BLETCHLEY CIRCLE, THE Season 1 & 2


Episode #101 – "Cracking a Killer's Code: Part 1"
During World War II, Susan, a pattern recognition expert, mathematician Millie, information gatherer Jean, and Lucy, a young girl with an incredible memory, work as code-breakers at Bletchley Park. In 1952, Susan, now married, hears on the radio about a serial killer. Susan contacts Deputy Chief Commissioner Wainwright, a wartime friend of her husband Timothy, with her theory that there will be another victim in a particular place. However the police find nothing. Susan then decides to call on her former colleagues, under the guise of a literary club.

Episode #102 – "Cracking a Killer's Code: Part 2"
The women surmise that the killer is a rail employee familiar with train times, who offered his victims perfume or nylons to go with him. They narrow the list of suspects down to three men. However, when Susan takes her theory to DCI Compton, in the absence of Wainwright, he is dismissive. Following a failed attempt to trap the killer, in which Lucy, acting as bait, is sexually assaulted by a passenger who is not the murderer, they discover that their original theory is wrong.

Episode #103 – "Cracking a Killer's Code: Part 3"
Susan speaks to a man who claims he is the suspect's psychiatrist and she unwittingly shares her reasons for seeing him. She is lucky to escape and soon realizes she has met the murderer; but, when the police are called to the house he has vanished. She visits Cavendish for more information, only to find that he too has been killed. When she takes her findings to Wainwright, he is again dismissive. Research leads the women to find that the serial killer's first victim was Julie Oakwood, during the war.

Episode #201 – "Blood on Their Hands: Part 1"
During the war Alice Merren was one of Bletchley's brightest code-breakers. Now it is 1953. Lucy has a clerical job for Scotland Yard, Millie works as a German translator and Susan is a housewife, perturbed that her husband's promotion may take them overseas. Jean visits Alice in prison, where she is awaiting trial for killing her old flame and Bletchley colleague John Richards. Jean is convinced of Alice's innocence and persuades her friends to investigate.

Episode #202 – "Blood on Their Hands: Part 2"
Alice is to hang, though she tells her friends she assumed Lizzie had killed John and so she has taken the blame. However, the women know that John was killed and the attempt made on Lizzie's life was an attempt to prevent them revealing what happened on Salisbury Plain. They feel that now they too are under surveillance. Discovering that the injured soldiers - all clearly guinea pigs as none had families - were treated at the same military hospital as Timothy had been, a reluctant Susan visits, claiming she needs his medical records for his overseas posting.

Episode #203 – "Uncustomed Goods: Part 1"
Susan and her family have moved to India for her husband's posting whilst Alice, though acquitted of murder, finds work impossible to obtain. Also unemployed, Millie runs a nice line in selling black market goods, but is abducted and her flat ransacked - though she has hidden wads of cash in her cooker. Alice, Jean and Lucy look for Millie's business associate Jasper, but he has vanished and they surmise that he has fled after cheating his bosses. The women learn that these are the Maltese Magros family, headed by the formidable Marta.

Episode #204 – "Uncustomed Goods: Part 2"
The women report Jasper's murder, but next day Ben, Lucy's colleague at the police station, informs them that the body has disappeared. Realizing that there is police corruption at work, the women decide they must stop the gang themselves. Jean poses as a potential client and visits Marta at the restaurant she runs, accompanied by Lucy, who uses her photographic memory to memorize the contents of Marta's ledger. It is in code but with Lizzie now at teacher training college next to the old Bletchley site, the friends return there and find an old enigma machine.