Death in Paradise season 14 episode 4 sees the team investigating a suspicious poisoning at a local distillery that affects multiple people — but only kills one of them. Was it a deliberate murder, and if so, how did the killer ensure that the right person got the fatal dose?
Meanwhile, after seemingly wrapping up the investigation into his mother's untimely death, DI Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet) attempted to make the remainder of his time on Saint Marie more comfortable by creating a home-from-home, but things did not go according to plan.
Read on to find out how the case was solved...
We begin with an open-topped sports car arriving at the Ambrose Distillery, driven by Janelle Dulice (Top Boy's Michelle Asante). After parking, she's greeted by Cora Ambrose (In The Long Run's Madeline Appiah). Cora attempts some pleasantries, but Janelle wants to get straight down to business and asks where Patrick is. Cora tells Janelle that Patrick is by the tasting bar, along with Janelle's assistant Antony — a piece of information that Janelle seems briefly thrown by.
At the aforementioned tasting bar, Antony Dulice (Tienne Simon) is discussing with Patrick Ambrose (Miss Scarlet and the Duke's Ansu Kabia) his plans to launch his own start-up one day. Patrick seems distracted, but is vaguely encouraging. Janelle and Cora arrive, and Janelle ignores Patrick's attempt at a handshake. Patrick says the contract will be with them shortly, and Cora suggests having a drink while they wait; Janelle tells them she just needs a moment with Antony. After Cora and Patrick retreat, Janelle tells Antony — who it turns out is her son — that she told him he wasn't supposed to be here, but he appears to have invited himself along anyway so that he can learn from her. Cora tells him this is too important to mess up, and Antony is stung by the implication that his presence there would somehow mess it up.
At the tasting bar, master distiller Francesca Bower (Two Doors Down's Siobhán Redmond) gives everyone the tasting notes of the distillery's new rum, saying that it has been aged in oak barrels, and the bottle they are drinking from was drawn three days ago specifically for this meeting. She puts ice into everyone's glasses, although Patrick says he'll take his neat. Cora suggests that Janelle makes a toast, and Janette toasts "to doing business". The four of them clink their glasses and drink.
Some time later, Antony is being wheeled out on a stretcher as Officer Darlene Curtis (Ginny Holder) and Officer Sebastian Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah) arrive. Francesca identifies herself as the one who called them, and says this is all her fault — she thinks it was methanol poisoning, but is flustered because this should not have happened. Seb reports that three victims are on their way to hospital, but a fourth was found at the bar who didn't make it. At the tasting bar, Patrick's lifeless body remains on the floor.
At the beach shack, Mervin is delightedly taking care of an air-conditioning unit. Now, I may not be a HVAC expert of any kind, but this seems to me to be both a wasteful and pointless investment for a building that looks to be about 40% open windows. But perhaps I'm missing something? DS Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson) arrives and is intrigued (not necessarily in a positive way) by the presence of the AC unit, which Mervin claims to be renting for a pittance. That's not the only bit of home improvement he's been working on, either; he's only gone and stuck a satellite dish on the outside. Mervin explains to Naomi that he's just trying to enjoy himself for the remainder of his stay on the island, and she asks if he's feeling all right about closing his mother's case. Mervin insists that he's fine, especially now he can watch the football, with air-conditioning. Naomi tells him there's been an accidental poisoning that has hospitalized three people and killed one, and Mervin guesses that it happened at the Ambrose Distillery, much to Naomi's surprise.
At the distillery, Darlene sets the scene: Patrick is the distillery owner and, like all the victims, had a single shot of rum before starting to feel ill. Mervin crouches over the body making "mmhmm" noises, annoying Darlene who tends to prefer communication in actual words, and Naomi explains to Darlene that she thinks Mervin is behaving this way for a reason; she's just not sure what that reason might be. Naomi asks if there's any explanation for Patrick dying and everyone else surviving, and Darlene says the current assumption is that he simply drank slightly more than everyone else. Mervin finds what he's looking for on the body: a Post-It note. He explains that he got a call on his mobile two days ago from someone who didn't say anything before hanging up, and when he checked the number, it came from the Ambrose Distillery — but when he called back, the receptionist said it could have come from any phone on the estate and there was no way of telling. Now he knows it was Patrick who was phoning, and the fact that he has now died feels like too much of a coincidence.
