Lost Treasures Are Discovered in the Penultimate Episode of 'Magpie Murders'

This week’s episode of Magpie Murders again opens with a flashback to 2015, and Alan Conway is leading a writing workshop. He reads an excerpt from his manuscript, The Slide, and encourages the class to comment. Lee Jaffrey (remember him?) ventures some mild praise, but another participant says he doesn’t get it, as he was expecting a whodunit. Alan gets annoyed at the mention of Atticus Pünd and asks the student his name. Predictably, Mr. Brent becomes the slovenly, witless gardener in Magpie Murders.

In the present, Susan is faced with her unsettling quandary from last week, the incriminating photo of Andreas and Alan sent to her anonymously. James Taylor texts her as she sits, as he remembered Conway’s manuscript sitting on a coffee table when he left; he also saw Alan’s sister, Claire, arriving as he went. He wonders if she might have taken the manuscript out of resentment. At Abbey Grange, Susan shows James a photo of Andreas. He doesn’t recognize it but recalls Alan complaining a former colleague emailed him, presumably hoping to procure money. Alan didn’t discourage Andreas from visiting, hat in hand, because it would be a pleasure to turn him down.

On the ride to London, Pünd sits in the passenger seat, suggesting motives for Andreas: fear, envy, anger, and desire. As he speculates, an exasperated Susan kicks him out of her brain and car before stopping at Claire’s to pressure her about the Magpie manuscript. Claire admits she took it, but only read a few pages before burning it, humiliated by Alan's depiction of her. He’d demeaned her for years, paid her a pittance to be his dogsbody, and used her friend DI Locke as inspiration for his incompetent policeman in the Pünd adventures. She’s glad he’s dead.