'The Marlow Murder Club' Recap: Episode 1

The Marlow Murder Club airs Sundays at 8:00 pm and is available to stream via the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the following episode.
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Judith Potts’ retirement is idyllic. Once an archaeologist, she now writes crossword puzzles in the large, antique-filled manor she shares with only her cat, Jasper. She always carries a tin of travel sweets. She moved to the tony town of Marlow a few years ago, and bathes nude in the river that runs behind her house when it’s especially hot out, as it is on the day when she hears a gunshot while swimming in the river.

The noise was preceded by a kerfuffle, and her neighbor, Stefan Dunwoody, doesn’t answer her when she calls out, so she gets out of the river and calls the police. They search the grounds of Stefan’s house and find nothing.

The police are skeptical of a gunshot in upscale Marlow. The detective who would handle the case is out sick, so Tanika Malik is put in charge. She calls Judith to ask if the noise could have been something else, given that there was no evidence of anything amiss at Stefan’s home. Judith insists it was a gunshot, and says the police didn’t search thoroughly enough.

She poles herself across the river to Stefan’s and looks around. First, she finds a bullet casing near a bench next to a tributary of the river. Then she uses a branch to clear the leaves on top of a pond downstream and finds Stefan’s pale face, its forehead marked by a bullet wound. His body must have drifted from the tributary to the pond.

Judith calls the police – but uses her archaeology tools to snap a photo of the bullet casing and its measurements first. An autopsy determines that the gun was probably held to Stefan’s head when fired, execution-style.

Tanika tells Judith not to interfere in the investigation from now on. Judith ignores the warning. She visits the art gallery Stefan owned in town to speak to his employee Antonia Webster. Antonia cries when Stefan is mentioned, and has nothing but kind words for the boss who always called himself an “old man.” (He was only 60, and lived alone, like Judith.) Everyone liked Stefan – but when Judith asks if he argued with anyone recently, Antonia recalls an uncomfortable incident at a regatta in town a month ago.

Stefan brought her to the event and got her into the members enclosure. There, he was accosted by a very drunk Elliot Howard with no prompting. Elliot called Stefan a fraud, a liar, and a cheat.

Elliot owns an auction house, so Judith stops by. She overhears him trying to sell an Egyptian artifact on the phone and realizes from her own knowledge of archaeology that he is either lying or it’s a fake. Once he’s off the phone, she tells him he spilled red wine on her blouse at the regatta, and that she’d like him to cover the dry cleaning bill – while also mentioning his spat with Stefan.

Elliot quickly sees through Judith, calling her a busybody, but does still answer some questions. He says Stefan stole hundreds of thousands of pounds from his clients. But he has an alibi: he was at choir rehearsal at the local church when Judith heard the gunshot. He eventually asks her to leave. Later, at his house, his wife and assistant Daisy asks about Judith. He says it was nothing. The couple’s relationship is not the warmest.

Judith ventures to the church to check on Elliot’s alibi. While searching empty backrooms for choir records, she hears a noise. She opens a cupboard door to find Becks Starling crammed inside, listening to headphones with a cup of tea.

Becks is the wife of Marlow’s new vicar and mother of two teens who take her for granted – just like her husband, Colin, who expects her to reflexively help out with church tasks like arranging flowers and pacifying congregation members such as the local gossip and head of the church council Mrs. Eddingham. That’s who Becks was hiding from – Mrs. Eddingham is insulted that Becks has yet to invite her to tea.

Judith explains her investigation and asks about Elliot, and Becks confirms that he was at choir the whole rehearsal. She tells Judith to leave the case to the police.

But later, frustrated by her family, Becks calls Mrs. Eddingham to invite her to tea. Colin will be giving the eulogy for Stefan, and since he and Becks are new in town, Becks needs to learn a bit more about Stefan from someone knowledgeable, such as Mrs. Eddingham.

That night, a brick shatters a window in Judith’s home. A message is rubber-banded to it: “Stay away.”

Judith calls Tanika, who, like Becks, is a somewhat put-upon mother. Her husband works nights, so when her daughter Shanti once again feels ill at school, Tanika has to bring her to the police station with her. Tanika worries that she will be taken off the case, now that it has grown to a real murder investigation, but her boss assures her she can still be the lead.

The detectives have learned that the casing found on Stefan’s grounds is from a bullet made in Munich in 1942. Judith has also come to the determination that it’s from a World War II-era German gun, given the Nazi symbol on it. She even asked Antonia if Stefan collected antique guns or ammo. (He didn’t.) Now she wonders if the gun could have come from Elliot’s auction house.

When she tells Tanika in a meeting about the warning she received, Tanika asks if she kept investigating. Judith tells her that of course she did, and lays out all she has learned. She suggests that Elliot hired a hitman to kill Stefan while he maintained an alibi at choir practice. Tanika dismisses such an idea.

Then a detective pops his head in to say that another person has been shot in Marlow.

The victim is a taxi driver named Iqbal Kassam. He was found by Suzie Harris, who has a business taking care of dogs, including Iqbal’s. He was due to pick up Suzie’s daughter Zeta from the airport, an arrival that Suzie eagerly awaited: she had canceled appointments with her clients and carefully tidied Zeta’s room. But Zeta called at the last minute to say that she had changed the flight her mother bought for her in order to stay longer with her father, with whom she is having the best time. She’ll probably still have a few days to spend with Suzie before she goes off to university.

Right after getting off the phone with her daughter, Suzie arrived at Iqbal’s house to drop his dog off. She found the door open, and Iqbal dead in a blood-spattered bed.