Death In Paradise season 13 episode 5 saw Marlon Pryce (Tahj Miles) taking centre stage: not only did the case of the week call up memories of his old life as a petty criminal, but Marlon also had to consider his future plans when his little sister Jocelyn (Miai Leonie Phillip) was offered an incredible opportunity.
Meanwhile, Neville (Ralf Little) finally came face-to-face with his online fan, "Sunset_Chaser" — and discovered that it was someone he already knew!
Here's what happened in Death In Paradise season 13 episode 5...
Ray Saunders (Holby City's Guy Henry) is interrupted in his meditation by a business call, and makes himself a drink while chatting to his pet parrot, Hoagie. Meanwhile at the Pryce household, Jocelyn has just received an letter offering her a scholarship to a prestigious school. Marlon's proud of her, but as he re-reads the letter later, the fact that the school is in Jamaica gives Marlon pause for thought. He's distracted by a phone call from Ray, who is calling him in distress, saying that he's at home and seriously hurt. Marlon makes his way to Ray's house and finds him lying on the deck outside in a pool of blood. As Marlon places a call to Neville to inform him of a suspected dead body, Marlon gets a whack right in the chops and is knocked out cold.
Neville, Naomi (Shantol Jackson) and Darlene (Ginny Holder) arrive at the scene some time later to find Marlon conscious with a banging headache but otherwise apparently unharmed. Marlon explains to the others that he used to work for Ray back in the day when he was usually on the other side of the law, but he cut all ties with him after joining the police. Given that, Marlon's not really sure why Ray called him specifically when he was in trouble — they weren't particularly friends even back then, although Ray was generally a good guy who looked out for him. Marlon knows his assailant was a man, but didn't get a good enough look to give a more detailed description.
As the team get to work analysing the crime scene, Neville finds a bullet embedded in the glass of a door, and notes that the parrot witnessed the murder. Darlene jokes that it would be really easy if the parrot could tell them who the killer was. (Darlene, you will get your wish, sort of, in about 40 minutes.) Ray placed a call to Marlon at 6:30pm, and according to the paramedics the shot would have killed him pretty quickly, so they have an approximate time of death. Neville's still baffled as to why Ray phoned Marlon as opposed to, say, calling the emergency services and getting an ambulance there in time to save him.
After being the medical all-clear, Marlon gives the team more information on Ray — he has a son called Max who's currently in prison in Guadeloupe, and there's also a guy called Booker StJean, who's Ray's right-hand man. Marlon's keen to visit Booker, but Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington) insists that Marlon take the day off to recuperate and offers to drive him home. On the way, Marlon broaches a sensitive subject with the Commissioner — the prospect of handing in his notice. Marlon explains that Jocelyn is a bright kid who's been handed an incredible opportunity, and that his mother can't go with her to Jamaica because she needs to stay in Saint Marie and care for their grandmother. He has contacted the police force in Jamaica and they don't have any openings, so he's planning to do bar work or whatever he can get until a position opens up. He apologises to the Commissioner for letting him down, and Selwyn assures him that he's done nothing of the sort — Marlon's doing the right thing for his sister, but Selwyn will be sad to lose him from the team.
Neville and Naomi go to interview Booker (Bloods star Kevin 'KG' Garry), who tells them that he wants to help, but he doesn't know who did it or why. Neville asks him why Ray would have called Marlon after being shot — wouldn't it have made sense to call Booker himself? Booker admits that it's odd, and when asked about his alibi, says that he was at home alone, but that he had absolutely no reason to kill Ray.
Back at the station, there has been a development on the parrot front — despite Darlene's best efforts to find a neighbour to care for the bird, Hoagie is now a temporary resident of Honoré Police Station. (Just throwing this idea out there: a spinoff where Hoagie the parrot and Harry the lizard team up to fight crime in the animal kingdom. We'd watch it!) On the case front, Darlene reports that the last sighting of Ray was at 6pm, buying a bottle of rum. He called Marlon at 6:30pm and was dead by the time Marlon arrived at 6:50pm, giving them a 20-minute window when the crime is likely to have taken place.
Meanwhile, Booker is getting a call from Max Saunders (Before We Die's Mark Strepan) — who, it appears, is not in prison in Guadeloupe but very much free and skulking in the shadows around Saint Marie — in which they both talk cryptically about knowing what each other did and agreeing to keep their mouths shut.
Marlon meets the rest of the team at Catherine's bar to break the news that he's leaving, and they're all clearly gutted — although Catherine (Élizabeth Bourgine) attempts to look on the bright side by reminding everyone what a great opportunity this will be for Jocelyn. At the bar, Selwyn confesses to her his concerns about Marlon having to give up his job, because he knows how hard Marlon worked to turn his life around. He fears that if Marlon has to wait too long for a police job, he could end up slipping back into old habits to make ends meet. Selwyn has tried calling the police commissioner over there to pull in a favour, but it went nowhere.
