Death in Paradise season 14 episode 6: who killed Adam Carter?

Death in Paradise season 14 episode 6 is one of those occasions where we can pretty confidently say the victim had it coming, as the corpse of the week is romance scammer Adam Carter (Phoenix Rise star Tyler Fayose), who was in the process of conning his latest mark when he met his maker. Needless to say he'd made a lot of enemies, but which of them hated him enough to want him dead?

Meanwhile, new police boss Sterling Fox (Enterprice's Trieve Blackwood-Cambridge) quickly makes his presence felt on Saint Marie. Following on from someone as beloved as Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington) was always going to be a challenge, but he doesn't do himself any favours with his plans to "streamline" the team's working practises...

Read on to find out what happened in Death in Paradise season 14 episode 6...

We open at a villa where Christian Butler (Tyler Fayose — yes, we know, but wait for it) is on a video call with Danielle Bailey (The Gold's Charlotte Spencer) telling her how much she is going to love the romantic views of the sunsets. Danielle tells him it's tipping it down where she is, so anything has to be better than that. She adds that they've only been doing this for a month, but it feels so much deeper. He says he can't wait for them to be together. She tells him she will see him tomorrow, and they end the call. Christian prepares gifts for Danielle's arrival: champagne, jewelry, flowers and the like. Outside, Gary Baines (Towards Zero's Alexander Cobb) is sitting in his car and talking on his phone, reporting to someone that Christian has just gone to bed, and he'll "do it in the morning, before she gets here". Sinister!

At the airport, Delmar Lloyd (Casualty's Tony Marshall) is waiting to pick Danielle up. He recognizes it's her first time in Saint Marie as she's got "that wide-eyed look" about her. She confirms the address as Christian video calls her, saying that he just wanted to check she'd arrived safely. Suddenly, he looks distracted, saying he heard a noise. Another voice is heard, and Christian tells the man to "just put that down", then a gunshot is heard and Christian slumps to the floor. Danielle is horrified and says they need to call the police. They get into the car and Delmar tells her to try calling Christian back.

They arrive at the villa with Danielle still trying to contact Christian, who's not answering. Delmar tells her the police are coming, but they need to wait outside in case the gunman is still in there. Danielle enters the villa very cautiously, asking Christian if he is all right. She finds him lying face down on the decking by the pool, blood pooling on the back of his shirt.

DS Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson) is enjoying a relaxing day off as she chats to her mum about her plans for the day. Her doorbell goes, and from the insistent ringing she instantly knows who it is: it's DI Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet). She ends the call and wails "but it's Saturday!" to nobody in particular. She opens the door to Mervin, who has brought a back of shopping and invites himself in. He says he figured she didn't have anything planned, and after everything with "Emmental, was it?", he thought it would do her good to keep busy. He says that the Commissioner has given him the go-ahead to reopen the investigation into his mother's death, so he thought he would start by cooking her breakfast — bacon and eggs, with bacon his friend sent over from the UK — while they start looking over the case. It's a lovely idea, but it's going to have to wait, because Naomi gets a call from Officer Darlene Curtis (Ginny Holder) telling her they have a new case.

At the villa, Danielle tells Mervin and Naomi that she'd just come out of a long-term relationship and wasn't looking for anything serious, so she joined an international dating app, which is where she met Christian. They had an instant connection and decided to meet in person. Delmar states that he was hired by Christian to collect Danielle from the airport, but had no prior dealings with him before that.

Danielle explains that Christian called her at 8:45 am and suddenly there was someone else in the villa. It sounded like the person said Christian "had it coming". Delmar says that they got into the car and drove straight there, which took about 10 minutes. Mervin asks Danielle if she has any idea what was meant by Christian "had it coming", and she says no: Christian wasn't the type to get into trouble, he was a good person. With the police having finished with their questioning for now, Delmar offers to drive Danielle to a hotel. Mervin notes that Christian was obviously minted, "and where there's money, there's motive". Naomi suggests that she and Darlene give the villa a once-over.

Mervin finds Officer Sebastian Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah) lying on the deck next to the victim, and Seb explains that the bullet went straight through Christian's heart and out through his back. The paramedics think he would have died instantly. The reason why Seb is lying on the floor? Because he's noticed that the corpse is clutching a bullet in his hand. Since there's no sign of any other bullets anywhere, it's presumably the one that killed him — and if the gunshot killed Christian instantly, he wouldn't have been able to pick the bullet up himself. Therefore, the killer must have placed it there — but why?

