The Death In Paradise Christmas special 2023 saw DI Neville Parker (Ralf Little) and the team dealing with a particularly tricky case when entrepreneur Gerry Stableforth (The Curse's Geoff Bell) was killed, only for a key witness to completely disappear — and Neville found himself somewhat distracted by the arrival of his mother Melanie (Doon Mackichan) for a Christmas visit — but she had some words of wisdom to help the detective mend his broken heart.
Here's what happened in the Death In Paradise Christmas special 2023...
A little unexpectedly, the Christmas Special opens not on the sun-drenched shores of Saint Marie but the grey and cloudy streets of Woking where Debbie Clumson (Ridley's Bronagh Waugh) is on a work video call in her dining room (complete with smart clothes from the waist up and pyjama bottoms from the waist down, the official uniform of working from home). She's getting ready to start packing, because her employers have invited her to travel out for their Christmas party in the Caribbean — however, her partner Dave Chadwick (Significant Other's Youssef Kerkour) claims he isn't feeling well and doesn't think he should fly. Debbie claims that Dave never wanted to go in the first place — but she's not planning to turn down the invitation just because he doesn't feel like it, so she's going without him.
Upon arriving in Saint Marie and being transported to her boss Gerry's luxurious villa, Debbie is greeted by Riley Biggs (Heartstopper's Leila Khan), who's interning for Gerry, who also happens to be her uncle. Out on the terrace, Gerry is getting ready for lunch with his wife Bella (Patsy Kensit), who's admiring a piece of artwork made out of empty bottles structured to look like a Christmas tree. It's the handiwork of their daughter Mariana (Amelia Clarkson), a professional artist whose work apparently sells for five-figure sums. After being introduced to the family by Gerry's son Benjamin (Shadow And Bone's Freddy Carter), Debbie joins them for lunch.
Later that evening, Debbie video-calls Dave back at home, telling him that she thinks the two of them are on very different pages in their relationship and that she isn't sure it's working. After ending the call, she walks out to her balcony, where she can see and hear Gerry shouting at someone on the terrace. She heads back inside and goes to bed — but while she's lying there waiting to drift off, she hears a blood-curdling scream. She rushes out to the balcony and is quickly joined by Benjamin, who also heard it. The two of them go to investigate the ravine below the villa, where a horrified Debbie sees Gerry lying on the ground. Riley also arrives at this point, and Benjamin goes back to the house to call an ambulance while Riley and Debbie run down to check on Gerry. It's too late, however, as Gerry only manages to croak out the words "it's behind you" before he dies.
Outside Government House, Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington) is presiding over the official switching-on of Honoré's Christmas lights. As he gives his speech, Neville is on the phone to his mother while Trainee Officer Darlene Curtis (Ginny Holder) speaks to local resident Daloris Green (Sutara Gayle), who's a little confused — she thinks she has a hospital appointment to get to, until Darlene explains to her that her appointment is at 9:30am tomorrow. As the Commissioner starts the countdown, Neville spots two kids unplugging the lights and rushes over to intervene — but his timing is unfortunate, because the Commissioner presses the button and nothing happens, and all he can see is Neville standing there with the two separated connectors of the extension cord in his hands. Despite Neville protesting his innocence, the furious Commissioner tells Neville that he has ruined the highlight of his year.
Officer Marlon Pryce (Tahj Miles) receives a call from the paramedics about an accidental death, so Neville and the team head up to the Stableforth residence. When they arrive, Darlene briefs Neville and the Commissioner that Gerry was the CEO of a UK-based clothing company, and based on the circumstances of his death, the family are assuming the fall was an accident. Riley has privately spoken to Marlon — irritating him by repeatedly calling him "Marlon" rather than "Officer Pryce" — to explain that Gerry looked right at Debbie and said "it's behind you" right before he died, but there was nothing behind either of them at the time.
However, when Neville and the Commissioner head up to the villa to get Debbie's version of the story, DS Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson) has some worrying news — she can't find Debbie anywhere. The security cameras show no evidence of Debbie leaving the grounds after the police arrived, so presumably she is still at the villa somewhere. Neville feels uneasy that about Debbie going missing so soon after Gerry spoke his final words to her, and begins to suspect that Gerry's death was no accident.
Neville gathers the family and asks if anyone saw Debbie after she left Riley to go and check on the arrival of the ambulance. As nobody has seen Debbie for more than eight hours, Neville is increasingly concerned.