Francesca, still quite emotional, says that health and safety officers have confirmed the cask was contaminated, so she can only assume that she must have distilled it at the wrong temperature and failed to remove all of the methanol; whether it was a faulty thermometer or human error, it's her fault. She walks Mervin through what happened: she drew the rum three days ago, the bottle was capped and sealed and given to Patrick, who kept it ever since. At the gathering, Patrick uncapped the bottle while Francesca put out four glasses, with ice in everyone's apart from his. Patrick poured everyone a shot, and they all sipped. Cora was about to pour Patrick a second shot while Francesca refreshed the glasses, and that's when Patrick started coughing, with everyone else falling ill soon afterwards. Mervin asks what they were all doing here, and Francesca explains that Janelle was about to buy the distillery from Patrick, but they never got to sign the contract. Since Cora is the last remaining member of the Ambrose family, Francesca assumes she is now the sole owner of the distillery.
Francesca is expecting to be arrested, but Mervin thinks it's more complicated than that: the impending signing of the contract to sell the entire estate is a second suspicious element in this case. But Patrick was the one who poured the drinks — so if it was murder, and the poisoning was intentional, how did the killer ensure Patrick gave himself a lethal dose but not anyone else?
At the police station, Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington) is waiting, because he has further info about the Ambrose family. He recalls that about 18 years ago, Patrick fell out with his father Darnell, though the reason for the argument was never made clear. Darnell died six weeks ago, so Patrick has only just inherited the distillery — and presumably returned to Saint Marie to sell it. Mervin and Naomi conclude that Patrick's lengthy absence, and the fact that he died shortly after returning to the island, amounts to Suspicious Thing Number Three. As Selwyn is on his way out, Darlene stops to check if he is all right in light of his impending redundancy. He assures her that he is fine, but thanks her for asking.
The next morning, Naomi arrives at the shack to find all of the doors and windows closed. She knocks on the door, and Mervin drags her inside where she gets an unpleasant shock: a temperature of 18ºC. Mervin admits that the downside to all of this is the need to keep the doors and windows closed at all times (see, like I said!), and Naomi says if it were up to her, she'd prefer to be able to see the view. She also points out that Harry the lizard seems to be suffering in the cold, so Mervin — who hadn't even noticed Harry was in the shack — quickly lets him out.
On the way to work, Naomi fills Mervin in on what she heard from the Ambrose family's lawyer: ever since Patrick left home 18 years ago, Cora helped her father to run the distillery, and it took her a long time to earn his respect. Reading between the lines, Naomi has deduced that Darnell was quite a traditional chap who wanted his son, not his daughter, to inherit the family business. However, Cora gradually convinced him that she had the skills, but he never got around to changing his will in time, and Cora was devastated when she found out that Patrick was not only inheriting the distillery, but planning to sell it.
Mervin goes to see Cora in hospital, where she admits that she and Patrick never got on, and she wasn't particularly upset when he disappeared all those years ago. She says that at first, their father kept putting a monthly allowance into Patrick's account, but he stopped after a year — hoping that being cut off would force Patrick to return home. Mervin asks how she felt when Patrick inherited the distillery, and Cora admits she was "beyond angry", and isn't shy about the fact that Patrick's death has given her everything she ever wanted — but promises Mervin that she didn't kill him.
Darlene and Seb are searching Patrick's office, and Seb is particularly impressed that Patrick had a minibar in there. Darlene is a bit distracted thinking about Selwyn losing his job, but breaks out of her reverie when she notices Seb taking pictures of the inside of the minibar, and points out that the room they are in isn't even a crime scene. Seb explains this is his new approach to investigating: previously he hasn't been doing enough and has missed things, so now he's going to do too much — and demonstrates this by photographing Darlene, who kisses her teeth at him.
Leaving the hospital, Mervin fills Naomi in on Cora's testimony. They see Janelle and Antony getting into a car, and Naomi reveals that neither of them seems to have much of a motive for wanting Patrick dead: Janelle only met Patrick a few days ago, and Antony only met him the day Patrick died. Plus, Janelle has majorly lost out from the sale of the distillery not going through. Janelle's phone rings, and she looks momentarily panicked, but doesn't answer it.
