The Thursday Murder Club

Chris is in the Central Prison of Nicosia. He has taken a trip into Spain to interview Gianni’s father, Costas Gunduz. Costas only shrugs when he is asked when he last saw Gianni, refusing to give any answers. However, Chris pushes further by stating that they “have records showing that [Gianni] arrived in Cyprus” after the murder. Chris and his contact talk about how if Gianni wanted to escape, all he would have to do is fly in and use his father’s trading connections to help him disappear. Costas neither confirms nor denies that happening.

In Chapter 95, Matthew is on his way to meet Elizabeth at St. Michael’s Chapel. He recalls it as the “place where his life broke in two, never to be fixed (220). He asks himself if there is any way that Elizabeth could have figured out the truth about him. In the next chapter, Ron and Ibrahim surprise Chris at the airport. Ibrahim says how great it is to bump into the Inspector. However, Chris is really confused as to why they are there. Ron says they heard he was there to see Gianni’s dad and wanted to see how it went. In Chapter 97, Elizabeth and Matthew finally meet at the church. They are in the confessional, and Elizabeth begins telling him a story of how she killed a man that attacked her, shooting him in the leg and wrapping the body in a curtain to be buried in a grave of her choosing in the Garden of Eternal Rest. Once she is finished, Matthew says that he does not believe what she is telling him, because she didn’t work there in 1970. She asks him if her story stirred any memories for him, and he says that he wants to talk, but she needs to get to the point of why they are there. Elizabeth, finally being blunt, asks him why he killed Ian.

Joyce’s diary details her concern over Elizabeth in the next chapter because she was under strict instructions to call Donna if Elizabeth was gone too long when meeting Matthew. That timeframe has passed, so she calls the officer, hoping that her friend is okay. In Chapters 99 and 100, Matthew and Elizabeth are in the Garden of Eternal Rest, stopping at the grave of a Sister Margaret Anne. But before Matthew can explain what they are doing there, Chris comes running up after Joyce’s call to Donna. Matthew later explains that when he was 25 years old and newly arrived from Ireland, he lived in the convent. He ended up falling in love with one of the nuns named Maggie; they would meet each other in private, and he planned to quit the priesthood for her. At night, she would come to see him, and he would signal her by lighting a candle. However, one night she never showed up, when he went to search for her, he found her hanging from the rafters in the chapel. Sister Mary told him that Maggie was pregnant. Maggie learned she would be kicked out of the convent after revealing the truth of her baby. The only reason that Maggie was allowed to be buried in the church’s graveyard is because Matthew made a deal. He would leave and strip himself of any connection to priesthood if Maggie could be buried with the church so she could have peace. Chris states that the story gives Matthew motive to have wanted to kill Ian, as Elizabeth accused him of in a previous chapter; however, Matthew denies it because Maggie would have been against it.

In the next two chapters, the group meets with Jason, who has some insight into finding Gianni. Through a mutual friend, Jason discovered that “Gianni came over three days before Tony was murdered, and left the day he died” (238); Jason agrees that he will tell the police about the contact if they are unable to figure it out soon on their own, going on to say that if the police can’t track down Gianni that he is confident the four of them could. Jason gives them all gifts for helping get to the truth and clear his name: his father, a bottle of wine; Joyce, two tickets to see Celebrity Ice Dance; Ibrahim, a box of cigars; and for Elizabeth, he holds up his phone and swipes the screen, saying that he and his father worked the case out (239). In Chapter 103, in the form of Joyce’s diary, the screen swipe is explained as a dating app called Tinder, with Jason believing that he helped solve the case by who he matched with on it: Karen Playfair.