Sophie Chambers a.k.a. Rebecca Walmslow appears on Episode 11:9 The Death Ghost. She is played by Chelsea Edge.
The Death Ghost[]
In December 2022, Sophie comes to Saint Marie as a tourist, bumping into Neville Parker at the airport. Neville apologises profusely and the pair go on with their day… well at least try to before Neville nearly hits her taxi with the Police car.
Later, Catherine shows Sophie around Catherine's Bar and shows her where she’s going to stay. When looking at her luggage, Sophie realises they had accidentally swapped them when bumping into each other. She goes to the Honoré Police Station and gives the luggage back to Neville. Neville tries to make a joke, but it flops. He hasn’t exactly made the best impression.
The team go to the Saint Marie Church to watch Marlon’s little sister, Jocelyn, sing at a school Christmas play. Catherine whispers to Neville that she invited Sophie, and explains to his confused face that they should have dinner together.
So, they go to eat at Catherine’s Bar and eat more English traditional Christmas feast and share it. They get to talk and realise they have a lot in common, especially them both being from Manchester.
Murder in the Stars[]
It’s a new year and Neville goes to Catherine and wonders if she’s heard from Sophie. Catherine says that she’s away for a few days doing some island hopping, with Neville then revealing that they had exchanged a few texts over Christmas and hoped she’d sent him a message.
Later, Neville is star gazing with his telescope when he is interrupted by Sophie showing up at his shack, where she’s then introduced to Harry and tells Neville she had stopped by to say hello after she went trekking in the rainforest in Dominica, knocking spots off Heaton Park. She then asks him if he would like a drink tomorrow night.
Tomorrow night comes and Sophie and Neville are sitting on the balcony of the shack, sharing a glass of mine. Sophie reveals she organised an after-school broad game club (every other Tuesday, 4 till 6), and that she also had a stamp collection as a kid. They bond over their nerdiness and then get a bit more serious. They both haven’t had a holiday romance before, she’d like to spend more time with Neville while she’s there, but she only has 10 days left. They kiss, with the sound of the record player in the background.
The Communal Death[]
Neville is at his desk laughing at his phone, saying he had a text from Sophie. They had gone to the Zoo the day before and she sent a picture of a giant tortoise, saying it looked like him.
They also planned to go jet skiing which unfortunately didn’t go too well, since Neville got scared of a jellyfish, accidentally reversing his jet ski into her jet ski and sending her to hospital (with very minor injuries).
He visits her in the hospital and prepares something special, but makes an outdoor seating area for them to sit at, complete with candles, torches and Catherine as the hostess. The time spent later and they’re holding hands and discussing if they’re going to stay in touch when she goes back to Manchester. They decided it was better to say their goodbyes now, instead of being hurt in the long run later.
Sophie and Neville say their goodbyes properly the next day when she leaves on a boat and sails off.
On the Sanctity of Children[]
Sophie returns to Saint Marie after texting Neville again in An Unpleasant Homecoming and saying she can come back for some time and work remotely. They hug and go back to the shack, before realising it had been broken into.
A Murder Forewarned[]
In the first of two parts, Neville and Sophie are shown to be living in the shack together and Sophie asks if they should invite the team over for dinner one night, stating that Sophie doesn’t really know his friends very well, plus it would be the first time they host a party together. At night, Neville is shown to be investigating the case of David Cartwright on a table inside the shack, with Sophie in his bed, showing that they are so close they even sleep in the same bed.
A few mornings after, Neville is getting more and more tense about David Cartwright, saying that he knows he did the murder, but he keeps getting away with it. Sophie tries to calm him down but can tell this has been weighing on his mind a lot.
Later, Neville cracks the case, doing the usual and going to the suspect and giving his speech on why, how and when he committed the murder, but David has still got away with it, Neville gets increasingly more frustrated about it and storms back to the shack and sees a parcel by the door. He slams it down onto the table and Sophie comes into the room to see what’s happening.
Neville opens the parcel and sees a book, David’s autobiography, actually signed by David himself saying ‘To my number one fan!’, this is the last straw for Neville and he rushes off to David’s hotel once again. Sophie tries to run after him, but he’s already gone.
He bashes on David’s door and demands to be let in and David lets him. However, later on, the scene shows police tape and officers around, David has been murdered.
Then we see everyone at the police station, the Commisoner arrests Neville. Sophie and Catherine arrive shortly after and protest, but Neville gets put into a cell.
Sins of the Detective[]
In the second of two parts, Neville is still in a cell at the police station, where a temporary English DI, Karen Flitcroft comes to investigate Neville. He has no alibi, has motive and means. It’s not looking good.
Later, the Commissioner, Catherine and Sophie are at a secluded area of the bar and Selwyn tell’s them they are the only people who know about Neville’s arrest and that they should try to stay quiet about it. Sophie asks how Neville is and Selwyn tells her that ‘’he’s coping admirably, considering the circumstances’’. Sophie goes into her bag and takes out a medicine bag, asking if he can have his eczema cream and some antihistamines as she’s worried he’ll have a flare-up.