Naomi and Darlene's search yields some fairly incriminating evidence — but about the victim, not the killer. Five different passports under different names, five different driving licences, four mobile phones and $20,000 in cash. Naomi has also been ringing around, and it turns out Christian — or whoever he is — didn't even own the villa; it's a short-term rental. Mervin phones Commissioner Selwyn Patterson to let him know, and Selwyn — who is in casual clothes and loading boxes into the boot of his car — says that he'll get the word out to see if any other islands have any intel on the victim. Catherine Bordey (Élizabeth Bourgine) approaches him, surprised to see him packing his things away so soon; Selwyn explains he has a handover meeting scheduled with the person who will be overseeing things after him. He'll be on gardening leave for the rest of the week after that, and then he's gone. Catherine laments that this is all happening far too quickly.

At the police station, Darlene has found out who the victim is: fingerprints confirm his identity as Adam Carter (there we go), born and raised in London, who served 18 months for fraud six years ago. Naomi has also been delving into Adam's laptop, and found six different dating apps with a variety of different profiles on each, where he was running multiple variations on the same scam: he's a rich guy looking for love who flies all around the world. Mervin says it's the same with Adam's phones: not many stored contacts, and they're all women. The final nail in the coffin is Adam's emails, which show him emailing the women he's been wooing, claiming that he's in a temporary short spot financially and asking to borrow money.

He's a romance scammer, in other words. Mervin says that there could be any number of women out there who would have wanted Adam dead, but Darlene reminds him that the voice Danielle heard on the video call was male. The thing is, the only male suspect they have is Delmar, and they know it can't be him because he was at the airport with Danielle when it happened. Outside the villa, Gary is lurking again, telling the person on the other end of the phone that the police are "all over it" and he's on the first flight out tomorrow.

Better late than never: Mervin is making bacon and eggs for Naomi at the shack. She suggests it's a bit late for breakfast, but he points out that the joy of bacon and eggs is that you can have it any time of the day. They tuck in, and Naomi seems reasonably impressed, if not exactly blown away, by his cooking. Mervin tells Naomi he's put posters up all around the harbour appealing for information about his mother's death. At the harbour, a man in a blue baseball cap is looking at one of the posters — but who is he?

The next day at the police station, Seb says that one of the neighbours spotted a car parked outside the villa on the morning of the murder. When he checked it out, it was registered to a local hire company who rented it to... Gary Baines. He explains that Gary arrived on the island two days ago, and is a UK-based solicitor with no criminal record. Oh, and he's Danielle's ex-fiancé. Seb called Danielle to ask about this, and she had no idea Gary was here; apparently he took the break-up badly and wouldn't accept things were over between them. Mervin congratulates Seb on a job well done, but as Mervin and Naomi head off to the airport to intercept Gary, Darlene tells Seb she's got a slightly less exciting job for him: getting a drunk to move on.

Naomi and Mervin arrive at the airport just as Gary is being dropped off by his cab. He tells them there's a reasonable explanation for him being there: he, as well as Danielle's parents, were concerned that "Christian" could have been absolutely anyone as he didn't seem to have much of a digital footprint, so Gary flew over to give him the once-over. Naomi points out that this is still very suss behavior from an ex-boyfriend, and Gary says that he thinks Danielle made a mistake ending things between them, and so do her parents.

Personally, I'm wondering if all of these alleged conversations with "Danielle's parents" were in fact between Gary and his own hand with a face drawn on it in felt pen, because he is currently giving off more red flags than the USSR, and Mervin agrees with me that this all looks like proper stalker ex behavior. Gary says he went to the villa the morning that Christian was killed because he wanted to talk to him, but someone else was already there with him: a woman, who sounded English and angry. Not wanting to intrude, he got back into his car and drove back to the hotel to have breakfast. Mervin and Naomi wonder who this mystery woman was.

Meaningful segue to the Saint Marie Fishing Pier where Seb is trying to rouse Kelly Herbert (McDonald & Dodds star Tala Gouveia), who has passed out drunk on the steps. He manages to pull her up to her feet, at which point she realizes that he's a police officer and gets very nervous. She declines to tell him who she is or what she's doing there, but Seb notices that she has a picture of Adam as the lock screen on her phone. Trying to get past him, she pushes Seb into the sea and makes a run for it. Seb appeals to the passers-by to stop her, but they don't intervene.

Back at the station, a rather damp Seb tells everyone that Kelly was acting suspiciously, and Darlene says she believes Kelly was the woman that Gary overheard arguing with Adam the morning he was killed: a local taxi company confirmed that they drove a British woman matching her description to the villa. Mervin and Naomi go to the Sunny Bay Hotel, where she's staying, and a rather embarrassed Kelly says that Adam went by the name of Andy Johnson when they were messaging. They dated a few years ago: video calls at first, then occasional weekends together. He ended up taking $20,000 from her — all of her savings, and a bit of money she inherited from her nan. She says it happened in stages: one time he said he had a deal going through and there was a shortfall, another time he said he needed it to pay back angry men he owed money to. But when she had no more money left, he ghosted her. Kelly admits to going to the villa, but says she came here to forgive Adam, not to kill him. She wanted to help him get his debts sorted so they could start over as a couple — but he told her he didn't love her and he never had. She says she left, went to a bar and started drinking.