Back at the police station, Darlene updates Mervin on the lab reports: the bottle of rum was contaminated, and there were traces in all four glasses but nowhere else. Patrick's post-mortem confirms he died of methanol poisoning, with the amount found in his system being higher than that found in the other three. Seb suggests that Patrick was the only one drinking his rum neat, so possibly the poison was diluted by the melting ice? Mervin shoots that theory down, saying that the melting ice wouldn't have reduced the overall dosage of poison. Darlene wonders if the killer wasn't even that calculating, that they didn't care how many people died and just got lucky that everyone apart from Patrick survived. Mervin points out that a potential outcome of that approach would Patrick surviving and everyone else dying; the opposite of what the killer wanted. Darlene says that during the search, she found out that Janelle used to work for the Ambrose Distillery, aged 19, for one summer before going to university in the US. Naomi does some mental arithmetic and reckons that, despite what she told them, Janelle must have met Patrick when she was working there. Darlene clarifies that she's talking about the summer of 2007, 18 years ago, and Mervin realises that's the same year Patrick left, so he asks her to go back to the distillery first thing in the morning and speak to anyone who was working there in 2007. Mervin's phone rings: it's the Commissioner, instructing him to return to the shack immediately.
Back at the shack, Mervin's satellite dish has attracted a lot of unwelcome attention. He asks Selwyn what the problem is, and Selwyn explains that the dish is an eyesore, and Mervin didn't seek permission to install it — and had he asked, Selwyn would have told him it's illegal. Mervin can't believe this, saying "you can just shove those up in London, no one gives a hoot". Naomi gently explains that the fact that the shack is on a public beach is part of the problem, and Catherine Bordey (Élizabeth Bourgine) adds that its in an area of natural beauty. She says that the council are not happy about it, and hands Mervin a fine for $150. Selwyn advises Mervin to pay the fine swiftly and take the satellite dish down. Catherine tells Mervin that it was nice seeing him again, although her tone of voice implies the opposite.
Naomi helps Mervin to take the dish down, and suggests that instead of sitting inside watching TV for the next few weeks, he could spend a bit more time getting to know about his mother — perhaps visit her old haunts, talk to her friends, that sort of thing. Mervin says that her neighbour Brianna mentioned a seafood restaurant that Dorna liked to go to, and Naomi suggests he go there and try it for himself. She reminds him that this is his one chance to learn about his mother's life on Saint Marie, and points out that he can watch "Day of the Match" (heh) as much as he likes when he gets home. Mervin agrees to give the idea due consideration.
At the distillery the next day, Seb reports that Patrick and Janelle were both seen there for the last time on August 22, 2007, with Darlene adding that people assumed they'd run away together, although nobody knows for sure. Naomi says that a summer romance from 18 years ago isn't much of a motive for murder, but Mervin says that it is odd that they both came back to the distillery at the same time.
Naomi and Mervin go to speak to Janelle, who warns them not to listen to gossip, and that there was never anything between her and Patrick. Looking at a picture of Janelle and Antony, Mervin notes that his date of birth is marked on the back: May 28 2008, roughly nine months after she left the distillery. Janelle admits that Patrick was Antony's father, but by the time she found out she was pregnant, he'd already disappeared, so she got on with raising Antony by herself. Mervin questions whether it's truly a coincidence that she came back to the island with Antony right before Patrick died, but Janelle insists her return was purely business, adding that Antony doesn't know Patrick was his father and she doesn't want him to find out about it now. Antony returns home as Mervin and Naomi are leaving, and asks what the police were doing there; Janelle tells him it was just routine questioning.
Naomi is surprised when Mervin takes her out for lunch to The Flying Fish restaurant — his mother's favourite place to eat. However, Mervin approaches lunch the same way he approaches everything else: with a ruthless efficiency, only briefly scanning the menu before ordering and asking the waitress to hurry the chef along as they're on the clock. Naomi encourages him to talk to the staff to see if they knew his mother, but Mervin is still in work mode and thinks Janelle isn't telling them the full story about what happened 18 years ago.
Francesca goes to Catherine's Bar for a drink, and admits to Catherine that she's feeling out of sorts with everything that's happened recently. Catherine encourages Francesca to open up, and Francesca says there's something she knows that she should probably tell the police — she feels it would be wrong to speak up, but also wrong to keep quiet, and she's not sure what to do. Catherine offers to help by making a call.
