XOXO (Season 3, Episode 10)
Premise: A newly named Environment Minister falls from her condo balcony, and the investigation leads to her affair with Graff’s own father.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 3, Episode 10
- 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)
- Guest stars
- Martin Donovan as Charles Graff, Erica Durance as Claire Matthews, Billy MacLellan as Peter Moore, Finlay Wojtak-Hissong as Owen Matthews
- Director
- David Wellington
- Writers
- Tassie Cameron
Summary
The Case
“XOXO” begins with Claire Matthews, a former litigator for polluting industries, celebrating her election as an MP and her appointment as Environment Minister. On the morning she dies, her son, Owen, 14, leaves to tour Clifford, the boarding school he is to attend, and Graff and Bateman, on their way to get root beer floats, end up at Claire’s body below her condo balcony. A stool and a half-tended planter leave suicide, accident and murder all possible.
Her husband and campaign manager, Peter Moore, insists she was not suicidal. A neighbour’s bird-feeder camera records Claire refusing someone and demanding to be let go at 10:14 a.m. The lobby cameras show no visitors, but many people had condo keys and used a service entrance. At the Archer Hotel, staff describe Claire’s trysts with an older man and show footage of Peter, banned after a scuffle with her there; he says they had agreed to separate quietly, and a fellow jogger later backs his alibi. Owen mentions gifts, including a coconut cream pie signed “XOXO” from Bardi’s, where Andre, who knew Graff as a boy, names Claire’s companion: Graff’s father, Charles.
Graff confronts Charles, a mining and development executive who admits a six-month romance, and the visit turns so personal that Holness takes Graff off the case. The team learns that Graff’s mother, Maggie, died in Paris in 1987, when he was 12, in a death ruled a suicide, and that he blames his father. Charles’s company had bought protected land near McFaulds Lake in the Ring of Fire. Owen asks Charles whether his mother meant to take him to Ottawa and hears they never discussed him. Talking his way into his father’s parked car, Graff finds GPS data placing it near Claire’s condo, but Charles says Claire secretly planned to ease the mining protections and was meeting him at a nearby café.
The Interrogation
Café footage shows Charles waiting there at 10:14. At Graff’s home, Bateman walks him through the Paris file until he accepts that his mother took her own life. Cheap roses in Claire’s trash, bought near Clifford, arrived the morning she died, and a student admits leaving Owen alone, for the whole two-hour chapel service by his girlfriend’s account. Bateman persuades Holness to let Graff back in.
Graff tells Owen about losing his own mother at the same age and insists Owen’s mother chose to leave him. Owen rejects this and, pressed, says he went home with roses to ask her to stay, that she refused and laughed at him, and agrees that he pushed her. He calls it an accident, and Bateman takes him into custody.
The ending
Spoiler: Afterward the partners share the root beer floats they missed at the start.
Suspect’s fate: Owen Matthews, arrested.
Why it stands out
- The season 3 finale and Aden Young’s last episode as Graff; in season 4, Bateman is partnered with Guns & Gangs detective John Darcy.
- Graff’s father, Charles, appears, and the episode reveals that Graff’s mother died in Paris when he was 12 and that he was then sent to boarding school in Toronto.