'Marble Hall Murders' Recap: Episode 2

Marble Hall Murders airs Sundays at 8:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the previous episode.
Recap and stream the previous two series, Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders.

Susan is reading more of Elliot Crace’s Atticus Pünd novel, going over it with him and noting possible problems, like the setting of Corfu, which leads to some difficulties around language. For instance, why does the eyepatched policeman Achilles Vasillikos speak excellent English? Elliot writes something in.

Achilles’ father worked as a translator for the British embassy and had his son learn English. He uses it when he approaches Pünd to tell him that Lady Chalfont, with whom Pünd was to meet, has died. Achilles’ superiors in Athens want him to enlist Pünd’s help in investigating the death, which is suspected to be a poisoning, even though Lady Chalfont was in ill health and didn’t expect to live another season. 

Lady Chalfont always had lemon ginger tea out of a smaller pot at tea; her son Jeffrey and son-in-law Harry both had Earl Grey out of a larger pot the afternoon she died. Lady Chalfont said her throat was burning before collapsing; Jeffrey assumed a heart attack. But the servant Maria, who served the tea, mentions that she was distracted by a knock at the window after preparing it. She went to look but saw no one; when she returned, the cover of the small pot had been removed, and she heard the door to the service staircase close.

Achilles has sent the tea to Athens for lab testing. 

The service staircase leads from the kitchen to bedrooms. The entire family was at home at the time of death. Pünd notes that you can hear conversations in the room below clearly from Lady Chalfont’s room; he hears Lady Chalfont’s grandson Cedric comment to his mother Lola about Lady Chalfont’s unwillingness to give Lola money to fund a new play she wants to star in.

Elliot’s wife Gillian interrupts. She’s eager to know if Susan thinks the book is any good; Susan says Pünd’s creator, Alan Conway, would have been impressed. Gillian wonders if Susan will be Elliot’s editor; Susan responds that she will, to Gillian’s delight.

Lady Chalfont’s daughter Judith says she heard someone on the creaky service stairs around 4:00. She thinks it was Lady Chalfont’s second husband Elmer; she doesn’t know of anyone else who was upstairs. Lola was in the library. 

The family dislikes Elmer, who is ten years younger than Lady Chalfont. They assumed he was a golddigger, even though he himself is wealthy, because he inherited his fortune from his first wife after she died by suicide in New York’s Grand Central Station.

Elmer reverses this characterization: He says the family resents him because they were all siphoning off Lady Chalfont’s money. He’s the only one who knows the contents of her will, which will surprise her children. As soon as the will is read, he wants to return to England, where the funeral will be held. 

Elmer was at Villa Belmar all day except for a lunch from around 1:00-3:00 with his son Robert. A book that is a study of poisons is jutting off the shelf in his office. He gets angry when Pünd points it out, explaining that he has to know about the topic since so many ancients were poisoned, and he deals in antiquities.

One of those antiquities is the Calyx Krater, an important vase acquired by his partner – Robert has implied under suspect circumstances. Indeed, Maria was cleaning the Ithacan museum from which the vase was taken when she witnessed Nazis shoot the museum director when he refused to hand it and other artifacts over in 1944. Another man obliged. Now she has recognized the vase in the Villa Belmar and has informed someone about it, but Lady Chalfont’s death prevents the man from moving forward with his plan. 

Susan comments to Elliot that his dislike of the character Elmer is strong. Elliot replies that Elmer is based on someone he knows. (Elmer is played by the same actor as Elliot’s hated father.) Susan warns him against such games, mentioning Alan’s own spiteful use of real-life people in his books. She has noticed that Belmar is an anagram of Marble and Lady Chalfont’s initials match that of Elliot’s grandmother Miriam Crace, who lived at Marble Hall. 

Elliot admits that he and his whole family hated Miriam. As a child, he wanted to be an author and, upon his father’s urging, showed Miriam a story he had written. She told him in cruel terms that he should look for a different, more boring career, like his father. 

Given the identification of Miriam and Lady Chalfont, Susan mentions that Miriam’s death was natural. Elliot knowingly tells her to keep reading his book.

Wanting to better understand Elliot, Susan visits Marble Hall, where he grew up, which is now a museum. She goes on a tour, seeing some of the left-handed pens Miriam used to write – she bought a new one for each of the 63 Tiny People books she wrote. “Grandpa’s stopwatch,” given to Miriam on her 50th birthday, is also there, stopped at 4:00. There’s a photo of her with her longtime driver as well. 

The house is decorated with taxidermy, a hobby of Miriam’s predeceased husband Arthur. He not only stuffed animals but also bought specimens. The tour guide mentions that Miriam had been ill for some time before dying. Also, in 1967, she spent six months in a clinic in Lausanne for stress.

Her son Jonathan turned the house into a museum. Her adopted son Frederick Turner now manages the house, and still lives there, in his old room in the attic. Susan finagles a meeting with Frederick, who is blind in one eye due to a car accident in which he drove through a red light while dazed by a head cold. He’s effusive in his praise of Miriam, who adopted him at age seven from an orphanage of which she was a patron; his mother Mary died giving birth to him. He served as the family accountant until Jonathan asked him to manage the museum.

He recalls the day Miriam died. She pressed the panic button in her room at 6:00, but it took a long time for the family doctor Lambert to arrive. Frederick bristles at the suggestion that there was something unnatural about Miriam’s death and warns Susan and Elliot not to damage Miriam’s name.

Susan visits the retired Lambert, who lives a town over. He mentions that he cured Arthur Crace of a skin affliction he got from taxidermy chemicals. His wife urges him to tell Susan about Elliot, who was fascinated with poison and disease as a boy and stole some cough medicine from Lambert’s bag in front of him while he was treating Julia for a minor ailment, just a few days before Miriam’s death. But he strongly rejects the notion that Miriam’s death was unnatural; he diagnosed the heart condition that killed her. Before Susan leaves, he praises Miriam; she left him a generous bequest that let him purchase expensive cars.

Lady Chalfont’s death wasn’t natural: testing shows her tea was poisoned. When the lawyer Lambrose arrives at Villa Belmar for the will reading with his secretary Sofia, who will soon leave his employment because she is engaged, Achilles and Pünd question them. They arrived at Belmar when Lady Chalfont died because she had called the same day she met Pünd, around 2:15, and asked them to come with the will. 

Lambrose reads Lady Chalfont’s wishes to the family: her late husband’s estate has already passed down to Jeffrey, who is running it into the ground, but the bulk of the rest of her fortune will go to Elmer, who will act as executor over it in disbursing funds to her family, thus protecting them. Each of her children gets 20,000 pounds outright; Cedric gets 20,000 when he turns 21; and Robert gets 10,000. 

The family is furious. They again accuse Elmer of being a golddigger, while he says Lady Chalfont just didn’t trust them with money, since they were all wasting what they did get from her. Harry accuses Elmer of murdering Lady Chalfont since he knew what was in her will; Robert defends his father by punching Harry. A chaotic brawl ensues.