A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder takes ages to get going, but it saves almost all of its main reveals for the finale. Episode 6 is a frantic and slightly overstuffed ending to the Netflix adaptation, lurching this way and that with one reveal after another, but it is a refreshingly conclusive climax that ties up every loose end.
Let’s break it all down.
Who Is The “Secret Older Guy?”
Look, I know the big question is who killed Andie Bell, but we’ll get to that in a minute. There are other things to unpack first.
In the course of her investigation, Pip uncovered a relationship that Andie was having with someone dubbed “Secret Older Guy”, and the identity of this enigmatic romantic partner is a season-long mystery. In the penultimate episode, Pip realizes it’s Naomi’s father Elliot after the former calls her on the latter’s phone, but it’s in Episode 6 that we get the real confrontation.
Elliot has a weird abandoned house that needs replastering. Here, he confesses to Pip that he and Andie had a romantic relationship – she was 17 – that began after he agreed to privately tutor her when she fell behind in school. Eventually, Andie broke it off when she got with Sal, but she suddenly returned to blackmail Elliot for five grand under threat of exposing their affair.
Elliot didn’t give in to the blackmail – Andie wanted the money to skip town, away from her overbearing father – and his rejection caused Andie to lash out. They fought, she fell, and she smashed her head on a countertop. This is why the flashback glimpses of her have often shown her sporting a big bloody dent in the back of her head.
However, at that point, Andie left of her own volition. Elliot never saw her again. He didn’t kill her, which means somebody else did.
Who Killed Andie Bell?
This brings us to the big reveal, which is that Andie was killed by her own sister, Becca.
This doesn’t happen out of nowhere. It’s revealed that at a Calamity party, Becca was drugged and raped by Max Hastings, who had bought the Rohypnol he used to dose her from Andie. Because of this, the incident was never reported to the police.
With this simmering resentment already bubbling away, Becca was not best pleased to see her sister on the night that she smashed her head on Elliot’s countertop. Andie told her she was leaving town, which would leave Becca alone at the mercy of their father. After having already been profoundly betrayed by Andie, Becca lashed out and pushed her. She hit her already injured head against the wall, which finished her off.
After watching her sister choke on her vomit, Becca dumped her body. In the finale, Becca offers to show Pip Andie’s final resting site and naturally tries to dump her in there as well after drugging her with the Rohypnol she found in Andie’s drug teddy.
What Happened to Sal?
The theory that everyone ran with throughout A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder was that Sal committed suicide because he felt guilty about Andie’s death, but since the ending reveals he didn’t kill her, it stands to reason that he didn’t have anything to feel especially guilty about.
With this in mind, what happened to him? Well, that was Elliot. Despite not having killed Andie, Elliot assumed she would die from her head injury and her body would be found, exposing him. So, Elliot drugged and smothered Sal to frame him for Andie’s murder, sending the confession text from his phone.
Elliot also blackmailed Naomi and Sam into lying about the time Sal left Max’s house on the night of Andie’s death. By looking through Naomi’s diary, Elliot had learned about the hit and run, which they had managed to cover up with the help of Dan de Silva, who was in turn being blackmailed by Max for having sex with Andie when she was 15.
It’s worth mentioning that as far as I can tell Dan gets away with this completely.
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder | Image via Netflix/BBC
Who is the Woman In Elliot’s Attic?
In a very odd twist, Pip discovers that Elliot is keeping a hostage upstairs. She rushes up to the attic, expecting to find Andie Bell, but instead finds someone else.
The “guest” is a woman named Isla, who isn’t important to anything beyond the fact that Elliot picked her up when he happened to pass by her when she was sleeping rough. He offered her shelter and comfort, but then he got really drunk and confessed to killing Sal. Terrified, Isla tried to flee, and Elliot forced her to stay.
Since then she has been stuck in the attic, and Elliot has been periodically visiting her under the guise of tutoring sessions (which explains the throwaway line from Naomi earlier about why he isn’t bringing any more money in, despite how much he “works.”)
I’m honestly not sure what the point of this is. Elliot’s situation with Andie made perfect sense; we know he was into young girls, the fact he murdered Sal proves he was willing to go to desperate lengths to protect himself. But these were terrible crimes of circumstance. Keeping Isla a prisoner all this time is just weird – it feels like an unnecessary supervillain flourish when it would have been more interesting for him to be a relatively normal guy who was driven to desperation by a series of terrible decisions.
Do Pip and Ravi End Up Together?
Thanks to Ravi and Naomi, Pip is saved from Becca, and justice is done. Ravi was supposed to be leaving town after learning the truth about what happened to his brother, but he just couldn’t leave Pip behind.
At the end of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, Pip plants a big kiss on Ravi, implying that they’ll be entering some kind of romantic relationship from this point forward. Not exactly Holmes and Watson – although maybe, depending on who you ask – but they’ve probably earned it after everything they’ve been through.
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