'The Marlow Murder Club' Digs Into the Death of Sir Peter Bailey in Season 2 Premiere

What a wonderful late-summer treat to dip back into a mystery with some of the most charming amateur detectives on Masterpiece. Judith Potts (Samantha Bond), Becks (Cora Horgan), and Suzie (Jo Martin), aka The Marlow Murder Club, are back on the case for Season 2 in "Death Comes To Marlow, Part 1," which makes me feel a lot better about the crime rate in their sleepy English village. 

It starts, as maybe all late summer mysteries should, with a garden party celebrating the marriage of Sir Peter Bailey (James Wilby) to his nurse, Jenny (Yuna Shin). Sir Peter invites Judith and the girls because he fears that something terrible is going to happen at the party, as his children and ex-wife are not pleased about the upcoming nuptials. 

Sir Peter could not have predicted that the terrible event was his own death. The excitement kicks up at the party when Peter's son Tristam (Tom Stourton) arrives. He's expressed his concerns about the marriage in the past, which immediately upsets Jenny when he shows up. Sir Peter confronts his son but ultimately decides to follow his sobbing wife back to the house while Tristam heads to the party for more champagne. 

The entire party is drawn to the house a short while later when they hear a massive crash. Jenny meets the party as she's coming downstairs, saying the sound came from below. Tristam leads the way and breaks into his father's locked study, allowing the entire party to see that a fallen bookcase has killed Sir Peter. 

The evidence suggests an accident, but Judith, Becks, and Suzie have another theory, considering Sir Peter's earlier warning, and so our mystery begins. 

The murder of a man with a title always brings the inheritance into question. Tristam was set to inherit his father's estate until he proclaimed his disagreement with Peter's upcoming marriage to Jenny. Peter's lawyer, Andrew Husselbee (Robert Portal), arrives at the crime scene to inform everyone that Peter made up a new will three weeks prior. Andrew doesn't know what was in the will, but he was a witness to its signing and has come to collect it. Luckily for Tristam, the will is nowhere to be found when Jenny opens Peter's personal safe, leaving the old will as the standing document. 

Judith finds the timing of the new will going missing extremely interesting, but Suzie and Becks are also on the case. They discover the footprint of a "posh female Wellie" outside of Sir Peter's study. The print was still damp, which indicated that whoever made the print had stood in the flower bed after it had been watered. Whoever made that footprint is high up on the people of interest list, and Judith wants the girls to come over the next morning to discuss. 

The police investigators, led by DS Tanika Malik (Natalie Dew), deduce that Sir Peter's death was an accident. The (alleged) only key to the room was found in his pocket, and the windows to the study don't open enough to allow another person in or out. Since nothing was found to suggest that someone was in the study with Peter's body, there is no evidence to support the involvement of another person. 

Tanika has learned not to dismiss Judith when she has a theory, though. While her team outwardly treats the investigation as an accident, she sends Brendan (Phil Langhorne) and Jason (Tijan Sarr) to follow up on a domestic disturbance notice filed by Peter's gardener, Adam Warner (Tom Fisher), three months prior. 

Meanwhile, Judith, Becks, and Suzie are working on their own theories. Jenny was the only other person in the house when Sir Peter died, but it doesn't make sense for her to kill him before they married and she got the money and the title. Judith is convinced this was a murder, but the trio has to figure out how someone else could have gotten out of the room and locked the door before the entire party arrived. 

Judith is also suspicious of Peter's daughter, Rosanna (Emily Bevan), who claims she was outside at the party when the crash happened. No one in the Marlow Murder Club remembers seeing her there in her sharp pinstripe jacket, which was suspiciously missing a button. We're not sure how that is important yet, but it's mentioned twice in the episode, so we know it will become relevant eventually. Perhaps the "Post Lady Wellie" that made the imprint in the garden belongs to Rosanna?

Brendan and Jason's chat with Adam Warner delivers some interesting tidbits, like Adam called the police when he saw Tristam physically threatening his father three months prior. He's also missing a box of rat poison from his gardening closet. He suspects Tristam took it, but the detectives (infuriatingly) don't ask any follow-up questions. 

They do, however, catch sight of Judith and the girls pulling up to the estate. Jenny wants them to search through the house and find the new will before Tristam officially inherits everything. Her desire to find the new will does raise a potential motive for Jenny, but it also allows the women to get a closer look at the crime scene and the rest of the house. They find an untouched jar of magnesium ribbons (bet that's going to be clutch in how the killer got in and out of the study) and Rosanna's missing button in Sir Peter's dressing room (What's it doing there if she was at the garden party?). The ladies waste no time getting an answer to that. 

They go straight to Rosanna, whose office is located in her mother, Lady Bailey's (Caroline Langrishe), garden. Rosanna confirms that she did ask her father for a business loan, and he refused, which led to a massive confrontation about how he always favored her older brother. Rosanna snuck upstairs during the party to see the new will and whether her father had left anything to her. She was still trying to get into the safe when Jenny came upstairs to find Peter's stress cigarettes. Rosanna hid in the dressing room until Jenny went downstairs after the crash, and that's where she lost the button. 

The trio decides to return to the Bailey estate and have their own conversation with the gardener, but when they arrive, they find Tristam attempting to throw Jenny out of the house. Judith puts a stop to it, and Tristam backs down just in time to take a phone call from a contact listed as "Cupcakes." 

The ladies follow Tristam as he talks on the phone. They even apprehend a motor scooter to keep up with him on his bike. They follow him to an apartment estate and watch as he argues with a young woman whom he apparently stood up that morning. She immediately becomes his potential accomplice in the murder of Peter Bailey. What's better is that Tanika calls Judith while she and the girls are watching Tristam and the mystery woman argue. Tanika has been instructed to drop the case, but she believes Judith that there was foul play. Instead of fighting the trio, she's going to work with them to secretly investigate what really happened to Sir Peter Bailey in that study. 

The game is officially afoot! 

The Marlow Murder Club Season 2 continues Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on most local PBS stations, the PBS app, and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel. All six episodes of Season 2 are available for members via PBS Passport. Season 1 is also available for PBS Passport members; Season 3 has already been greenlit. Check your local listings.