Gabriel’s idiosyncratic organizational system in his bookstore, to Gabriel’s horror, but Jack has truly been helpful in a different sense: he has realized that the antique coin found in a newly discovered pile of skeletons still has traces of silver polish on it from a very recent cleaning that helped to clearly reveal its date – a date that suggested the skeletons were part of a mass burial during the plague centuries ago. Gabriel finds this suspicious, and suspects someone hid new bones amongst the old and planted the coin to forestall further investigation.

Gabriel sends Trottie to nearby curio shops to ask about the coin.

Nora and Jack learn from the publican that George unusually visited in the middle of the day the day before he died, saying he had a very important secret. He thought one of his friends was cheating at dominoes. 

Gabriel searches George’s inventory and notices a bottle of morphine missing from his shop. He guesses that this is what Mrs. Dredge was concealing in her coat when Mickey saw her leaving George’s.

He’s right. Dredge’s son lost a leg in the war and suffers from great pain. The doctors don’t give him enough morphine, so Mrs. Dredge was stealing more from her employer. George blamed Mickey for the thefts. Dredge wasn’t aware, but is happily surprised, that she receives everything in George’s new will. She insists that George was alive when she left him right before nicking the morphine.

Gabriel has now confirmed his suspicion of the identity of George’s killer. He goes to Eric Wellbeloved’s butcher shop and asks when Eric’s wife Sheila drove up to Sheffield to visit family, as Eric told Gabriel the other day. Eric answers that she’s been gone since Thursday – but Trottie borrowed his car on Friday. Eric grabs a cleaver and darts out of the shop to find police waiting.

Eric fell in love with another woman, Enid, who is newly working in his shop. Gabriel guessed at the romance when Enid intimately wiped residue from Eric’s face in the shop without comment. This new love led Eric to strangle his wife, Sheila, with whom he had always fought. He bought caustic soda from George to dissolve Sheila’s flesh – he knew of this disposal method from his work as a butcher – and George joked that Eric was trying to get rid of a body. Eric then tried to make the bones look aged with gravy browning and cut them up – the marks on them match his work on the bone Gabriel got from him for Dog. And Gabriel contacted Sheila’s family in Sheffield, who haven’t seen her despite Eric’s story.

Baseheart had told Eric about the skeletons he unearthed, and Eric hid Sheila’s bones among them. He overdid the ruse by buying a coin from a plague year, cleaning it, and adding it to the pile – a curio shop confirmed to Trottie that Eric had recently bought the coin. 

Then Eric received a note from George warning him that he would report him to the authorities if they didn’t discuss a transgression. Eric assumed George knew about his murder of Sheila – but the rule-follower George just thought Eric was cheating at dominoes. Nevertheless, Eric says that he went to George’s and poisoned him, making it look like suicide, when George refused to compromise. 

But Eric’s story isn’t exactly right: he didn’t know about the wound on the back of George’s head and the trace of blood – cow’s blood, because the strike didn’t break George’s skin. That’s because Eric’s new paramour Enid is the one who visited and killed George. She hit him on the back of the head with a piece of meat after he refused to be bribed not to go to the authorities. She then poisoned him. She’s the bundled figure Mickey saw.

Eric admits that Enid discovered he had killed Sheila and took charge. When she is brought into the police station, she rushes to kiss Eric, grabs an officer’s baton and hits him with it, and yells at Eric to run. 

The butcher disappears into the night. Bliss, Gabriel, and Jack follow him to the bomb crater where he tried to hide his wife’s bones. Baseheart’s spotlight is still there, so they turn it on to find Eric in the neighboring abandoned building. Gabriel follows him inside to try to convince him to turn himself in, but instead he throws himself out a window to his death. 

While debriefing with Nora and Trottie, Jack finally shares his last name, Blunt, and a bit of his story. He fell in with the wrong people after growing up an orphan, and was caught while being the escape driver for a robbery; his accomplices escaped. Then the prison reform board sent him to a job at Book’s. 

Why did you choose me? he asks Gabriel, wondering why the bookseller agreed to employ and house a random convict. You know nothing about me. 

Gabriel won’t explain. Outside, the man with an eyepatch whom Gabriel met earlier watches from the shadow of his car.