'Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries' Season 2, Episode 6 Recap: "Marked For Murder"
This week's Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries cold open starts with the already dead victim hanging naked in the shower. The episode properly begins with a young lady arriving at Abbotsford's football clubhouse after the game asking the vice-captain, Vince Barlow (Dan O'Connor), for an autograph, while Bert cheers on their win over West Melbourne. Vince is happy to sign even as the barkeep asks where the captain is, Harry The Hangman. The coach, Joe Mclean (Robert Morgan), says they left him to his quirky after-game health routine in the sheds as the girl quietly steals his hat for someone waiting outside.
Fisher: All's fair in love and football.
As Bert explains to Miss Fisher, who is hired to find the hat the next morning, this is a calamity. It's the coach's lucky hat. West Melbourne stole it to ensure Abbotsford will lose. Mclean escorts her inside the sheds, to find the floor flooded, and the absent team captain, hung by a West Melbourne scarf. Jack and Collins arrive as Abbotsford fans are riling up and stop Bert and his buddy, Pat O'Farrell (Mat Stevenson), from inciting violence. They also see Harry's wife, Celia Harper (Jessica Clarke), arrive and that Vince asks for her to be taken home.
As Fisher comes out to speak to Bert and Cec (who is a West Melbourne supporter), Neville Gibbs (Damien Garvey), the West head coach, arrives to offer his condolences. He lost his wife and then his daughter, Myra, two years ago, and knows how hard this is. Jack questions Gibbs, noting that Harry used to play for West before switching teams. Gibbs insists his team wouldn't have been so stupid as to use their scarves, suggesting Jack should question the Abbortford players. Harry was a well-known womanizer and not well-liked.
If that weren't enough, Jack's ex-wife, Rosie Sanderson, and her fiance, Sidney, arrive as well. Sidney is not just a hardcore Abbotsford supporter, Harry worked for him, managing the warehouses, and they were good friends. In the conversation, Rosie notes that her allegiance to Abbotsford is a heartbreaker for her father, the Deputy Commissioner Sanderson, Jack's boss, who is a dyed-in-the-wool West Melbourne fan. Jack sighs, knowing Sanderson won't take well to accusing one of his team's players of murder.
Cec identifies the teen Bert saw asking for autographs as West's orange girl, Poppy Brown (Kaiya Jones), so Fisher goes shopping for fruit, and fishing for answers. The poor kid is blindsided when Fisher states she'll take the kid down to the station if Poppy doesn't talk. Her description of the man who paid her for the hat is one both Bert and Cec know immediately: Stan Baines (Brad McMurray). Baines was Harry's mentor, and he never got over his defection. There was even an altercation on the field in their last game.
Jack has Baines in for questioning, and though he seems innocent of murder, he does return the hat. Mclean comes to pick it up, his pup, Scotty, in tow. (Dot is highly allergic.) Mclean says Harry swapped teams because Baines wouldn't give him time on the ball, and Gibbs was too distracted by Myra's death to notice. Dot notes with Harry out, Vince is now in line for team captain, he was already in line for it before Harry traded clubs. A search turns up a "travel tours" cruise packet in Vince's locker, but not much else. The initial report shows Harry died by hanging, but by a rope. The scarf was a posthumous set-up.
At Harry's memorial service, Fisher notes Vince and Celia are too intimate with each other, and Rosie agrees, though Celia claimed she and Harry were planning a cruise at the end of the season. The two have a lovely heart to heart over intuition, Rosie mentions Celia asked her about divorce, but thought she didn't have it in her. Their conversation is interrupted by Baine arriving to pay his respects. In the distraction, Rosie, Celia, and Vince exit. Fisher follows them out and catches Celia telling a lovesick Vince to get his hands off her. A woman runs up to Baines, saying, "they're on to us," before the Abbotsford fan crowd catches up to him and chases him out.
Jack's investigation turns up Vince booked the cruise with Celia, not Harry. Vince says Harry was a worthless husband who didn't care about anything except the game, including his teammates. Meanwhile, Celia admits to Fisher Harry never got over leaving West, and he refused to grant her a divorce. But it wasn't suicide: Harper's wrists were bound, and he was forced to stand on a block of ice, which melted out from under him. When Fisher gets home, her gloves make Dot sneeze again. But Miss Fisher didn't see Scotty, she only touched the scarf Harry was hung with. Baines calls her, drunk, saying he has a confession and to meet him at the clubrooms. But by the time she arrives, he's been shot, with 297 carved into his forehead.
Confronted with the dog hair on the scarf, Mclean admits he staged the scene after finding Harry's body and a suicide note, believing Harry killing himself over leaving West would devastate fans and team morale. But he doesn't own a gun; he couldn't have killed Baines. Fisher tracks down the woman from the party, who Poppy identifies as Mrs. Dangerfield (Carole Patullo), the former West club nurse, who left after Gibbs' daughter died. Under questioning, she admits Baines begged her to help Myra after Harry got her pregnant, but she was too late. Myra died the next day, July 29. (In euro date style "29-7.")
Gibbs only tracked down Dangerfield recently. He obliquely referenced Myra before the game, which is why Harry and Baines fought. Baines had told Harry to deny everything and leave her, which is why Myra attempted to give herself an abortion in the first place. After the game, Gibbs forced Harry to confess, tied him up and hanged him in revenge, and then shot Baines for good measure. To top it off: The scarf Mclean grabbed was one knitted by Myra. With the arrest of Gibbs for murder and Mclean for obstruction, both teams down their coaches and best players. And yet, the episode ends with another West Melbourne vs. Abbotsford game for everyone to attend. Nothing stops a football match, not even murder.
