'Ridley' Recap: Episode 2

Ridley airs Sundays at 7:00 pm on WTTW and is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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Ridley and Farman continue revisiting the investigation of Zoe Lindsey’s disappearance years ago, speaking to Gill Moreland, the owner of the trailer park where Zoe lived. Moreland says that Penny Lindsey sometimes left Zoe with her while Penny went to the pub. Zoe and Moreland’s son Adam were friends; he was with Zoe when she disappeared.

Adam has lived his life in the shadow of this trauma, so Gill is reluctant to let Ridley and Farman speak to him. When they do, he recounts that he and Zoe were in line for ice cream. He saw her talking to someone in a white van, but he turned away to get the ice cream and then she was gone.

The police in the initial investigation—a different department than Ridley’s—assumed the van was one owned by Daniel Preston, the trailer park employee who was accused of Zoe’s abduction after child pornography was found on his computer. But Jesse Halpin, the recently murdered man whom Ridley questioned years ago in connection with Zoe’s disappearance, also had a white van. And he worked at the trailer park at the time, Gill confirms.

Paul Goodwin, now chief inspector at Farman’s station, had worked the case and has regretted and questioned it since. Now he gets a warrant for Ridley and Farman to search the Halpin farm.

They find an old white van hidden under a cloth in the back of a barn there.

Lorna Spalden, a tenant of and worker for the Halpins, tries to surreptitiously watch the detectives as they search the Halpin lands. When they confront her, she brandishes a rifle but eventually lowers it. Testing reveals it’s the gun used to kill Jesse.

Under questioning, Lorna says that Jesse told her years ago she would have to leave the farm, unless she helped him bury the body of a young girl. He claimed the girl’s death was an accident, and convinced Lorna that she was a part of it. That burial is why he was so protective of his woods, setting traps that caught Steve Parry’s dog one night. The detectives set about unearthing the body from where Lorna says it was buried.

Catherine, the Halpins’ daughter and Parry’s girlfriend, leaves home. She suspects her parents were hiding a terrible secret, and can’t live with her mom anymore.

Ridley flees to his own safe place: Marling’s bar, which he co-owns. He tells Annie Marling, the bar’s owner and his wife’s best friend, that he visited Michael Flannery in jail. Marling admonishes Ridley, telling him that Flannery doesn’t deserve forgiveness for setting Ridley’s home on fire and killing his wife and daughter. But Ridley blames himself: Flannery was targeting him with the fire.

Gill Moreland also meets someone with a difficult place in her past. Daniel Preston is waiting for her in her home; he remembers where she keeps the spare key. You need to tell the police the truth, he says: that we were together when Zoe Lindsey disappeared. But she has seen how Penny Lindsey was blamed for having a penchant for drink. Moreland doesn’t want the world to know that she was dating a pedophile. She tells Preston he disgusts her.

Adam sees Preston as he leaves and punches him. Preston falls and cracks his head on a brick. He’s still alive, but has bleeding on his brain.

Adam tells the detectives that he knew about his mother’s relationship even when he was a kid. Moreland admits the relationship to the detectives when asked about it. Preston was with her; he has an alibi for Zoe’s abduction.

Ridley meets with his former colleague Jean Dixon, who was in charge of  Zoe’s case, and enumerates all the flaws in her investigation. It seems like she wanted an easy solution and found one in Preston, then made the case fit. She asks Ridley to let the case go; he says he can’t.

He convinces Penny to take a DNA test to compare against the body found buried in the Halpin woods. But the samples don’t match, and the body has all its teeth, while Zoe was missing one when she was abducted. The body was killed by a blow to the head.

Lorna undergoes further questioning and says that the girl she helped bury fell off a tractor, and was dead when Jesse—her dad—found her.

Ridley and Farman go to the Halpin farm, where Ridley finds on Catherine’s bed the doll that Zoe Lindsey loved and was holding in the photo used for her missing persons poster. Catherine is not the Halpins’ daughter; she’s Zoe Lindsey.

Farman and Ridley find Moll in the woods. She explains that Jesse didn’t trust outsiders, so they didn’t bring their daughter in after she fell and then died. He was working at the trailer park and thought Zoe looked just like his late daughter. Trying to console the shattered Moll, he took Zoe, and they raised her as their own. They justified it by arguing that the drink-appreciating Penny didn’t care for Zoe as much as they did.

Jesse had recently decided that they should tell “Catherine” the truth. Moll couldn’t stand to lose another child, so she killed Jesse. Lorna took the gun afterwards, trying to protect the Halpins, as she always did.

Moll tells Zoe the truth before going to prison. Ridley brings Zoe to her true mother, Penny, who hugs her, crying. Zoe eventually returns the hug.

As a grieving parent, Ridley understands why the Halpins did what they did, even though he knows it was not justified. The case seems to have helped him with his own grief. He and Farman set a dinner date, and he heads to Marling’s during a busy hour when there’s live music. He takes the stage and joins the trio to sing a song, to Annie Marling’s delight.

Afterwards, he calls his home answering machine repeatedly so that he can hear his wife’s voice.