What happens

The search for Cecily becomes a public appeal, while Susan follows Frank Parris’s movements before his death. A visit to a solicitor opens a new branch of the inquiry beyond Branlow Hall. The important question is no longer simply who disliked the guest: Susan needs to discover what his return to England threatened to change. Her work also brings her close to her own family, where Katie is less forthcoming than Susan would like.

Pünd and Madeline have an equally crowded field of possible motives. Melissa’s professional and financial decisions have upset people who depended on her. An argument overheard outside her home seems useful, but words detached from their setting can create a convincing and entirely mistaken picture. The investigators must ask what the speaker actually meant, rather than what the listener expected to hear.

The episode is particularly enjoyable as a study in evasiveness. Some people redirect questions, some offer another suspect, and some appear to be answering quite frankly while leaving the essential point untouched. Keep track of what changes a theory: an admitted lie is valuable, but it does not automatically make the liar a murderer.

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Who’s in this episode

Susan Ryeland

Played by Lesley Manville. Susan takes the inquiry outside the hotel and revisits familiar contacts.

Atticus Pünd

Played by Tim McMullan. Pünd tests motives against words and objects rather than accepting their first meaning.

Sajid Khan

Played by Sanjeev Kohli. The solicitor explains the property dispute that brought Frank back to England.

Katie Williams

Played by Claire Rushbrook. Susan’s sister is dealing with difficulties she does not want to discuss.

Oscar Berlin

Played by Mark Gatiss. Melissa’s producer has both a grievance and an account that needs testing.

Eric Chandler

Played by Thomas Coombes. The household employee becomes important to the meaning of an overheard argument.

Where it was filmed

Filming: Crete hosts Susan and Andreas’s hotel. Dublin locations supply the English settings.

Clues to watch for

The wording of Aiden’s televised appeal and the different reactions it provokes.
The ownership of the missing fountain pen: listen for changes between the accounts.
The hotel picture in Melissa’s house, and what a description of it could mean.
The name Day’s End, which appears in more than one strand of the story.
What Khan says about the Websters compared with how the couple behave when Susan visits.

Full recap (spoilers)

Aiden makes a television appeal for Cecily, supported by Locke. The broadcast is watched across the circle of people involved in the case. Among them are Frank’s sister Joanne Webster and her husband Martin. Martin’s grim speculation about Cecily alarms Joanne, introducing a household whose private conversation is quite different from the public language of concern.

Susan visits Sajid Khan. He explains that Frank wanted to sell the house he jointly owned with Joanne because his business had failed. Joanne could not afford to buy his share, making the dispute a genuine threat to the Websters’ home. Khan also inadvertently reveals that Katie has consulted him. Susan goes to the garden centre, where her sister insists that things are manageable. Jack has left university and is working there; Katie discourages a fuller discussion.

At the Websters’ house, Martin is more commanding than Khan’s description had led Susan to expect. He describes the family disagreement and shows a photograph of Frank with Joanne. Frank’s death allowed them to keep the property. Joanne subsequently warns Susan away. The visit yields an obvious motive, but Susan must still connect a motive to events at the hotel. Their hostility alone cannot supply that missing connection.

In the novel, Lance and Maureen produce a draft love letter supposedly found among Melissa’s papers. It directs attention towards her marriage. Pünd and Madeline then question Oscar Berlin, whose planned film depends on Melissa. Oskar offers a beach walk as an alibi. Madeline bluffs about the tide, and he changes his account: he went to Melissa’s house and heard an argument, but did not enter.

The words he overheard appear to concern a crooked hotel. Pünd discovers that the reference is to a picture covering a peephole. Eric has been watching Melissa in her bedroom and taking possessions. His mother Phyllis has been protecting him. The revelation explains the argument without settling the murder. Algernon, meanwhile, has encouraged Melissa to invest in Day’s End without admitting his own interest in it; the supposed property venture is a fraud.

At Branlow Hall, Susan hears conflicting details about the fountain pen that disappeared around the wedding. Cecily’s belief in horoscopes and her nerves before the ceremony also enter the conversation. Lisa and Liam reveal their mutual ability to threaten one another, while Aiden objects to the cost of Susan’s investigation. Locke warns her against interfering. With the hotel growing less welcoming, Susan decides that understanding Conway himself may be her best route forward and prepares to investigate in London.

Book vs TV (book spoilers)

The novel separates Susan’s account from its embedded mystery; this episode places the interviews alongside one another.
The book’s local detective is Hare; the adaptation retains Daniel Mays’s Chubb.
Susan can discuss her thinking with an imagined Pünd on screen; the novel has no equivalent spoken partnership.

The book handles this differently. Read or listen to Moonflower Murders.