Elsbeth Season 2 Episode 11: Tiny Town

Iris is a 24/7 video portal linking a small plaza in Manhattan with a tiny Scottish fishing village, and Angus (Ioan Gruffudd) spends much of his day beside it, playing mandolin and writing songs over coffee from the cafe owner Fiona. The two of them have been following a couple they nickname the Lovers, who meet repeatedly in the plaza, the young woman arriving with a rose each time. On the night in question the woman - cosmetics researcher Hayley Ritter - waits dejectedly with a heart-shaped box of chocolates no one claims.

A different man arrives and loudly confronts her, the argument turns physical, she falls to the ground as he leaves, and she appears to choke to death while Angus can only gesticulate at tourists whose backs are turned.

Angus and Elsbeth move quickly from miming through the portal to speaking on the phone, and he shares everything he saw, including a description of the man Hayley had been meeting for the police sketch artist. Dr. Cameron brings the autopsy results to the precinct in person: Hayley's death was caused by a fentanyl overdose. Elle-Meme security chief Howard Thorwald says she had tested positive for fentanyl in a routine random drug test earlier that week and that he had to report the instant-firing offense to HR.

Her boyfriend Charles rejects the idea outright - the couple were working through a rocky period in couples therapy while pursuing IVF - though he had also suspected her of infidelity because she used an encrypted messaging app and had turned off location sharing.

The man Charles suspected is an investigative journalist named George Singh, who used encrypted messaging only to protect sources and told his partner nothing before publication. His partner says he dashed off to meet a source on the day of Hayley's murder, and his body is found in a park not far from the plaza, dead of a fentanyl overdose on the eve of filing a big expose. Angus then recalls that he missed ten seconds of the killing because he turned back to help Fiona with coffee spilled on his notebook; the Murray sisters, his town's pair of fractious know-it-alls, saw it instead.

They describe a man whose face was hidden by a surgical mask that he lowered to cough or sneeze on Hayley, and they squabble over the tartan of his scarf - Murray of Atholl, Mackenzie, or Robertson Hunting, all of them in the blue-and-green family.

Elsbeth takes a harder discrepancy to Thorwald at Elle-Meme: Hayley's recent IVF bloodwork was free of drugs, the fentanyl-positive result came a day later, and the date on the report is not clear either. Alone in his office, Elsbeth identifies Thorwald as the murderer when she sees his jacket and blue-and-green plaid scarf and finds a surgical mask in a pocket.

Hayley had been a whistleblower ready to raise the alarm about a carcinogen in the concealer she was developing; Thorwald framed her for drug use, used one of Elle-Meme's mini perfume atomizers to spray fentanyl in her face, and stole the box of chocolates, which also held a thumb drive of company secrets meant for George. Elsbeth's phone battery is nearly dead and she cannot raise the alarm, but Angus called the NYPD switchboard to say that he and the Murray sisters had spotted the murderer and that Elsbeth was in that office, and Wagner and Kaya arrive to arrest him.

Elsbeth cannot reach Angus to thank him - his phone is off and Fiona does not know where he is - until he turns up in New York in person, waving off her concern about the Edinburgh gigs because music is a hobby: his job is firefighter. Captain Wagner reveals he secretly took five weeks of dance lessons so his wife Claudia would have the partner she deserves for their anniversary, and Kaya declines Cameron's offer of a cupcake he brought home from work, saying a morgue cupcake is definitely not the vibe and proposing a bodega run for ice cream and dish soap.

The identification rests on three things Elsbeth can hold on to. Hayley's recent IVF bloodwork was drug-free while the Elle-Meme report showing fentanyl is dated a day later - and the date on that report is not clear. The witnesses in Scotland put the attacker in a surgical mask and a blue-and-green tartan scarf. Thorwald has both in his office. The method follows from his motive: Hayley was about to expose a carcinogen in the concealer she was developing, so he framed her for drug use, sprayed fentanyl in her face with one of Elle-Meme's mini perfume atomizers, and took the chocolates containing the thumb drive meant for George Singh, whose own death was staged as the same kind of overdose.

Elsbeth is rescued rather than rescuing herself: her phone battery was too low to raise the alarm, and it is Angus's call to the NYPD switchboard - reporting that he and the Murray sisters had spotted the murderer and that Elsbeth was in that office - that sends Wagner and Kaya in.

Unresolved inside the episode: Elsbeth cannot reach Angus afterwards, his phone is off and Fiona does not know where he is; the tartan itself is never settled, with the witnesses and a passerby naming three different blue-and-green patterns; and the episode does not say what becomes of Charles, whose suspicion of Hayley is disproven but whose aggressive confrontation with her was the last thing Angus saw before the killing.