Back at the police station, Darlene says she's been through all the contacts on Adam's phones and laptops, but none of the people he was talking to — apart from Danielle and Kelly — are currently on the island, according to immigration. Naomi has traced CCTV of Kelly at the bar, where she entered at 8:33am and left at 10:18am. The barman confirms she was in the room with him the whole time, so she can't have been at Adam's villa to shoot him at 8:45am. Seb, meanwhile, has confirmed with hotel staff that Gary Baines was eating breakfast between 8:30am and 9:30am. And with Danielle and Delmar watching the murder on the video call at the airport, that makes zero suspects who could have been in the right place at the right time. The lab have confirmed the bullet found in Adam's hand is the same calibre as the one that killed him, but there were no traces of blood on it, so the killer must have wiped it clean. Selwyn arrives and informs them that he wants to take them all out for a drink, as it's Sunday night and they've all worked all weekend.

In his room at home, Delmar looks at a family picture on his bedside table, and then opens his bedside drawer, where a suspicious amount of cash is stashed.

Meanwhile, the gang are all at Catherine's Bar, where everyone is laughing at Kelly managing to push Seb into the water despite being almost a foot shorter than him. While Mervin and Selwyn go up to get more drinks, Catherine asks the others if Selwyn has told them that his successor arrives tomorrow for the handover: he has not told them this. Everyone agrees that it's too soon, and Catherine says that she thinks this evening is Selwyn's way of saying goodbye to his team.

At the bar, Selwyn tells Mervin that after tomorrow, he won't be around as much, so he'll be on his own with the Dorna Bray case — but he's happy to help out unofficially if needed. As they take the drinks back over, the same man in the blue baseball cap from earlier is watching from a distance.

You know how sometimes you can take against someone from the very first moment you meet them? Well, the next morning we are introduced to Selwyn's replacement, Sterling Fox, as he zooms through the streets of Saint Marie in his flash car wearing a flash suit, basically establishing him right from the off as someone who is the very opposite of Selwyn: all style, no substance.

He oozes his way into Selwyn's office and proceeds to patronize him about how "cute" the island is. He goes on to say that it's an honor to meet Selwyn, who's apparently known in the Jamaica HQ as a living legend; Selwyn responds, rather archly, by saying it makes you wonder why they're getting rid of him in that case. Selwyn offers to give Sterling the tour, and then introduce him to the team.

Naomi and Mervin join Seb outside Delmar's house to explain that the money found in Adam's safe was counterfeit. Also, Delmar's prints were all over it, which means he lied when he claimed he'd never met the victim. Inside, Seb finds $20,000 in Delmar's bedroom, and Delmar confesses that this is real money: he switched the cash stashed in Adam's safe with forgeries. He also admits that he's been helping out with Adam's scams for the last few months, as Adam was paying Delmar to drive him and his various women around. Delmar explains that his granddaughter is going to college in the US, so he thought he could help with paying her fees. Mervin wonders if Adam was onto Delmar stealing from him, but Delmar insists that Adam never found out what he had been doing.

At the police station, Darlene has already had the misfortune of meeting Sterling, and as the others arrive back, she introduces him (as "this young gentleman", which is a nicely spiky way to do it). Sterling tells them that he wants to get some one-to-one sessions in the diary, when he's on the island every other Wednesday, as he'd like to streamline their working methodology to cut out the waste. (I can think of a fairly good way to cut out the waste, and it involves this guy cutting his visits back from "every other Wednesday" to "never ever again".) Naomi infers that he's primarily here to cut costs, and he dances around that idea in a way that suggests it's entirely true. Meanwhile, Darlene has an update on the case: she's found that one of Adam's previous victims was a woman called Samantha Colby, who ended up declaring herself bankrupt. Samantha went to school with Danielle Bailey, and if their socials are anything to go by, they're still good friends.

Mervin goes to speak to Danielle, who says she didn't know about Sam and Adam. Danielle admits that Sam had become distant from her in the last year and she'd never really known why, but now it makes sense. Naomi joins them, having just spoken to Sam, who corroborated Danielle's account of events. Sam also said that she feels guilty for Adam targeting Danielle, because she talked about Danielle when she and Adam were together, and he presumably used that knowledge when he was scamming her. As Mervin and Naomi come to the conclusion that they're no closer to the truth, Mervin decides it's time for them to bring the case to life.