Back at the Flying Fish, Naomi is enjoying her lunch, but Mervin has already hoovered his up and is raring to get back to work, because he wants to consult the station duty logs from 18 years ago. He goes to settle the bill and suggests Naomi boxes the rest of her lunch up to take with her. Mervin goes to call Darlene to ask her to get the appropriate files out of the archives, but is confronted by a thoroughly exasperated Naomi (and her boxed lunch), who tells him bluntly that the point of coming to the restaurant was to reconnect with his mother, but he raced through the whole thing like it was just another item on his to-do list. She adds that if he'd stopped to really take notice of his surroundings, he would have seen a board inside with pictures of regular customers on it: including one of his mother. She reminds him that he's going to miss some really important things if he doesn't slow down, and Mervin tells her he knows that. The heat dissipates from the argument as they reach an understanding — Mervin, although he doesn't outright admit it, showing an awareness that he knows he shouldn't always act like this, and Naomi apologising for blowing up at him just now. (Some really lovely work from both Don Gilet and Shantol Jackson in this scene, by the way.)
Catherine has summoned Selwyn to her bar to meet with Francesca, who tells him that the thing she knows isn't really her secret to share — but she's been carrying it for so long. Selwyn advises her to open up, and Francesca tells him that it's about Janelle.
Back at the police station, Darlene has uncovered an entry from the duty logs concerning Janelle: she came to the police station in the morning of August 23 2007 — the day after she left the distillery — saying she wanted to report a crime. Sergeant Lily Thomson (remember her? The corrupt officer from the very first episode of Death in Paradise, played by Lenora Crichlow?) was on duty that day and started taking a statement, but Janelle changed her mind and left. Naomi wonders what crime Janelle intended to report, at which point Selwyn arrives with the answer to that question: Francesca told him that on August 22, she was leaving for the day when she found Janelle running through the distillery grounds in a state of distress and shock, having been sexually assaulted by Patrick. Selwyn says that in light of this new evidence, they need to speak to Janelle — but they need to be sensitive, so he asks for Naomi and Darlene to take the lead on this interview.
Janelle comes to the police station, having worked out that Francesca has been speaking to them. She says that she was working late on August 22, 2007 and was about to leave when Patrick appeared, saying he wanted a drink. Since he was the boss's son, she didn't feel able to refuse, but he started ranting about his father and the argument that they'd had earlier — apparently, the week before, a fire that was Patrick's fault had burned down one of the outbuildings and it was going to cost a lot of money to repair. Janelle tried to leave again, but Patrick stopped her and forced himself upon her. She says that when she heard Patrick was back and putting the distillery up for sale, she wanted to buy it so she could knock it all down and turn it into something else, erasing all of the horrible memories that it held for her. She wanted to see Patrick again, to look him in the eyes the way she couldn't 18 years ago. But it was strange when she did: he seemed like a different man, more guarded and quiet, like he was hiding something. She says that even though she spent most of her life hating Patrick, she didn't kill him because that would have made her no better than him.
Seb stops off at Catherine's Bar for a glass of water, and Catherine tells him how good Selwyn was with Francesca earlier. She thinks it's not right that he won't be there to do that any more, and Seb — via a characteristically meandering speech about his favourite character being written out of his favourite TV show when he was a kid — suggests that they could organise a petition to save Selwyn's job. Meanwhile, Mervin tells Selwyn that something is bothering him: from the start, they were working on the assumption that Patrick was the victim and one of their subjects was the perpetrator, but the opposite can also be true, as Janelle was a victim of a crime committed by Patrick. That's left him wondering why Patrick, as the perpetrator of a crime himself, would have been phoning the police.
Back at the police station, Mervin goes through the hundreds of photos that Seb took of the distillery, admitting that he doesn't entirely know what he's looking for. He finds a picture that Seb took of the inside of Patrick's minibar, and congratulates Seb on his good work because that picture might just be the key to solving the case. Meanwhile, Darlene — who has been dusting the Post-It note with Mervin's phone number on it for prints — has got a result, finding two sets of prints. One of them belongs to one of their suspects, but the other matches a guy unconnected to the case called Samson Lay. He was arrested for his involvement in a bank robbery in Guadeloupe in 2007 and later absconded, and there is still an outstanding warrant for his arrest. Seb wonders what Samson has to do with Patrick's murder, and Mervin twigs: everything.