Neville and the Commissioner contact Dave back in Woking to alert him to the fact that Debbie is missing. He's extremely worried and instantly books a flight to Saint Marie. As Dave goes to pack his bags, we see a figure in a hoodie watching him from the shadows and making a phone call to an unknown person, telling them that Dave is still here but won't be for long: "Looks like he's heading your way."
At the airport, Naomi tells Neville that the family were withholding important information — she found that he'd made 13 calls to his lawyer on the same day, because his fashion company is in major financial trouble and he was on the verge of declaring bankruptcy. However, Gerry's lawyer told Naomi that Benjamin was very much against this, and made a failed attempt to wrest control of the company from his father in order to prevent it. Dave emerges from the airport and is anxious to get to the hotel, but Neville informs him that they're waiting for one more person — his mum, who was due to fly in for Christmas. Melanie arrives at that moment and instantly demands hugs from Neville and Naomi, and when Dave explains that he's here to look for his missing fiancée, Melanie hugs him too.
Neville takes Dave to his hotel and explains that they have posted missing person fliers around the island, and despite Neville's assurances that the best thing for Dave to do is wait for news, Dave is determined that he's going to play an active role in the search for Debbie — he makes multiple photocopies of the missing person poster that Neville gave him and starts wandering the streets handing them out to people.
Back at the Stableforth villa, Darlene has found a piece of evidence — a bracelet with a broken clasp and specks of blood on it. Riley confirms it's Debbie's bracelet, because she remembers seeing her wearing it. Marlon is annoyed because Riley has been following him and Darlene around all day, and Riley explains that she's a big crime show buff. Nonetheless, Neville tells her that she'll need to keep her distance from the investigation. As Marlon takes the bracelet to the lab to be examined, Darlene confirms to Neville that the team has combed the entire grounds of the villa, and Debbie is definitely not there.
Having dropped off her bags at Neville's beach hut, Melanie heads to Catherine's bar, where she thanks Catherine (Élizabeth Bourgine) for taking such good care of her son. She asks Catherine how Neville has been in the wake of everything that happened with Sophie — and Catherine tells her that Neville isn't going to get over something like that quickly. Catherine asks what plans Melanie has while she's on the island, and invites her to the Commissioner's Christmas Eve drinks party as well as Honoré's Christmas carnival parade. Dave arrives at the bar looking extremely hot and sunburnt — sadly, he's had no luck finding Debbie.
Benjamin arrives at the police station for questioning. He admits that there were hostilities between him and his father on the day he died, because he disagreed with his father's bankruptcy plans. Although Neville appreciates Benjamin's openness, he points out that Gerry's death has given Benjamin everything he wanted: the company is still active, and he gets another attempt at the new business venture his father had vetoed. Benjamin assures them he would not kill his father just to get control of the family business.
Neville returns home, where Melanie has a surprise for him: she's decorated the beach hut for Christmas, with a little help from Catherine. Melanie tries to get Neville to open up about the Sophie incident, and he admits it's still playing on his mind a bit.
After receiving a call from Naomi, who's been working at the Stableforth villa all night, Neville heads there to meet her. Naomi tells him that she saw Mariana's fiancé arriving late the night before — his name is Callen Shaw (Foundation's Wade Briggs), and he has a criminal record for embezzlement, theft and forgery all around the UK art underworld. After Naomi made some enquiries, she discovered that Gerry had been feeding information about Callen to fraud detectives in the UK, because he wanted Callen far away from his daughter — preferably in prison. Naomi also confirms that despite Mariana's claims of selling her artwork for vast sums of money, she hasn't really made much of an impact in the art world and is mostly being bankrolled by her father.
Mariana assures Neville and Naomi that she knows all about Callen's past, but she doesn't believe he's a bad person. She knew that her father had hired a private investigator to investigate Callen, and admits to having paid him off, but she insists that she didn't know how close her father and the PI had got to exposing Callen, and neither did Callen himself. Callen informs them that he flew in from London last night, and that Mariana couldn't have pushed Gerry into the ravine, because she was on a video call with him when they heard the scream.