Mervin and Naomi base themselves at the police station, while Darlene and Seb are at the villa, keeping in touch via video call so they can re-enact the circumstances of Adam's death. Before Darlene and Seb can get things underway, however, Seb's interrupted by the arrival of Kelly, who has brought flowers for Adam in an attempt to gain closure over his death. She recognizes Seb as the man she pushed into the sea, and apologizes.

Meanwhile, Mervin is getting frustrated at the lack of action, so Naomi suggests they start without Seb and just have Darlene pretend that the killer is coming in and firing the gun. Mervin insists that they need to hear the killer — but then he realizes that maybe they don't need to hear the killer at all. He asks Darlene to show him the villa so he can check something on the terrace — and something he sees in the footage clues him in as to who did it and how, and possibly even why. But he needs to make a phone call first — he also needs Naomi to get all of Adam's mobile phones to the lab because he's pretty sure something important was deleted from one of them, and he needs Darlene and Seb to get themselves down to the courthouse to get a search warrant.

The suspects gather at the villa, where Mervin holds up one of Adam's phones and explains that it holds evidence that reveals how one of them managed to kill him without being anywhere near him when it happened. It was something that Kelly said that tipped him off: the way she talked about Adam using subterfuge to get her to part with money, and implying that mysterious bad people were out to get him. That's what Danielle saw playing out on the video call, because there was no intruder and no shooting. What she saw on their phone call was a hoax staged by Adam: he used his Bluetooth speaker to play a recording of himself — using his native London accent, not the Caribbean one that he used with Danielle — portraying the "intruder" on the call. Adam's plan involved Danielle arriving there, finding him alive, at which point he'd explain that he owed money to some dangerous people so that Danielle would feel compelled to lend it to him.

Naomi brings out the bullet that they found in Adam's hand, and Mervin says they've spent the whole case assuming the killer put it into his hand — but not knowing why. However, it wasn't actually the one that killed him; it was one that he was keeping as a prop for his scam, to show to Danielle as evidence that someone had shot at him. But someone really did shoot him: Delmar. He'd been working with Adam for a few months, and he was involved in the scams, one of his jobs being pretending to call the police whenever one of Adam's victims thought he'd been shot. Except this time, he really did phone the police, because he knew Adam wouldn't be found alive.

When they arrived at the villa, Delmar purposely stayed back, knowing that love and compassion for Christian would make Danielle go inside to check on him, even if that meant putting herself in danger. As Danielle walked through the villa slowly, in case the killer was still there; Delmar ran down the side of the property much faster than her and fatally shot Adam Carter on the terrace. By the time Danielle got there, Adam was dead and Delmar was already running back down the way he came. After finding Adam's body, Danielle went back to Delmar at the entrance, where he told her to wait there for the police — he then went over to where Adam's body was lying and deleted the recording, putting the phone back in the safe so that when the police arrive, the only phone they would find Adam with was the one he called Danielle on. Delmar recovered the bullet that he shot Adam with and removed it from the scene.

All that remains is why Delmar killed Adam: earlier, Mervin spoke to Delmar's daughter about how much his granddaughter meant to him, and he theorises that the more Delmar assisted in Adam's scams, the more he started to wonder how he would feel if Adam did that to someone he loved. Naomi adds that when they spoke to Delmar's daughter, she told them that his granddaughter isn't going to college in the US, so they think he actually took the money to give it back to the women Adam had been conning as a way of making amends. But Delmar realised that wasn't enough, as Adam would carry on conning women — so he decided to stop him permanently.

Over at Government House, Sterling thanks Selwyn for everything he's done over the last 51 years, and wondering with fairly fake humility whether he'll be up to the job of taking over from him. Sterling shakes Selwyn's hand and wishes him all the best for the future, and with that, the long and storied career of Commissioner Selwyn Patterson comes to a fairly muted end. There's not even a cake! And to make matters worse, Selwyn discovers that Sterling has left a mark on his car door where he carelessly hit it with the door of his own car.

At a bar by the harbour, Mervin tells Naomi that his posters appealing for information about Dorna have been up for three days, but nobody has called. Naomi tells him it was worth a try. They go inside, and Mervin orders two beers. Naomi suggests doing a full search of Dorna's house, processing it for fingerprints and doing door-to-door inquiries on the street. Mervin says the thing that really gets him is that everyone who knew his mum talked about how good and kind she was, so he can't understand why someone would want to harm her. Oh, and the barman who's avidly listening to this entire conversation from a few feet away? That's Roy Palmer (Detectorists' Gerard Horan) — the man in the blue baseball cap!