'Moonflower Murders' Recap: Episode 6

Moonflower Murders is available to stream. Recap the previous episode. 
Recap and stream the previous series, Magpie Murders.
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Wait, Atticus Pünd killed John Spencer?! That’s what he told Chubb at the end of the previous episode.

But Pünd is not the killer; he just holds himself responsible. For he brought the killer to the area and left her with the opportunity to kill John. It’s his assistant, Madeline Cain.

Pünd explains everything to Chubb while Cain protests. He starts with Edgar Schultz, the American who hired him to investigate the murder of Melissa James. Schultz couldn’t have come from New York City, as he claimed; flights wouldn’t have made it to London fast enough upon him hearing news of Melissa’s death. And his accent was odd – like that of an actor putting on an American accent.

For he was an actor, hired by Madeline to get Pünd to investigate Melisa’s murder. Madeline is a huge admirer of Melissa James’ film career, as she revealed throughout the investigation. She even wrote fan letters to Melissa, as Pünd noticed in Melissa’s room. Madeline also spotted the letter from her on Melissa’s desk and feigned an attack, knocking over a vase so that she could hide the letter lest Pünd see it and recognize her handwriting – too late.

After John Spencer confessed to murdering Melissa – or so he thought – Madeline took justice into her own hands while Pünd and Chubb were distracted, stabbing John. She had already made clear that she thought Melissa’s murderer should hang.

Pünd and Chubb were distracted by Eric Chandler at the window; the young man was listening outside because he feared the police had returned for his crimes of peeping on Melissa and taking small items of hers. Pünd noticed the dirt on Eric’s boots from the mud outside the window.

Madeline apologizes to Pünd and resigns as his assistant before being arrested.

But who murdered Frank Parris and Cecily MacNeil?

Susan is going to speak with Stefan Leonidas, the man who confessed to the murder of Frank, to hopefully find out. Craig Andrews has secured her a visit to Stefan’s prison – and also shipped her phone back to her, after almost driving a wedge between her and Andreas with it.

Andreas will drive with Susan to visit Stefan, and has told her that he will come back to England to live with her there – but she now wants to return to Crete with him.

Before leaving the Branlow hotel, Susan confronts Lisa about forcing Stefan to have sex with her. Lisa immediately becomes flexible about Susan’s checkout time.

Stefan tells Susan that Lisa is evil. She fired him the month before Cecily’s wedding, pinning petty thefts committed by a maid on him. But Liam told Susan he saw Stefan having sex with Lisa in the forest a couple weeks after that. Stefan explains that he saw Lisa one more time, in the hope that she would give him his job back. It failed.

A few weeks later, he had one or two glasses of wine at the party before the wedding and was knocked out for the night. He awoke to find he had been accused of murder.

Stefan also relates that Cecily recently wrote to him, telling him she knew he was innocent. He’s convinced that whoever killed Frank Parris – not him, despite his confession – also killed Cecily. Why did he confess? Because he was a vulnerable immigrant with a criminal record, and Locke told him he might get a reduced sentence if he pled guilty. Locke was wrong. The one “brightness” in his life has been taken from him; his “dawn” is gone.

Susan is confused by this last statement, as she tells Andreas – but she didn’t think to ask Stefan about it. She also thinks he’s lying about seeing Lisa one more time after being fired – he hesitated before answering.

Everything finally clicks into place when Andreas asks to stop for a drink at a pub called The Plough and Stars.

But before Susan reveals everything, she stops by the Websters’ house and insists that they listen to her. She has realized that Martin was trying to make it seem as if he murdered his wife Joanne’s brother, Frank Parris. Always bullied by his wife, he hinted to Joanne that he killed Frank so that they could keep their house – that’s why she now acts cowed around him. That’s also why he drove Susan off the road – so he could appear to be a big man to his wife.

Back at the Branlow, Susan calls everyone together to reveal the true murderer – a device straight out of Agatha Christie that she once criticized in Alan Conway’s book. The Plough and the Stars made her think of constellations, and that revealed the answer. Cecily believed in horoscopes; the necklace found with her body had her star sign, Sagittarius. And Sagittarius is compatible with Leo, the sign of her husband, Aiden, as she said at their wedding. Aiden even has a shoulder tattoo related to his constellation.

Alan dedicated his book based on Frank Parris’ murder to Frank and Leo; the latter was a male escort. Alan joked once to his partner James Taylor that Leo must have been jetlagged, coming from Melbourne. James assumed that meant Leo was Australian, but the joke was that he was coming from nearby Melbourne, England, in Derbyshire – where Aiden is from. Aiden used his star sign as a name while he was an escort; he then married Cecily for her family’s money, to escape that life.

But when Frank came to stay at the Branlow, he recognized Aiden from his escort days. Frank then told everyone that he was going to see The Marriage of Figaro that evening, not because the opera was on – it wasn’t – but because the villain in that opera tries to force a member of a married couple to sleep with him on the eve of their wedding night – and Frank was going to do the same thing to Aiden, via blackmail. That’s why he handed Aiden a “broken” keycard to his room, in front of Cecily, no less. Alan figured all this out and included it in his book. He even peppered the book with references to lions (the constellation Leo is a lion), which he told Susan were clues, even though they were never explained in the book.

Aiden refused to let Frank blackmail him, and decided to kill him and frame Stefan. He drugged Stefan’s wine at the party with Cecily’s sleeping pills, then dressed up like Stefan and even carried his toolbox. Before entering Frank’s room to murder him with a hammer, he jabbed Cecily’s dog Chase with the brooch on display next to the dog’s bed in order to make Chase bark, thus drawing the night manager Derek upstairs. Derek then glimpsed someone who looked like Stefan moving in the direction of Frank’s room, and told the police after Frank was murdered.

Aiden went even further, taking money from Frank’s wallet and hiding it in Stefan’s room while Stefan was drugged by the sleeping pills. Aiden also used the fountain pen Cecily had borrowed from her father then lost to collect some of Frank’s blood and drip it onto Stefan’s sheets.

When Cecily read Atticus Pünd Takes the Case and recognized something in it as pointing to Aiden as the killer, Aiden killed her to keep from being found out. He says he loved her – but she loved Stefan. Cecily was the woman Liam saw with Stefan in the woods, not Lisa – and their affair is the real reason Lisa fired Stefan; she didn’t want to share him with her sister.

But the affair had a lasting effect: Cecily’s daughter Roxana, who looks much more like Stefan than Aiden. Roxana is also a common name in Stefan’s native Romania; it means “brightness” or “dawn,” which explains Stefan’s lament to Susan.

It’s all over. Susan returns to Crete with Andreas – she has gotten a job in publishing after all, and can work freelance from Crete, allowing her to have the best of both worlds. Her sister Katie is due to visit the hotel; life is settled.

But Susan can’t stop poring over notes about Alan and the murder; she’s convinced she missed something. Andreas wants her to leave Alan behind, and she agrees, burning all of the notes.

But there is still another of Alan’s word games that she missed: Madeline Cain, John Spencer’s killer in Atticus Pünd Takes the Case, is an anagram of Aiden MacNeil, the murderer of Frank Parris.