As Neville and Naomi are leaving, Naomi gets an email from the lab — the blood on the bracelet has been confirmed as Debbie's. The two of them go to find Dave, who is in the town centre where the carnival is taking place — as are Catherine and Melanie, who are having a brilliant time. Naomi is quite impressed with Melanie's confidence — she points out that Melanie has had more dates on this island in 24 hours than Naomi herself has managed in two years. Neville spots Dave, who is extremely sunburnt by this point, and breaks the news that it looks as though someone hurt Debbie the night she went missing. As Dave continues flyering, he hands one to Daloris, who appears to recognise Debbie.
Riley attempts to call the police station anonymously from a payphone, but Marlon instantly recognises her voice because she has not left him alone for the past two days. He goes out to meet her, and Riley swears him to secrecy: not long before Gerry died, she saw him and Gerry having a serious argument about their children and Bella claiming Gerry was going to "ruin their lives". Riley isn't sure exactly what Bella was talking about, but she heard Bella saying she would do anything she could to protect her children. She tells Marlon that Gerry was a good man who did a lot to help her, but the rest of his family were horrible to him.
Neville and Naomi head to the villa to question Bella, who's surprised they are still treating the case as a murder enquiry. She blithely dismisses the row, saying that the two of them were married for 30 years and had arguments like that all the time. Bella says that Gerry was trying to take away everything that mattered to their kids, and her instinct was to protect her children. However, she says she didn't kill Gerry, and she can prove it because she was outside on the terrace when Gerry fell — and the chef they'd hired for the lunch saw her there and can corroborate her story.
After making some calls, the team establish that everyone's alibis for the time of Gerry's death check out — except Riley's, since no one can vouch for her being inside the villa. Marlon has done a background check on her, but he can't find anything that would suggest a motive for killing Gerry. So, in short, Bella, Benjamin, Mariana and Callen have motives but also have alibis, while Riley has no official alibi but also no motive — and none of this explains why Debbie disappeared after the murder or where she went.
Just when Neville thinks things can't get any worse, he gets a call from Melanie alerting him to the fact that Dave collapsed from severe heatstroke at the carnival and is now in the hospital. Melanie waits in the hospital with Dave, and when he regains consciousness he admits that he has messed things up with Debbie recently and that she was thinking of ending things between them. He blames himself for Debbie's disappearance — if he'd just come to Saint Marie with Debbie in the first place, he'd have been there with her last night and she wouldn't have gone missing. Melanie consoles him in her typically forthright manner, and reassures him that if there's anyone in the world who can find Debbie and get her back safely, it's Neville.
At the police station in the evening, Daloris comes to see Darlene and explains that she knows Debbie Clumson — but she can't recall from where. Darlene explains to the team that Daloris has dementia, and as Daloris is leaving, she suddenly remembers hearing Debbie saying "it's behind you" repeatedly, which clues Neville and Naomi in to the fact that she must have met Debbie after Gerry died.
Christmas Eve dawns, and after working through the night for two days in a row, Naomi is falling asleep at her desk. Melanie arrives at the police station after spending all the night in the hospital keeping an eye on Dave, and after hearing Dave's relationship fears, she wants Neville to open up about his own. He thinks he's not so much "unlucky in love" as outright cursed, and wonders if he should just accept that he'll never find someone.
Neville comes to the conclusion that Debbie must have been hiding in plain sight all along, and works out that there's only one way she could have left the villa — and only one place she could have gone. He calls Darlene and asks her to find out if Daloris had a hospital visit recently, and of course Darlene already knows the answer, because Daloris showed Darlene her letter from the hospital at the Christmas lights ceremony, showing she had an appointment at 9:30am the day after Gerry died. Neville asks if there's anything evidence that Debbie's been at Daloris's house, and Darlene says there's nothing to suggest that, but Daloris seems to think it's the case.
Neville has a hunch that Debbie is about to rematerialise — right back where it all started. Sure enough, Riley's out running in the grounds of the villa when she sees Debbie sitting on a bench, staring into space. Neville and Naomi arrive, and Debbie apologises for the fuss she caused. She fills in the gaps for them: when she was heading back to the villa to check on the ambulance, she found a document folder on this bench. She was curious, because when she saw Gerry arguing with someone earlier, he was waving around a folder like that. She looked inside the folder, and then suddenly felt a hard, sharp pain in her head.