Back at the distillery, Mervin shows the Post-It to Cora, saying that they found her fingerprints on it. He asks why she wrote his number down — was it because, as he suspects, she was planning to call him to report a crime a few days ago? Naomi says that they have just checked the body lying in the mortuary and confirmed it isn't actually Patrick Ambrose: it's Samson Lay. Mervin says she wanted to inform him that the man who had returned home claiming to be Patrick was actually an imposter, and Cora feigns ignorance — with Mervin adding that they know that the man killed here two days ago wasn't Patrick, it makes them wonder where the real Patrick is. He says he doesn't believe Patrick ever left the distillery — he thinks he is underneath the building they are standing in, and that Cora was the one who killed him. Cora protests, but the police have just brought in a specialist forensic team to determine if there is a body buried below, and are ready to bring in a digger as their next step.
Naomi asks Cora to tell them what happened on August 22, 2007 — the last night Patrick was seen at the distillery. Cornered, Cora admits to having seen Francesca and Janelle talking, which made her realise what Patrick had done to Janelle. Cora went to confront him, but he just smiled, so she grabbed the nearest thing she could reach — a bottle of rum — and whacked him with it. Patrick fell, banged his head, and never got up. As the new outbuilding was being constructed at the time, Mervin deduces that Cora dragged Patrick's body to the site so that the builders would unwittingly bury the body, and then convinced her father that Patrick had absconded. Cora says she took a suitcase, filled it with her brother's wallet, passport and clothes, and threw it into the sea. But when she heard that someone was drawing money from Patrick's account, she realised someone had stolen his identity. Samson looked reasonably like Patrick, so when he turned up, nobody knew he was an imposter apart from Cora. Mervin says that Samson was living a hand-to-mouth existence, so the opportunity to sell the distillery was too tempting to refuse, even though it was risky.
Naomi says that the police believe Cora found out about Janelle's plans to raze the distillery after buying it, and feared that Patrick's body would be found in the process. She wrote Mervin's number down because she was planning to report Samson as an imposter, but he figured out what she was up to, and warned her that if she tried anything, he'd let everyone know what she did to Patrick — so Cora felt that killing Samson was her only way out.
Everyone moves to the tasting bar to reveal how Cora committed the crime. The bottle of rum drawn by Francesca and poured by Patrick/Samson did not actually contain any methanol. Cora administered a non-lethal dose to herself, Janelle and Anthony by lacing the ice with it, leaving the poisoned ice cubes on the top of the bucket to ensure that Francesca would pick them. Samson then poured rum into everyone's glasses, causing the ice in Cora's, Janelle's and Antony's to melt and release a trace amount of methanol. At this point, Samson is the only one drinking a glass that didn't contain methanol: because he'd already been poisoned.
This is where Seb's photo of the minibar brings everything into focus (no pun intended): it was stacked with cans of soft drinks, which Samson clearly drank a lot of. During his statement, Antony confirmed that he saw "Patrick" finishing a can of soda when he arrived at the distillery, so Mervin is certain that Cora sneaked into Samson/Patrick's office shortly before Janelle and Antony arrived and spiked his drink while he was on the phone and distracted. All that was left to do was to contaminate the rum bottle after the fact, so when Cora offered everyone a second glass, she dropped the bottle top on the floor and added a few drops of methanol into the bottle while she was out of sight picking it up. While this was going on, Francesca was refreshing everyone's glasses, removing all traces of the poison — then Cora poured a second shot for Samson only, ensuring his glass would test positive for methanol and that the police would assume his first drink was poisoned just like everyone else's, since they were all poured from the same bottle, even though it was the soft drink that really killed him.
Cora apologises for what she did, saying that Samson wasn't a good man, but she didn't think he deserved to die. However, she says that Patrick did deserve to die, and she's not sorry for what she did to him. Naomi arrests Cora for Samson's murder.
With the case solved, Seb and Catherine get to work on an online petition to save Selwyn's job, while Mervin returns to the Flying Fish, trying to take it slowly the second time around. He goes to the board and looks at the picture of a smiling Dorna, and toasts his late mother with his bottle of beer before settling down to eat his dinner at a more leisurely pace while enjoying the view out towards the beach.
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