Who killed Anais' father in A Remarkable Place to Die?
Charles Mallory's killer was convicted years before his daughter came home, and she spends the whole first season convinced the court stopped one name too early.
A Remarkable Place to Die is a New Zealand crime drama created by Philly de Lacey and written with John Banas, set in Queenstown. Season 1, four 90-minute episodes, aired on TVNZ in late 2024 and reached American viewers on Acorn TV this year. Chelsie Preston Crayford plays Anaïs Mallory, a Sydney homicide detective who moves back home after her sister Lynne dies in a road accident. Rebecca Gibney plays her mother, Veronica, and Charles Jazz Terrier plays Luke Staunton, Anaïs' former fiancé, now married to her former best friend, Maja.
The version everyone accepted
The official story is short, and in the finale Anaïs tells it herself, in a scene with Lynne, who makes her say it out loud. "There was a meth lab in one of the rental properties," Anaïs says. "Dad found out about it." Charles went over to confront the people running it, there was a fight, and he fell.
A man named Alan Souter went to prison for it. The case, an investigator reminds her, was "thoroughly canvassed in the trial." Anaïs doesn't accept that it ends with Souter, and she has been phoning him in prison twice a week for a month to get him to say who else was involved.
The men who could have talked
Souter is finally ready to name names in the finale, on one condition: he wants to be moved to another prison first. The transfer doesn't come through in time.
By then, the people who knew how the operation worked are being removed one by one:
- Doug Snapes, the operation's meth cook, has already been thrown out of a helicopter.
- Alan Souter is stabbed in prison before he can talk.
- Len Snapes, Doug's brother and a cook himself, is the one who stabs him. He has just been locked up for killing the man who killed Doug.
When the news of Souter's death reaches the people around Anaïs, nobody pretends it's a coincidence.
"Looks like someone was trying to shut him up."
Who was paying
Anaïs gets there through the money. Doug Snapes kept a ledger, and she gets hold of its missing pages. They show a run of payments that went to Doug and passed through him to Alan Souter, profits from the drug operation. The ledger names the money man only by his initials, "PB."
PB stands for Pretty Boy, an old nickname of Luke Staunton's.
What Luke admits
Confronted with the paper trail, Luke stops pretending. "We made a lot of money, Anais, and it was so... fucking easy," he says. Then he tells her what happened to her father.
Charles had found one of their labs, and they had been paying him to stay quiet. Then he wanted more money. The finale shows the call that followed, with Luke telling Souter how to handle it.
"It's not that hard, Alan. Just dissuade him from asking for more."
Souter's idea of dissuading him is a beating at the edge of a drop, and Charles goes over it. Luke's defense is that the death was never the plan. "I didn't have him killed," he tells Anaïs. "Souter went rogue on me."
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So Alan Souter killed Charles Mallory, and Luke Staunton sent him. Anaïs arrests Luke on the spot, for producing class-A drugs and for "complicity in the murder of Charles Mallory and Alan Souter."
Why Charles wanted more
The reason for the extra money comes from Anaïs' mother earlier in the same episode. Veronica has avoided one of the family's properties for years, and she finally tells her daughter why.
"Your father wasn't always the man that you think he was," Veronica says.
Charles had been staying there with a mistress. Luke makes the connection for himself in the confrontation, sneering about Charles' "rather expensive hobbies" and asking Anaïs what the woman's name was.
The ledger holds one more entry Anaïs can't let go: a payment of $50,000 the day after Lynne died, to someone recorded as "GL." Luke says it stands for "the gym lady," next door to a friend of Anaïs'. Minutes later, Anaïs is called to the Queenstown festival, where Maja is lying dead on the dance floor.
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