When she came to, she couldn't remember how she'd got there or what her name was, only that she was scared and someone had tried to hurt her. Feeling unsafe, she headed towards the blue flashing lights that she could see in the distance and hid in the ambulance, riding in it all the way to the hospital. That's where she met Daloris, who understood all too well how it felt not to trust your own memory, and took Debbie home to look after her. Debbie kept hearing a voice in her head saying "it's behind you" and gradually started to remember little things — finding the document folder, and being at the villa for work — so she made her way back to the villa hoping it would trigger her to remember the rest. Naomi asks her what was inside the folder, and Debbie says it was mostly papers and documents — and then a lot of photos of herself.
Neville suggests a final search of the villa to locate this important file, and after an extensive search it seems like they're no closer to the truth — but then Neville's eyes fall on the plastic bottle Christmas tree artwork. Sure enough, the folder is hidden inside one of the bottles! Opening it up, he puts the final pieces of the puzzle together, and asks for Riley's help. All she needs to do is head down into the ravine — and scream.
With everyone gathered in the villa, Neville lays out his case. Gerry died because he uncovered a plan to steal something from Debbie. Screengrabs taken during a video call with Debbie show that there is a vase behind her in her dining room, which is apparently a rare Ming dynasty original, worth close to $6m — the sort of money the family needs to avoid bankruptcy. He assumes that Mariana, as the artist in the family, first noticed the vase's value, and then she came up with a plan, along with Benjamin and Callen, to steal it without Debbie realising. The three of them concocted a plan to invite her and Dave out to the Caribbean for Christmas to ensure the house would be empty, so Callen could travel to the UK and steal the vase, replacing it with a worthless replica.
On the evening of Gerry's death, he uncovered the theft, and the people Debbie overheard him shouting at were Benjamin and Mariana. He was threatening to tell Debbie what they'd done and have them arrested, guaranteeing they wouldn't be able to claim the priceless vase when it arrived on the island.
This gives them a clear motive for their father's murder, but Benjamin and Mariana are quick to remind Neville that they have alibis. Neville disagrees: the time that everyone at the villa heard Gerry scream wasn't the time that he fell to his death, because Riley went down into the ravine and screamed. just now, nobody in the villa heard anything.
Pulling out Benjamin's mobile phone, Neville reveals that a technician in the lab has recovered a deleted file of Gerry screaming. He confronts Benjamin and Mariana, accusing one of them of pushing Gerry into the ravine while the other recorded the scream as he fell. Mariana bursts into tears and insists she didn't kill Gerry, she was just doing what Benjamin told her to do, and Benjamin snaps at her to shut up.
After Benjamin pushed Gerry into the ravine, they ran back to the villa to ensure they both had alibis: they played the scream over a Bluetooth speaker with Benjamin being careful to be seen by Debbie on the balcony, and Mariana making a video call to Callen in the UK. Mariana admits that after Benjamin came back to the house to tell everyone about Gerry's fall, she was making her way to the ravine when she saw Debbie reading the folder. In a panic, she picked up a rock and struck Debbie in the back of the head, and then hid the folder where she thought no one would look. Neville realises that the robbery was playing on Gerry's mind just before he died, so when he saw Debbie, he whispered "it's behind you" — trying to tip her off that she was about to be the victim of a $6m robbery. Benjamin and Mariana are arrested, and Marlon thanks Riley for her help solving the case.
Neville and Naomi take Debbie to the hospital where they tell her, much to her surprise, that Dave is on the island and being treated for heatstroke. Neville explains that he walked every inch of the island trying to find her, and Debbie is deeply touched. Debbie and Dave reconcile — somewhat gingerly, given his extreme sunburn. Melanie and Neville watch the touching reunion, and Melanie tells Neville that even though love can be painful, it's worth it. He agrees, and promises not to give up on finding love.
Everyone gathers at the Commissioner's Christmas Eve drinks party in their finery, where a sleep-deprived Naomi gets drunk quite quickly. Neville, however, has misread the invitation and turns up in a casual shirt, shorts and a Santa hat — having already been warned by the Commissioner not to publicly embarrass him again.
Naomi watches Melanie dancing happily with some suitors at the party and confesses to Marlon that she wishes she could be more carefree like Melanie. Marlon tells Naomi that she doesn't need to be like anyone else, because she's cool just the way she is. A delighted Naomi leans in and kisses him on the lips, much to his surprise. Both Neville and the Commissioner witness the kiss and are faintly alarmed by it, but after seeing both Naomi and Melanie kissing people that evening, the Commissioner resolves to go and find some mistletoe himself...
Death In Paradise season 13 begins in 2024.