The next day at the police station, Darlene catches Neville looking giddy while on his phone — turns out that he and "Chloe", aka "Sunset_Chaser", the fan who's been commenting on his blog, have progressed from swapping blog comments to texting. Apparently she's a solicitor in Leeds who, like Neville, is also a big quizzer. Darlene asks if he's requested for a picture yet — she wastes no time, does our Darlene — and Neville admits that he's already asked. By the end of the day, however, no pic has come and Neville's starting to worry that Chloe has gone cold on him, but Darlene encourages him to give her a chance.
Inside, Neville asks Marlon for his thoughts on Booker, and Marlon says that Ray and Booker were always really tight — though admittedly his intel is about three years out of date by this point. Marlon and Darlene head off to conduct a search of Booker's apartment, while Naomi arrives with news of a potential second suspect: according to Ray's cleaner, Max turned up at Ray's house a few days before he was killed, demanding money that he was owed and generally behaving in a threatening manner.
Neville and Naomi pay Max a visit, and Max — quite the charmer — blithely admits to threatening his dad and says that, if anything, he doesn't think he took it far enough. He even goes as far as to say he might have wanted to kill his dad — but he can prove he didn't do it, because he was at home from 6-7pm, meeting with his probation officer. The probation officer backs up Max's alibi, so despite the fact that Max is a nasty piece of work, Naomi and Neville grudgingly cross him off their suspects list.
Darlene and Marlon's search of Booker's apartment hasn't turned up anything of note — but as they're leaving, Marlon stands on a loose manhole cover and, when they look inside, they find both a terrible smell (normal) and a bag containing a gun and a pair of gloves (slightly less normal). Booker, well, books it and manages to give Darlene and Marlon the slip. Back at the station, Neville and Darlene notice that both the gun and the gloves are covered in an unknown sticky substance. Marlon offers to speak to his old crew and see if they have any fresh info on Ray and Booker. Marlon is surprised when he learns that Max is out of prison, but has some idea why he's mad at Ray: three years ago, Max was caught by the Guadeloupe border force with a bag of cocaine, doing a pick-up for his dad. Apparently Ray was dipping his toe into the world of drug dealing after his pirate DVD market stopped being profitable (that's the streaming era for you) — but when Max got caught, he took the rap for his dad and was presumably expecting to be rewarded for doing it. So the team are left with two suspects: Max, who had lots of motive but also a watertight alibi, and Booker, who has no alibi but no motive. Neville wishes that Hoagie the parrot could pipe up and tell them whodunnit, and Marlon confirms that Hoagie can talk — but he can only repeat the things he hears Ray say. (Yes, this will be important later.)
After work, Naomi pays Marlon and Naomi a visit at home to congratulate Jocelyn on her scholarship — and also to tell Marlon that she's really going to miss him. Marlon says that the fresh start will be good for him, even if he has to wait for a position to come up with the Jamaican police. Naomi knows that he's not being completely honest with her, and Marlon admits that he could have ended up in the same position as Max — literally, because Ray initially asked him to do the drugs pickup. Despite knowing it was a bad idea, Marlon was tempted because he really needed the money, but then Ray got Max to do it while Marlon was still making up his mind. He's realised how close he was to going down a very different path in life, because becoming a police officer saved him. He feels selfish, because as much as he wants to do the right thing for Jocelyn, he doesn't want to give up the police either — being a police officer is who he is now. Concerned, Naomi places a call to the Commissioner asking if there is anything they can do to find a police job for Marlon in Jamaica. He tells her that he shares her concerns, but that she needs to focus her attentions on the murder investigation, and ends the call. What Naomi doesn't see is that the Commissioner is outside the headquarters of West Jamaica Police, meeting with JP Hooper (Tobi Bakare) — formerly a Sergeant in Saint Marie and now a Detective Sergeant in Jamaica — to see if they can pull some strings for Marlon.
Naomi meets Neville and Marlon at Neville's beach hut, where Marlon's old contacts have come up trumps: apparently before the drugs bust, Max was showing signs of wanting to get his dad out of the way so he could take over the family business, so Ray deliberately tipped off the Border Police to remind his son who's boss. They've also got evidence that Max left Ray a threatening voicemail the day that he died, so Neville and Naomi pay Max another visit — but Max reminds them that he has an alibi proving he was nowhere near when Ray was shot. After they leave, Max gets a call from Booker, saying he's going to the police to confess.
