'The Marlow Murder Club' Recap: Season 3 Episode 6

The Marlow Murder Club is available to stream via the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the previous episodes.
Keep up with your favorite dramas and mysteries by signing up for our newsletter, Dramalogue. 

While Cal could have died of hypothermia in the walk-in storage of Gastronomy, Judith and her friends quickly notice an empty tank of liquid nitrogen in a storeroom next door and a pipe straight to the storage. The ventilation was also switched off, and the door locked from the outside. Someone pumped gas in to suffocate Cal.

Ilsa found him around 11:00 am. She had asked him to deep clean Gastronomy, and he was there alone. His wife Nicki says he called around 5:00 pm the previous day to say he wouldn’t be home until the early morning. She also says that Cal had recently begun behaving as if he was gambling again despite his recovery from his addiction, hiding his phone and making calls in other rooms. And she mentions that she saw Damon angrily telling Cal to keep quiet yesterday. 

This timeline means Omari could not have killed Cal, because he was already in the police’s custody. He does admit that he had a plan to kill Ferdy, by giving him poisonous mushrooms for a dish that he knew Ferdy would taste. Omari is the one who was sending threats to Ferdy, but was too scared to go through with his plan to kill him. 

Why did he even have such a plan? Ferdy told Omari’s father they would go into partnership together and that he would help Omari’s father, an immigrant, get citizenship. Instead, Omari’s father had to leave England; Ferdy then used his recipes to become a culinary success.

Isla joined Ferdy’s first restaurant months before Omari’s father left, so she would have known him. And she is the one who hired Omari at Gastronomy. She tells the police she hired him to redress past wrongs.

She wants to host an event at the restaurant to reassure its customers that it will stay open despite Ferdy’s death, and Tanika decides to let it go ahead: the police can carefully observe their suspects to see if anyone was working together. For another pair of eyes, Judith turns to Darius – and comes up with a plan to offload her over-confident suitor Matthew on Becks’ demanding mother-in-law Marian. The pair immediately take to each other, to everyone’s relief.

At the restaurant event, Isla hands Damon a package, and he takes it inside the restaurant. Suzie and Becks try to follow, but the door is locked. Darius noticed that the bartender outside had a key, so he distracts him while Judith pilfers it. Damon puts the package in a locker and leaves. 

The package contains a bunch of cash, in addition to a red T-shirt that matches one seen on the person filming the videos of Ferdy’s abuse that are being released to a tabloid. (There was a mirror in the video.) 

Damon’s phone also received a call right before Ferdy was murdered; that’s why he was outside. The call originated from a seemingly abandoned shop that actually contains a hidden gambling den. 

Damon admits that he was filming Ferdy because he had heard Ferdy was going to fire him as soon as his out-of-prison employment program ended, and Damon wanted insurance. He started selling the videos because he was illegally gambling at the abandoned shop and owed people a lot of money. The cash from Isla was a payment to get him to stop selling the videos, as she wanted to protect the reputation of Gastronomy. 

Ferdy loved gambling, so Damon introduced him to the game in a bid to get on his good side – this is why Ferdy was withdrawing large sums of cash recently. Ferdy then bullied Cal, the recovered gambling addict, into joining the game. But Cal got lucky and won 300,000 pounds.

Judith surmises that Cal was hiding this money when she and her friends saw him acting suspiciously at Gastronomy after Ferdy’s death. Nicki didn’t know he was gambling again, so he couldn’t hide it at home, and he knew that the police had already swept the restaurant. 

A glove with a watersports club logo on it was found between Gastronomy and the river after Ferdy’s death, and the police have discovered that Isla is a member of the club. She says she leaves all her gear, gloves included, at the club. She mentions that Nicki was also a member of the club, but had to leave because she and Cal could no longer afford it due to his gambling. 

Judith, Suzie, and Becks search Gastronomy for Cal’s money and find it in the cellar, sent down the coal chute near where they saw him. But then the lights go out and Judith is separated from the other two. She is locked in a room with the killer of Cal and Ferdy: Nicki. 

Suzie calls the police, but they’ve already come to suspect Nicki. 

Nicki explains that she learned about Cal’s windfall, and that he was going to flee to Australia on his own, and had to stop him – that was their dream, together, since they married at 18. She had locked herself out and found Cal’s secret phone in the glovebox of his car alongside spare keys. He had texted his brother in Australia about the windfall and a flight he had already purchased – and told him not to tell Nicki.

Judith convinces Nicki that she can leave with Cal’s money, without hurting Judith. Nicki does so – and finds the police waiting.

Nicki didn’t plan to kill Ferdy. He just saw her as she was about to stab Cal, so she made a split-second decision to stab Ferdy – she couldn’t go to prison while Cal escaped to Australia. 

She had paddleboarded to Gastronomy, accidentally dropping her glove there. She snuck inside to grab Ferdy’s knife and pinned a 50-pound note to it, thinking it might implicate Ferdy or the gambling ring. She then paddleboarded back home, and was able to get there quickly enough to place a seemingly exculpatory call to Cal from her home phone because the river was flowing strongly that day – Judith didn’t swim. Nicki then killed Cal while he was deep-cleaning the restaurant, knowing he would be alone and it would be her last chance before he flew to Australia. 

With the case solved, Isla reopens Gastronomy, now crediting Omari’s father for the recipes. The newspaper profile on Tanika comes out and is glowing; she has suggested Judith, Suzie, and Becks as future subjects. Becks’ mother-in-law Marian is finally leaving her house, going to France with Matthew. And Judith, having initially refused Darius’ request to be more than friends, tells him that in fact she would love to.