'Marble Hall Murders' Recap: Episode 3

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 has attracted suspicion by asking questions of Frederick Turner and Dr. Lambert. She is summoned to meet Jonathan Crace, who is in charge of protecting the reputation of his mother, Miriam Crace, as the head of her foundation. He assures her that, despite what Eliot believes, Miriam’s death was natural. Dr. Lambert was not included in Miriam’s will – although he told Susan he was – but Eliot benefited: The family house he is living in was paid for by Miriam. 

Jonathan warns Susan to be careful what she says about Miriam – particularly since the foundation is closing a $200 million deal with Netflix. Nevertheless, he reluctantly invites her to the party commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Miriam’s death when Roland brings it up in front of Susan.

Roland is much friendlier to Susan, and invites her to a quick lunch – his uncle only gives him 30 minutes for lunch. He’s the head of PR for the foundation, and has worked for it for six years, even though his brother Eliot regards his job as a betrayal, since they both hated their grandmother. Even though Eliot has fallen out with Roland, Roland keeps tabs on him through his wife, Gillian. 

Miriam wasn’t just cruel to her grandchildren. She once threatened to sell the rights to her Tiny People books to an outside company just to spite Jonathan, who managed her brand. But Roland dismisses Eliot’s contention that Miriam was murdered. Sure, Eliot, Roland, and their sister Julia made a potion, but the notion that they would kill her with it was make-believe – and she never drank it, anyway. 

Susan returns home to find a twitchy Eliot waiting on her doorstep. He hasn’t been home: He spent the night at his club, Boon’s. He hands over the next portion of his novel, and tells Susan when she brings up Frederick that his adopted uncle lies about the car accident that blinded one of his eyes. The rest of the family believes he was drunk when it happened. 

Eliot also tells Susan that he has been invited onto a radio show to talk about Miriam. Susan tells him it’s a bad idea, but he has already accepted, and wonders if she’s scheming against him. He’s conspiratorial and defensive. She at least begs him to be careful about what he says: They need his grandmother’s readers to buy his book when it comes out.

Jonathan warns Roland about Susan, but Roland shoots back that Miriam was a terrible person who slept around. 

Susan goes to dinner with her sister and her new investment fund manager boyfriend, Dave, but he’s dull and barely talks. Katie asks Susan to give him a chance. She met him online. Back home, Susan opens the website Katie used to meet Dave, then shuts it.

In Eliot’s novel, Atticus Pünd and the local Corfu police officer Achilles Vasillikos are trying to figure out who killed Lady Chalfont. Achilles questions a known herbal vendor in a market town, and he says he sold aconite, the plant that poisoned Lady Chalfont, to a white-haired man in a white suit, straw hat, and sunglasses at noon the day Lady Chalfont died. The man spoke little Greek, and the vendor thought he was a doctor; he smelled of surgical spirit. 

This description matches Lady Chalfont’s second husband, Elmer Waysmith. But Elmer said he had lunch in a different town with his son Robert at 1:00 – he wouldn’t have been able to travel that quickly on the roads. Plus, Robert says Elmer was wearing a lilac blazer, nor was he carrying anything. The detectives can’t question Elmer himself; he has just sold an antique to a client who lives on the island, Lucas Dorfman. Elmer is a workaholic; he didn’t even come home from Europe when his first wife, Robert’s mother, died by suicide. 

Pünd wonders if Elmer could have stopped at the Hotel Poseidon near the restaurant where he lunched to change clothes. There was a matchbook from the hotel at the Villa Belmar. It is run by Val Androulakis, the English mother of Sofia Androulakis, the lawyer Lambrose’s secretary. A white-haired man did rent a room for two nights. His name, signed in the guestbook in turquoise ink like that used by Elmer, is the generic John Ford. He didn’t talk much. He also didn’t sleep in the bed, despite taking the best room, with a balcony view of the restaurant and the ocean. He carried a single case.

Val last saw him at 10:30 am the day Lady Chalfont died, when he left in a white suit, Panama hat, and sunglasses. She didn’t see him return, but his room was later empty with the door open and the key left out. He did use the shower, and a New York newspaper was in the trash can, while an American brand of shoe polish was under the bed. Elmer is American.

Pünd, who is in Corfu to live out his final days with cancer, collapses from the heat. He recovers in the fresh air at a patio table where Elmer and Robert lunched. He tells Frederick he is dying, and asks about Frederick’s own injuries – he has an eyepatch. Frederick was hurt by the Germans during the war. Pünd explains that he spent the war in a German prison camp, and Frederick apologizes for his antipathy – he assumed Pünd, being German, was his enemy. 

Despite all the evidence seeming to point to suspicious behavior by Elmer, Pünd still thinks the timeline is impossible. Even if Elmer changed his clothes at the Hotel Poseidon, where did they go? Achilles checks the restaurant’s trash bins and finds a case with the clothes matching the man’s description inside. And Pünd realizes that Elmer could have taken a boat from the market town to get there in time. 

Eliot does his radio interview. Among the fun facts: Miriam was color-blind, and Eliot doesn’t much remember his grandfather, who died when he was 9. Then Eliot drops the bomb: He says that Miriam was cruel, and that she was poisoned. He saw someone go into her room the night she died. And he’s going to reveal who it was in his upcoming novel, within which he has hidden a secret message, just like Pünd’s creator Alan Conway used to. 

Eliot is in crisis. His friend Elaine – Charles Clover’s widow – asks Susan to come to Eliot’s house, where Gillian is in distress. Gillian has been cheating on Eliot, even though she says she loves him, and he found out. She ended it, but just found out she’s pregnant – and Eliot can’t have children. When she told him this morning, Eliot stormed out of the house with a knife. He has tried to kill himself twice before. 

Susan goes to Boon’s and finds Eliot there, in a mess. He says he was going to use the knife on Gillian, not himself. He tells Susan to stop meddling in his private life and to leave him alone.

Miriam’s party is that night. Susan enters with Elaine, and meets Eliot’s sister Julia when she introduces herself, having overheard Susan’s name. Julia teaches geography; her students love her grandmother’s books so much that she changed her name so they wouldn’t know about the connection. She hated Miriam, too; Roland helped her and Eliot survive Marble Hall. She’s at the party because it’s the only place she can complain about Miriam, having signed an NDA.

Frederick comes to speak antagonistically to Susan; his partner Brenda, Susan’s tour guide at Marble Hall, is also there. Susan meets Jonathan’s wife Leilah; there’s no love lost between the couple. Leilah asks Susan to call her later.

As Jonathan makes a speech, Eliot grabs the microphone away from him and announces that Miriam’s killer is in the room. When Susan tries to intervene, Eliot says he’s firing her. Jonathan blames Susan for Eliot’s outburst and has security escort her out while simply asking Eliot to leave of his own volition. 

He does, grabbing a bottle of champagne on his way. As Eliot walks down the dark street outside, a car runs him over from behind.