‘The Madame Blanc Mysteries’ Season 5 Debuts with “Fountains”
Jean White: "I've had tea with a serial killer!"
Welcome back to Acorn TV’s sunny, picturesque French town of Saint Victoire, where the murder rate keeps antique dealer/police consultant Jean White (Sally Lindsay) on her toes. We last saw Jean and her squeeze Dom Hayes (Steve Edge) at their engagement, and Season 5 will conclude with their Christmas wedding. (Finally!)
At La Couronne restaurant, ex-pats Jeremy (Robin Askwith) and Judith Lloyd James (Sue Holderness) tell Jean and Dom about a garden improvement that will take them a tiny step closer to their own Paris World Fair. The transformation of their pergola will feature “personalized roses and the fragrance of us.” (Or, as Dom puts it, love rooted in compost.) But unwelcome change is taking place in the town square, where the fountain will be demolished and rebuilt bigger and better. Grumbling ensues, particularly from Dom, whose day job is driving a cab, and from Gloria Beaushaw (Sue Vincent), proprietor of the local car repair business, who both anticipate weeks of traffic diversions. Who needs a bigger fountain, anyway? The mayor, Stéphanie Arquette, ran for election on a conservation platform, and this is unexpected and unwelcome.
Dom receives a call from his daughter, Claudie (Ella Dale), that lasts only a few seconds, and for a moment he looks concerned. Next, he has to say an emotional goodbye to his beloved old car, Madeleine, which will be replaced the next day by a car already named Geraldine and lovingly restored by Gloria.
The next day Dom delivers a parcel to the Lloyd-Jameses, some paint samples from London for the pergola. He was charged €300 at customs and suggests that next time the couple ask Jean to handle their delivery, since she has a service that offers competitive pricing. But something is wrong – the fountain is not running.
We viewers saw a woman attacked in an alley by an unknown man during the night, and now her body is inside it. More shocking: it’s the mayor, Stéphanie Arquette.
Chief of Police André Caron (Alex Gaumond) has gotten used to Jean simply refusing to take no for an answer when it comes to helping with his cases; the two debate the strange rash on the mayor’s legs. Her last phone call was from Eddie Day, and Jean calls her flamboyant gangster frenemy John Marsden (Stephen Bailey) for more information. After gushing about a statuette he recently acquired of Victorian poisoner William Palmer, John tells her Eddie Day is a builder best known for being a loan shark and all-round villain.
Jean and André interview the mayor’s husband, Roland Arquette (Benjamin Duc), who is shaken and tearful. Jean already knows him as a client, and he begs to return the antique cabinet he bought as a gift for Stéphanie. He admits his wife had ambitious plans for the town and applied for a government grant, and assured they would be a shoo-in. Unfortunately, she spent the whole amount before finding out it was denied, and had to borrow money from Eddie at a ruinous interest rate.
André calls a colleague at another station to find Eddie (Justin Moorhouse), and has an unsuccessful interview with him. Full of jokes, Eddie claims he was home last night with his best friend, a Rottweiler who doesn’t give interviews. But, as André tells Jean, Eddie is the last person who could benefit from her murder, as she had already agreed to repay her debt in full now the grant money was in her hands.
Jean helps Gloria transport a huge antique pot to the Lloyd-James’ chateau, where Dom is already on hand to start painting the pergola. But for the moment, the Lloyd-Jameses have tasked him with digging up some flowers nearby. However, when Jean arrives at the pergola site, she finds Dom sick, his forearms covered with a rash, and being fed brandy by his hosts. Gloria, who claimed she didn’t know anything about plants, identifies them as Angel Trumpets (Brugmansia), a South American native with a gorgeous scent and highly poisonous.
After settling Dom on a shady bench with water and paracetamol, Jean realizes the rash on his forearms is identical to the mayor’s, but pergola builder Louise Gagne (Jessica Morali) is adamant she did not visit yesterday.
Jean’s next stop is to tell Roland Arquette she has found a buyer for the cabinet. He invites her in for tea, and she compliments him on the brew and the furnishings, and points out the cabinet’s important original features. He tells Jean she reminds him of his mother, but before things can get really weird, she admires a photograph of the fountain when it was new. In tears again, he leaves the room, giving Jean the opportunity to snoop. She finds an original contract between the late mayor and Simone to rebuild the fountain.
Back at the station, André suggests Stéphanie Arquette visit the Lloyd-James’s chateau the day before, and when Louise found that the job had been awarded to Eddie Day, she murdered her. Louise has struggled against gender discrimination in her profession for years.
Under questioning, Louise admits she pushed Stéphanie into the flowers, but didn’t kill her. However, André believes she is guilty and imprisons her until the CCTV can be checked. (Didn’t Louise, a builder, know that a seventeenth-century chateau, by law, had to have CCTV cameras?) When he and Jean are alone, he admits he sorta maybe lied about the CCTV because he needed to keep Louise for another 24 hours. He’s also concerned that Barbara (Olivia Caffrey), who had murdered Jean’s husband Rory in Season 1, still holds a grudge against Jean, and fears she is in danger.
As Jean and Gloria chat over a drink in La Couronne, the Lloyd-Jameses escort Dom, wobbly but improving, to join them. Outside, Dom calls Claudie back but is sent to voicemail, where he identifies himself as Mr. Cole. (He apparently suspects Claudie may be under some sort of threat at home.)
Jean updates everyone on the latest news in the case, and Louise is the only suspect. The Lloyd-James are infuriated, as she’s their builder. Roland Arquette had an alibi, claiming he was playing Scrabble with his mum all night, but Gloria, who recently worked on his car, says he was lying because it was parked at the square at that time. Judith tells them that Roland Arquette’s original last name was Mercier, but he changed it when he married Stéphanie. His first wife disappeared mysteriously twenty years ago, and he was hoping the new marriage and new name would erase it.
Sure enough, that night a man dressed in black is found digging in the fountain – it’s Roland – and admits to André and Jean that he was trying to retrieve his first wife’s bones, which he’d hidden in the fountain after murdering her. Already emotionally unstable from his current wife accidentally disturbing the resting place of his first one, when he learned she was in debt to a loan shark, it seemed best to do away with her as well. The alibi provided by his mother was watertight, and she also provided the poisoned tea that he used two decades ago to kill his first wife. “She’d do anything for me,” he says fondly of his dear old mum, who had the idea to dump his second wife in the fountain because no one would think to look for both his wives in the same spot.
He then asks André and Jean for another cup of tea. “I’ve had tea with a serial killer,” Jean says.
Jean calls Dom to suggest they visit Claudie the next day, since phoning seems unsuccessful, but they’re both woken a few hours later by someone knocking at the door. Outside, Dom finds Claudie crying and pregnant, and his suspicions that she is being abused seem all too real.
The Madame Blanc Mysteries Season 5 continues with a new episode airing every Monday through the holidays. Seasons 1 through 4 are streaming on Acorn TV.
The Madame Blanc Mysteries
Seasons 1 through 3 are also available on select PBS Passports; as always, check your local listings.
