'Ridley' Recap: Episode 3

Ridley airs Sundays at 7:00 pm on WTTW and is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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People keep telling Ridley that it’s good to keep busy, in the wake of the loss of his wife and daughter in a fire set by a man trying to hurt Ridley. One way he is doing so is by refurbishing an old boat his wife bought and wanted to restore together. Now he’s doing it alone, although his protégée Carol Farman has offered to send her 14 year-old son Jack to help, for Jack’s own good. 

But Ridley also has detective work to occupy him, even though he has retired from the police force. Farman has brought him on to consult on another case from the very beginning based on a gut feeling.

So Ridley is on Brackenbed Moor to see where a woman’s body was found by some workers for Graylish Enterprises, which operates the wind turbines standing in the empty landscape. Her wounds suggest she was killed elsewhere by a blow to the head and then dragged to this location. She doesn’t have identification, but she does have a distinctive tattoo, and there are some flowers near her body.

While Harry Graylish, the CEO of his eponymous company, frets to Farman about losing money if the turbine has to be shut down because of the discovery of the body, Ridley approaches a young biker taking photos from afar and tells him to move on. Kit McKellen is an amateur sleuth, Ridley later learns, who has been cautioned several times for wasting police time. He has noticed tire tracks near the body that probably belong to a camper van.

McKellen frequents an online true crime forum, where he shares details about the case with the community and claims to be working with Ridley. 

Eventually, an ID is found near the body. Gabriela Baldoni was a chambermaid at the Palace Hotel. Ridley knows the hotel’s manager, James Mallors—he was once a regular at the bar Ridley co-owns—so he goes with Farman to the hotel. 

Business isn’t great, so Mallors asks Ridley to try to prevent the case from impacting the hotel. Meanwhile, Farman talks to Baldoni’s boss, the housekeeper Janet Venables. She explains that she fired Baldoni a couple weeks ago after she was late for her evening shift—not for the first time. It was a busy weekend, with a three-day conference taking place at the hotel. Baldoni lived in the hotel, and left her room in a hurry, leaving some things behind.

Elena Mondelo was Baldoni’s roommate. She says that Baldoni thought she was above cleaning rooms, and was seeing someone with money, maybe a married man. When Baldoni left the hotel after her firing, Elena didn’t hear from her for several days. Then she finally received a text that Baldoni was fine and returning home—she is supposedly from Italy.

Except that the autopsy has determined that Baldoni probably died before that text was sent. It also shows that Baldoni was strangled and fought back before she was hit and killed from behind. There are navy blue fibers on her clothing. 

Baldoni’s social media profiles show that she frequented a snooker club in town, as did other hotel workers. The bartender there, Jenna Noble, says she last saw Baldoni a couple weeks ago—the day Baldoni was fired. She sat and waited for someone for an hour before leaving. 

Ridley finds someone waiting for him at the police station: McKellen. The enthusiastic young man gives Ridley his card, arguing that he could help the police use more data analysis in solving crimes. He also mentions that the tattoo on Baldoni’s arm is called a jelica, a pattern common in the Balkans. 

Indeed, a SIM card from Albania is found in the trash in Baldoni’s room at the hotel. It seems Baldoni was living under a false name; when the detectives confront Venables, the housekeeper, she admits that the chambermaid came in off the street and asked for a job with forged documents. All the hotels turn a blind eye to such migrant workers. Venables doesn’t know Baldoni’s real name. She says that Mallors may not have known about the deception—he’s easily led by a pretty girl. He’s also currently out ill. The detectives suspect he is staying away from the hotel while their investigation continues.

Baldoni’s roommate Elena admits that she is from Romania, and that Baldoni said she was from Berat in Albania. Under threat of prosecution for working illegally, Elena points the detectives to a man at the snooker club who forged documents for migrant workers, saying he’s not someone you want to anger.

The detectives find Stewart Daley upstairs at the snooker club, in an office he uses that is full of forged identification documents. He tries to flee but is caught. 

Jenna, the bartender, says he rented the office from the club for what she thought was legitimate business—but Daley says she knew what he was doing and introduced him to Baldoni for the purpose of document forging. He won’t answer more questions. 

At dinner together, Farman tells Ridley that a background check on McKellen shows that he has severe OCD. She suggests that Ridley shouldn’t encourage the young man. 

She also tells him that her wife Geri has blindsided her by asking to have another baby. Farman is Jack’s biological mother; Geri wants a child who is hers. But Farman is overwhelmingly busy with her new promotion and feels too old and tired to have another baby. Ridley suggests that she tell Geri this—but Geri, annoyed with Farman’s non-responsiveness, has gone to stay with her father for a few days.

Ridley returns home to look at McKellen’s crime forum—and finds Baldoni’s postmortem report has been leaked and published there. From McKellen’s card, Ridley knows he works at the coroner’s office—he must have been the one to leak the report. Ridley visits him and cautions him, and McKellen admits that he can get fixated. His mother committed suicide when he was 8, and Baldoni’s death reminded him of her. Ridley throws McKellen a bone and shares that he was right that Baldoni was from the Balkans. 

The detectives finally gain access to Baldoni’s phone records, and find three calls to the same phone number on the day she was killed. The number is Harry Graylish’s. 

Graylish is out on a grouse shoot with clients who have paid to go with him, but his wife Debs says that they had house guests the weekend Baldoni was killed. When Harry returns, he admits to the detectives that he had a fling with Baldoni but had recently ended it. She wanted to meet and talk, and threatened to tell his wife. Graylish agrees to come to the station for questioning.

Before they leave, Ridley notices James Mallors amongst the clients Graylish is hosting at his estate.