Moonflower Murders, Episode 2

On the flight back to England, Susan meets a reader who admires Conway and assumes that he was a pleasant man. A flashback supplies a sharply different picture. At a café, Susan pushes an irritable Alan about his next manuscript. A newspaper report about Frank Parris catches his attention. Susan encourages the idea of using a wedding murder as the basis for a story, remembering now how casually that suggestion was made.

Susan retrieves her red car and drives to Branlow Hall. Lawrence shows her the hotel, including the room where Frank died, now used for storage. Lunch introduces Lisa’s bitterness about her sister and brother-in-law. Lisa questions Susan’s fee and resents arrangements that have benefited Cecily and Aiden, including their occupation of the cottage. After Lisa leaves, Lawrence explains that her scar resulted from a childhood incident involving Cecily and broken glass.

In Conway’s novel, a visitor presenting himself as Melissa’s American agent asks Pünd to investigate. Madeline encourages him to accept. They travel to the Moonflower Hotel, meet Chubb and inspect Melissa’s home. Her doctor received a frightened telephone call at 6.28; by his arrival at 6.38, she was dead. The account offers a narrow window, but Pünd still needs to establish what the physical scene actually means.

There is a telephone torn from its fitting, evidence of a struggle and a bloodstain on the bed frame. Downstairs tissues suggest that Melissa had been crying near another phone. Madeline becomes faint during the description of the killing and breaks a vase. Among the actress’s possessions are reminders of her screen career, including a Turkish dagger. John Spencer says that he was at the opera, and directs suspicion towards the hotel managers. Pünd asks Chubb to check the alibi.

Susan visits Aiden after narrowly avoiding Locke. Aiden explains how Cecily found Conway’s book and became angry at its versions of her family. Gwyneth Endicott helps look after Roxana, Aiden and Cecily’s daughter. On the evening Cecily vanished, Aiden was told she had taken Chase out. The dog’s return without her made the situation alarming. The family story gives Susan another sequence to disentangle, this time without a crime scene to inspect.

Derek describes the night of Frank’s murder. A barking dog drew him upstairs; he saw someone he believed to be Stefan, but his identification depended on limited details. He also disputes the accusations of theft against Stefan and remembers booking Frank a taxi to see solicitor Sajid Khan. The episode leaves Susan with a concrete next visit, while Liam’s discouraging comments add to her sense that the hotel has little appetite for reopening the past.

• Inspector Chubb occupies the local police role that the novel gives to Detective Chief Inspector Hare.
• Melissa’s husband is John Spencer on television, replacing the novel’s Francis Pendleton.
• The screen adaptation alternates the two arrivals rather than pausing Susan’s narrative for the complete Pünd novel.