Checkmate! Ludwig Solves a Murder with a Game of Reverse Chess

By his own admission, Ludwig is “quite the legend” in the puzzle-making field. But he has one puzzle — reverse chess — that never quite took off. “Nobody could ever solve them,” Ludwig laments. But finally! Finally! Reverse chess gets its moment to shine in Ludwig's fourth episode. In this game, the player doesn’t try to anticipate the next move their opponent will make in a chess game. Instead, they try to figure out all the moves their opponent has made before. 

Lucy is begging her brother-in-law not to solve any more murders and to focus on discovering what happened to James and decoding the cipher James left behind. “The cipher is a puzzle. Solving puzzles is literally what you do,” she tells him. But every time Ludwig thinks he’s out of the murder-solving business, they pull him back in.  A man named Marty (Robert Jarman) has fallen to his death at a construction site. Once again, Carter is convinced that no murder has taken place. “It’s most certainly a workplace accident. Let’s just get it over with and get back to the station,” he tells Ludwig. But, of course, if it were just a workplace accident, there wouldn’t be an episode now, would there?

Ludwig notices several inconsistencies at the site. The warning signs were put up late. The generator had been completely tampered with. The guard rails had been loosened, and the generator, which was covered with water, had been rewired. Furthermore, an empty water bottle has been thrown down the chute and into the trash.

Ludwig connects the dots. Someone set it up so the deceased would get a shock and fall off the site to his death. Marty wasn’t exactly beloved by his colleagues. He was fond of pranks. He convinced his co-worker Stefan (Alex Romashov) that he was about to be deported and Gary (Allan Mustafa) that he had won the lottery. Gary, thinking he was about to get a windfall of cash, almost proposed to his girlfriend. Connor (Gavin Spokes), the foreman, thought he was being offered a job overseeing the construction of a luxury hotel in Las Vegas. Zara (Natali McCleary), the lone female on the site, went on one date with Marty, and he implied that much more had happened between them than it did. Gary says it was all in good fun and that it was only a joke. “How is it a joke? It doesn’t follow any of the normal or traditional structures of a joke,” Ludwig wonders.  

Marty’s pension for pranks makes everyone at the job site with him on the morning of his death a suspect. Although each worker is assigned a specific job and location every morning, they all swap jobs and are in different places. “How does anyone know what anyone else is doing?” Ludwig wonders. 

He discovers that someone has one of his puzzle books and has solved every puzzle—even the reverse chess. He realizes it was “a Rube Goldbergian sequence of events” that led to Marty’s death. Someone was smart enough to predict every move their co-workers would make so that Marty would be the one on the fourth floor and fall to his death. He marvels a bit that a construction worker would be that smart. Lucy rightly calls him a “bit of a snob.”  

Ludwig, clearly a fan of the dramatic reveals, once again gathers all the suspects in a room to announce who the killer is. “The killer, with an impressive level of psychological insight, accurately predicted who would swap with who and in what order,” he says.  He demonstrates all the killer’s moves via a game of chess. Alas, the only chess game Simon could find is a castle and fairy princess-themed one. “We start with the end game and work backward,” Ludwig says before announcing that Gary is the killer. Gary balks at this. Why would he want to kill Marty?

“Why anyone wants to kill anyone is a mystery to me... but I’m going to go with pride and arrogance,” Ludwig tells him. It turns out that even Gary’s girlfriend was one of Marty’s pranks. Gary was catfished. When asked if he knows what “catfish” means, Ludwig replies, “I think you and everyone else know full well I’m about to state incorrectly that it’s a type of fish.” Ludwig tells Gary that he’s a person of exceptional intelligence who hides it by spitting and using the phrase “mate” frequently. 

Gary still thinks he can get away with it until it’s proven that the water bottle, which has Gary’s fingerprints all over it, can only be thrown away down the chute. A grate covers the top, so he couldn’t have thrown it away from the ground like he claimed. Ludwig hands Gary his puzzle book and whispers, “This is yours. I signed it for you.” Check and mate, Gary! 

Back at home, Lucy is not thrilled that Ludwig’s knack for solving cases is making the papers. “Praise be! Man charged for Cambridge Church killing,” the headline reads while referencing “super cop” DCI James Taylor. Henry holds out hope that perhaps his father will see the newspaper article and realize they haven’t been following his dad’s instructions. “Maybe it will force his hand and bring him home,” he tells his mother.

But it’s not James who calls Ludwig, but a mysterious man from an unknown number. “I saw you in the paper... what the hell do you think you are doing?” the voice on the other end of the line says. When Ludwig asks who it is, the man hangs up. 

Henry is not thrilled with his mother and accuses her of just pretending that his uncle is his dad. Lucy falls back on the tried-and-true parenting move of sending Henry to his room. Henry’s not entirely off base here, though. There is an undercurrent of something between Ludwig and Lucy. Clearly, Ludwig still pines for her on some level. And it’s revealed that Lucy kept the four-leaf clover, pressed into a bookmark, that Ludwig gave her when they were children. 

Holly (Sophie Willan), the police’s technology expert, is definitely suspicious of Ludwig. She tells him that Chief Constable Ziegler had accessed many files from James’ computer. Even on the days that Ziegler wasn’t in the office.” Don’t worry. I’ve wiped the system,” Holly tells him. “I won’t do it again.” Why Holly is helping him remains a mystery. 

As the episode ends, we see someone, the same person who was taking photos of Ludwig outside Lucy’s house, staring at a board where they have started to put together that James and John (Ludwig) are two different people. With only two episodes left, what will be Ludwig’s next move?

Ludwig continues with one new episode every Thursday on BritBox. Season 2 is already greenlit.