Good Neighbours (Season 1, Episode 2)
Premise: Toronto’s Major Crime Unit investigates the shooting of four condo board members, which uncovers a teenager’s body hidden in concrete on the building’s roof for 20 years.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 1, Episode 2
- Starring
- DS Henry Graff (Aden Young), DS Frankie Bateman (Kathleen Munroe), Insp. Vivienne Holness (Karen Robinson), DCA Theo Forrester (K.C. Collins), Mark Yohannes (Araya Mengesha), Dr. Lucy Da Silva (Nicola Correia-Damude)
- Guest stars
- Kristopher Turner as Dr. Carl Embers, Torren Sylvain as Dennis Embers, Diego Matamoros as Kenneth Waters, Tennille Read as Jessica Lewis, Husein Madhavji as Pravat Doshi
- Director
- Peter Stebbings
- Writers
- Sam Godfrey
Summary
The Case
“Good Neighbours” finds Dennis Embers turning up at the hospital where his older brother, Dr. Carl Embers, works. That night, as fireworks go off, a gunman kills Dennis and three neighbours who had come to his condo uninvited: Amanda Green, Harold Chen and Derek Kapoor. All four sit on the condo board, and a developer, Pinecorp, needs every owner’s vote to buy the building; Dennis alone refused. Graff and Bateman read the shooting as aimed at Dennis, with the others killed because they were in the room.
An off-key piano and Dennis’s cochlear implant lead to a hidden device giving off a 17-kilohertz whine that only he could hear, the kind shops use to scatter teenagers. Board head Jessica Lewis admits planting it, prompted by her boyfriend, Pinecorp project manager Pravat Doshi, who admits paying Dennis $200,000 for his vote the day he died. The cash surfaces with Dennis’s ex-girlfriend, Eden Turner, stopped on her way to Cambodia; she says he was running from something. A support post Dennis installed himself leads to the rooftop garden above his unit, where a body lies set in concrete.
Da Silva dates the remains to about 20 years ago, and a helix piercing and 2003 repair permits identify Maeve Waters, 16, who vanished in November 2003 and had befriended Dennis at summer camp. Her father, Kenneth Waters, admits visiting the building after an anonymous email, which Dennis himself sent, named it. Maeve was strangled. Camp photos show Carl, then a counsellor, carrying the Leica her boyfriend gave her, and a gas leak at his McGill residence sent him home the night she died. Resident Hassan Khan admits Carl left the hospital for three hours the night of the shooting.
The Interrogation
Called in to sign papers releasing the condo, Carl is handed the camera and says he arrived to find Maeve dead, that Dennis admitted strangling her and begged for help burying her. The detectives then produce a September 2003 X-ray of Dennis’s badly broken arm, from the same hospital visit that led to his implant and to suspicions of abuse, and point out it would still have been in a cast. Their version: Carl came home to find Maeve with Dennis, killed her and made his brother help hide her. Carl stops talking, but his own story already admits burying a body, enough to hold him as an accessory after the fact.
The ending
Spoiler: Told that he shot Dennis to inherit the condo and stop the sale, Carl admits he wanted only his brother and fired on the others because they saw his face. The episode closes on the idea that the dead can still speak: Dennis’s X-ray sinks his brother.
Suspect’s fate: Carl Embers, arrested.
Why it stands out
- Tammy Isbell first appears as Detective Alice Riley, who walks Graff and Bateman through the crime scene; she is credited again in episode 5.
- Real Toronto settings anchor the cold case: Maeve vanished after a Roy Thomson Hall concert where Dennis worked as an usher, and he sends his tip from the Toronto Reference Library.