Back at the station, Darlene has been going through Ray's finances and has learned that he's been having serious money troubles for the last three years. Naomi, meanwhile, has the lab results from the gun and gloves found in the manhole — forensics prove that both the gun and gloves were used in Ray's murder, the only prints on either item belong to Booker, and the sticky substance on both the gun and the gloves is glucose. Everything seems to be pointing to Booker's guilt — but as Booker is making his way to the police station, Max is lying in wait in his car and rams directly into Booker's moped.
Either Max is a bit incompetent on the homicide front or this hit-and-run was only ever intended to spook Booker into keeping quiet, because Booker survives the crash. Booker is certainly unwilling to talk to the police by the time they arrive, and Naomi wonders if perhaps Max and Booker were working together — but Marlon thinks this is very unlikely, based on what he knows about both of them. The team decide to call it a day, but Neville and Marlon return to the police station to feed Hoagie. Marlon is still pre-occupied with what exactly is going on between Max and Booker, and Neville takes the opportunity to compliment Marlon on his conduct during the case — despite his connection to the victim, and the fact that he was assaulted by one of the suspects, he hasn't let it cloud his judgement. Neville asks Marlon if he wants a beer, and jokingly offers Hoagie one as well. Hoagie responds by croaking "fancy a cocktail?", and Marlon remembers that Hoagie only repeats things that he heard Ray say. This reminds Marlon that Max was always making cocktails, and looking back at the crime scene photo, he's noticed that something crucial is missing. Neville knows what Marlon's referring to — and he now knows who killed Ray.
Neville and Marlon pay Booker a visit in the hospital. Marlon tells him that they know Booker was the one who assaulted Marlon at Ray's house — but that it was Max who killed Ray. So here's what happened: when Marlon arrived at the villa, Ray wasn't actually dead — the whole thing was an elaborate ruse staged by Booker and Ray to fake Ray's death. The glucose on the gun and the gloves came from a fake blood mix made of corn syrup and red dye, and Ray had an identical version of the shirt that he was wearing, which Booker shot a hole through, deliberately getting the bullet lodged in the glass door to create a suitably convincing crime scene. Then Ray called Marlon, because he needed a police officer to witness the scene. Then, after Marlon turned up and saw Ray on the floor in the distance, Booker knocked him out to give Ray time to get up and leg it — the plan being that when Marlon came to and the rest of the police arrive, they'd assume the killer had disposed of the body while he was unconscious.
Booker admits that Ray had a boat moored with some cash stashed on it, and the idea was to flee to another island, where Booker would eventually join him once the heat was off. The last part of the plan was for Booker to plant the gun at the guesthouse where Max was staying. (Not that we're saying Max doesn't deserve everything he gets, but framing your son for a crime he didn't commit on two separate occasions is not going to win you many Father of the Year awards, is it?) But shortly after knocking Marlon out, Booker heard a gun being fired — and when he returned to the fake "crime scene", he saw Max fleeing with a gun and realised it was now a very real crime scene.
Of course, this means that Ray's time of death was later than the police had assumed, meaning that Max's alibi no longer holds up. And the crucial clue that helped Neville and Marlon figure all of this out was a missing cocktail shaker from Ray's bar — which Max had taken with him, because that's where the second bullet ended up. At this point, Naomi calls to alert Neville to the fact that Max has absconded, and Marlon realises that Max is probably trying to use Ray's boat to flee, so the team race to find him, catching him just as he's getting into the boat. Marlon heroically tackles Max in the water and arrests him for Ray's murder. Neville opens Max's holdall and finds the real murder weapon, plus the incriminating cocktail shaker. (There's a sentence you don't get to write every day.) Neville takes a call from the Commissioner, who wants them all to join at Catherine's bar, because he's got a surprise for Marlon.
That surprise is JP, who's come to Saint Marie for a visit to tell Marlon that after he and the Commissioner had a little word with the Superintendent in Jamaica, and JP put in a very good word for Marlon, to the extent that there is a job there waiting for him. Marlon thanks JP, who says this was all the Commissioner's doing, so Marlon goes over to thank him very sincerely for everything he's done, and they hug. (What? No, we're not crying, shut up.)
Sunset_Chaser is revealed!
Darlene asks Neville if there's been any word from Chloe, and Neville says there has not — maybe she was hiding something after all. At that moment a taxi pulls up at the bar and a woman gets out — Neville's ex-girlfriend, Zoe (Hullraisers star Taj Atwal). According to Neville, they broke up shortly before he came to Saint Marie and haven't spoken since. Neville goes over to see her and asks what she's doing there, and Zoe admits to being Chloe, aka Sunset_Chaser. Dun-dun-dunnnn!
