'The Marlow Murder Club' Recap: Season 3 Episode 2

The Marlow Murder Club airs Sundays at 7:00 pm and is available to stream via the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the previous episodes.
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When Tanika arrives at the murdered mayor Geoffrey’s house after Judith and her friends found a masked intruder there, she is distracted from her annoyance at Judith’s independence by Judith’s guess at the identity of the intruder. Tanika and Judith go test her hypothesis, visiting the town council member Marcus with an accusation. He admits he was the intruder.

But he used Geoffrey’s key, so he wasn’t breaking in. He simply wanted to retrieve the blackmail letter Judith found in Geoffrey’s house. It was sent to Marcus, not Geoffrey, but the mayor promised to take care of it for Marcus. After Geoffrey’s death, Marcus worried that a blackmail letter in his house with Marcus’ fingerprints on it would look bad and so went to take it back. He claims not to know why he was being blackmailed.

Judith returns Dave’s novel manuscript to him from Geoffrey’s house and is helped by Dave to the realization that there must be fake receipts to account for the sudden increase in petty cash spending documented on the council website and pointed out by Dave. After hours of poring through receipts, Judith and Becks discover several with the odd amount of 8.88 and suspect they’re fake. Indeed, one is for a hardware store that has closed. There’s a signature on each one: the council member Debbie’s.

Debbie explains that she has been struggling with menopause, forgetting things enough that she earned a reprimand from her boss Paul, her fellow council member Sophia’s husband. She struggled to get medical help quickly on her public insurance, but private health care is expensive – so she “borrowed” some money from the council to get into a doctor quickly and save her career. Geoffrey never found out, she says tearfully.

While leaving Debbie’s office, Becks takes the chance to ask Paul his whereabouts during Geoffrey’s death. He says he was seeing a movie. But when Becks takes advantage of her family’s absence to see the same movie, she realizes Paul is lying: he said it had a happy ending, and it most certainly does not. He admits that he simply fell asleep. No alibi for him.

In his house, Judith notices a photo of him and Sophia in which she is wearing earrings that match one Judith found in Geoffrey’s house. Sophia explains that she started to find herself attracted to Geoffrey, given how supportive he was, as opposed to Paul. After a council meeting at his house, she stayed after and tried kissing him; the earring must have fallen off then. Geoffrey told her he still loved his late wife but promised to forget Sophia had kissed him.

Meanwhile, Judith has also matched a cut-out letter from the blackmail sent to Marcus to an architecture magazine. She approaches fellow council member Terrence, an architect, who admits he sent it. He had discovered that Marcus was the hateful commenter Marlow1628 on the council website because of a characteristic misspelling. He confirmed it by feeding Marcus false information that then appeared on the website. (Marcus is frustrated by cancel culture, and Marlow1628 is his way to speak his mind.) So Terrence sent Marcus the blackmail letter, hoping it would stop him. 

It didn’t. The argument Mrs. Eddingham witnessed between Terrence and Geoffrey was over this situation. But Terrence didn’t kill Geoffrey. He points the police to the person he saw through frosted glass in the kitchen before the council meeting. All he could discern was light-colored hair.

The detectives search the council hall and find a ladder in the women’s bathroom plus a loose ventilation panel. Inside the vent is a bag with a syringe carrying the poison aconite, a white coat, catering gloves, and a blond wig. Some hair in the wig matches Sophia’s.

But Judith has figured out who the killer is, and it’s not Sophia. She teams up with Sophia to catch them.

Judith asks Alec, the tea and coffee guy, to set a bonfire of her great-aunt’s stash of newspapers outside her house. She records a conversation with Sophia about this fire. And then she sets off with her friends and Tanika to see the council members as they decide on a dedication for a bench in honor of Geoffrey. 

As Judith lays out the case against Sophia, who has been framed, Sophia says she wouldn’t kill Geoffrey – he was still helping her with the graves she had mixed up, and they had managed to find the body that had gotten lost in the mistake. There’s paperwork in her podcast studio proving it. 

As Judith and Sophia’s pre-taped conversation about the fire at Judith’s home then plays to Sophia’s phone, Judith heads to Sophia’s podcasting studio. She knows that Dave has installed a listening device on Sophia’s phone and is thus tracking her movements; the recording and fire will make him think everyone is distracted and away from Sophia’s house, while the remark that the lost grave had been found would send him to Sophia’s house.

That’s because Dave’s late mother is the body Sophia lost. Dave has been consumed by the absence of his mother’s grave and learned through snooping around the council that Sophia was in charge of the graveyards. He decided to enact revenge – and Geoffrey, offering mentorship to him, gave him an in. Geoffrey recommended Dave to do IT work on Sophia’s podcasting studio, allowing him to access her emails and to bug her phone. In the emails, he found that Geoffrey had protected Sophia from her mistake regarding the graveyards, and so decided to punish both of them by killing Geoffrey and framing Sophia for the murder.

He got aconite and hair – a slug-preventing technique – from Sophia’s garden and disguised himself with a blond wig but was sure to be seen through glass by Terrence while he poisoned Geoffrey’s coffee. He then put Sophia’s hair in the wig and left it at the town council to be discovered. 

Judith was tipped off to Dave when she returned his manuscript to him from Geoffrey and he glanced at the bench they were sitting on and recited one of the plaques the council was considering installing on a bench to honor Geoffrey – thus tipping Judith off that he had seen the council’s emails. 

In the midst of all this, the archaeologist Darius has missed an afternoon tea date with Judith. He comes to her house to apologize: he had to accompany a colleague to the hospital. That colleague’s illness has led Darius to be asked to lead a dig in Wales to replace them, which means he will be leaving soon. Judith asks him in for a drink.

Suzie has been trying – unsuccessfully – to gather petitions to urge a landowner to repair a closed public bridge on his land. After Tanika talks to her daughter Shanti about how it’s important to stand up to bullies – Shanti is friends with some at school – Shanti decides to help Suzie and gathers plenty of signatures.