'The Marlow Murder Club' Recap: Season 3 Episode 4

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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The person whom Judith and Becks have disturbed in a hidden room of the house in which Becks and her college friends are enjoying a reunion is harmless, if cantankerous and odd. He is Hector Bly, the house’s owner. He lied to the police that he was on vacation in the Highlands. And the cameras he has monitoring parts of his house are to protect heirlooms from guests; he set them up, illegally, after some drunken visitors smashed some things. Even though he doesn’t want people in his house, he needs the money from the rentals to keep it up. He doesn’t want to be the one to have to sell a house that has been in his family for centuries.

Judith and Suzie get Jessica to answer questions about her request for a copy of a receipt from a hotel room Freddie booked during an alumni event. Jessica admits that she saw Freddie with a woman other than his wife and decided to get evidence of his affair. Work has been difficult lately, with a partner position open, and she needed something big to win it. Freddie’s wife’s company has some profitable green technology, so Jessica blackmailed Freddie about his affair to get access to his wife’s company for a deal with her law firm. But it hasn’t been finalized yet.

The woman Freddie was having an affair with? Ryan’s ex-wife Sasha. 

Ryan seems genuinely shocked when he finds out about the affair from the detectives. He was only married to Sasha for four years, and has barely spoken to her for a decade. 

He is upset that Jessica didn’t tell him about the affair, however. Tensions in the house are running high; Jessica is lashing out at everyone, particularly Una for telling Becks that Jessica and Freddie were at the alumni event together. 

Creepy as they are, Hector’s cameras of the house prove useful. They show every friend reacting to the sound of a scream when Freddie died, in what they thought was just a game at first. There’s no camera in the library, where Freddie was stabbed. But everyone has an alibi – including Hector, who was playing speed chess on his computer, with his moves recorded.

The friends are desperate to leave the house, but Tanika asks them to stay for two more hours, until their initial reservation would have ended. 

Despite another warning from Tanika not to work with Becks, a witness, and compromise the investigation, Judith enlists Becks to ask the prickly Hector if his house has a copy of Dracula, the book found burned in the fireplace of Freddie’s room. Hector points Becks to its location in the library.

The book has had its pages ripped out and replaced with Freddie’s copy of Ryan’s book, which Ryan brought as a gift, complete with dedication, for each friend. Inside Ryan’s book is the coversheet from Oskar’s dissertation, which got him kicked out of college for plagiarism. Freddie must have brought it, since he now works at the college they all attended. 

The detectives confront Oskar, who says he didn’t know that the coversheet was in the house. He also mentions that he wrote all the dedications in the books for Ryan. He still denies the plagiarism. The college matched the signature on his coversheet to the one in his passport, but he had never seen the plagiarized essay until they showed it to him. And when he looked for the original copy of his essay on his computer, the file was gone, either crashed or deleted. 

Judith notices that the handwriting on the back of the coversheet, where the date is marked, doesn’t match Oskar’s in the dedication of Freddie’s book. She then also notices something in Hector’s camera footage of everyone hearing the scream at the time of Freddie’s death. Matching the direction Oskar turns to a blueprint of the house, she realizes he didn’t turn towards the library, where Freddie was stabbed.

Judith knows who killed Freddie.

Ryan, not Oskar, plagiarized his dissertation but, knowing he would get caught, switched his and Oskar’s essays, forged Oskar’s signature on the coversheet, and deleted the essay from Oskar’s computer – they lived together. Before the reunion, Freddie must have gone through everyone’s old files at school, presumably to find something funny about them, and discovered Ryan’s subterfuge by recognizing his handwriting of the date on the coversheet. Once at the house, he confronted Ryan, giving him until the end of the reunion to reveal the truth – or else he would. He then hid the coversheet inside Ryan’s book in the library so Ryan couldn’t find it.

Ryan returned to the house before everyone else after lunch in order to set up a treasure hunt. Camera footage shows him moving through the house rapidly, but he pauses for six minutes in the blind spot where the secret door to Hector’s room is. Ryan discovered Hector’s room and cameras while Hector wasn’t in it. He then used the knowledge of the cameras and their location to plan a way to kill Freddie but also give himself an alibi.

When Oskar told the police he saw someone outside the library, it was Ryan, leaving after stabbing Freddie. Ryan corroborated Oskar to make the police believe someone else was in the house, eventually leading them to Hector and his camera footage. He then made sure he was in view of a camera, screamed while his back was to it, and then turned towards the library to make it look like he, too, was turning towards a scream that came from Freddie in the library. 

To prove that the handwriting of the date on the dissertation coversheet is Ryan’s, Judith has asked Becks’ husband Colin to bring a birthday card from Ryan to Becks. The handwriting is the same. Ryan didn’t want Freddie to expose his long-ago lie and thus lead to the collapse of his life and foundation.

Now Oskar will take charge of the foundation, and Jessica will help him get the plagiarism charge wiped from his past. 

Hector will no longer be allowed to rent his house out to guests, having broken the law by setting up cameras inside, but Judith suggests that he allow people to pay to tour and visit the house and grounds in order to afford the upkeep.

At her own house, she enlists her friends to help paint and do the work for which she had been considering hiring a contractor. There, Suzie tells Brendan not to be embarrassed that they ran into each other at speed-dating. She promises not to tell his colleagues – but she has already told her friends Judith and Becks.