Sophie and Catherine have been keeping each other company and are comforting each other. They later go to the police station and turn up with some snacks for the team, as well as some for Neville. Sophie asks if she can go and see him, with Selwyn saying she’s not allowed, but Catherine protests to give them at least a few minutes. Selwyn says yes.
Naomi opens the cell and leaves them alone. Sophie and Neville hug and say they miss each other, with Sophie giving him a sandwich. Neville is very distressed and is coming up in hives and shows fears of not being a detective anymore, but Sophie gently takes his face and tells him that won’t happen, they hug again.
The next day, time is up. Neville gets charged with murder and is taken to prison, Sophie watches him being taken away and seeks Catherine for support. She appears devastated, as well as Neville.
As Neville is taken to his prison cell, he notices the guard opening the door with the wrong key and then opens it with the right one, which gives Neville a very light moment to think and seems like it triggers something in him, but not sure what yet.
Sophie and Catherine are shown to be bonding again, with Catherine asking her if she’s okay and if she’ll be alright alone. They hold hands and Catherine heads home.
This is when the scene is brought back to Neville, where he’s now in his prison cell bed and has another moment of thought, noting that the guard opened the door with a wrong key first. But what does it mean? Neville isn’t sure why it matters.
He has visions of the scene, it was the wrong key at the crime scene, so the killer had to have opened the door with the right key and changed it for the wrong keys. But he questions when it was put back. He then has visions of the day he was arrested, when everybody was at the police station - it had to be there, that’s when it was swapped over.
Neville scrambles his mind and walks through it again, having a look at all the possible people who could have done it in the police station. But there was only one place at the police station that could have done it and one person who was near it - it’s the one person he could never imagine and he faced his worst fears, Sophie was the one who was near that place, she did it.
Back at the station in real time, Selwyn, Naomi, Darlene and Marlon are trying everything they can to find out what really happened. They have been looking for past cases on Saint Marie, but they realise they should be looking further, at cases Neville did in Manchester, revealing an old case that Neville investigated, Grace Wilmslow, who took her own life a year into her prison sentence. Neville had arrested Grace and charged her with murder. Selwyn questions if it's possible someone might hold Neville responsible for Grace’s death, such as a close friend or a family member.
Naomi finds a file and reads out that Grace grew up in a care home with her older sister, Rebecca Wilmslow, that being her only relative.
By now, Neville is shouting through his cell door, saying he needs to speak to someone immediately, finally, Selwyn walks through the door. They both realise they solved the case.
Meanwhile, Sophie (or Rebecca) is at the shack, packing her suitcase and rehearsing her lines about what she’s going to say to Catherine as she goes to Manchester, but is interrupted by Neville entering the shack. Sophie is confused and Neville says he’s been released as there’s evidence that he didn’t kill David Cartwright.
Sophie tries to hide her worry and says that it’s good to see her. Neville says he knows he did it. She continues her act and tells him that’s crazy, but Neville stops her and tells her to drop the act.
Neville tells Sophie that he knows she is not Sophie Chambers, but instead Rebecca Wilmslow. He then shows her a file of her sister Grace Wilmslow, a young woman he arrested and charged with murder in 2018, a year later when she was 19 years old when she took her own life in prison. He then shows her a picture taken from Grace’s social media account, clearly showing her and Sophie together.
Sophie had been playing a game with Neville since the start of her arrival on the island, revealing that it was in fact not an accident that they bumped into each other in the airport in Christmas 2022, contriving the whole thing. She swapped their suitcases when Neville wasn’t looking just so she could swap them back and start worming her way into his life, waiting for the opportunity to destroy Neville.
So, when Neville was unable to arrest David Cartwright for a crime Neville knew David had committed, Sophie saw that opportunity to stage a murder Neville had a clear motive for because he was frustrated that he wasn’t able to get justice for the man David had taken.
And then, the book with the David Cartwright dedication/signature on it ‘To My Number One Fan’, Sophie had made out like it had been delivered at the shack, but it hadn’t in reality, with Sophie getting the book herself. She had actually gone to David’s hotel beforehand, spinning that she was a big fan of his and asking if he could spare a couple of moments, getting David to sign the book, knowing that if Neville had thought it came from him, the effect it was having on Neville would be large.
So, when Neville leaves that evening he finds the book and confronts him at David’s hotel, Sophie actually follows him and finds a knife in Neville’s kitchen (making sure not to leave fingerprints) and waits at the back of David’s hotel room and watched as Neville and David argued, biding her time until he’d gone. That’s when she knocked on the glass doors and was let in by David, but that’s when she brutally stabbed him in the middle of the room.
This is when she had to seal the crime scene, making it seem impossible that anyone could have entered from the back door, taking the hotel key off its fob and replacing it with a similar key, so it could pass at first glance. She then left the room, closed the back door and locked them.
This made it so when the officers arrived at the crime scene, they found the doors locked and the key still inside the room, with no reason to assume that the key on the hotel fob wouldn’t be able to open the back door, with their own DI being accused of murder so they had to lock down the crime scene as quickly as possible.
This is when Sophie had to find a convenient moment to swap the keys back, the day Neville was arrested. His colleagues were shocked, confused and distracted which is when the opportunity presented itself to switch the keys back.
So when the detective from the DPS visited the crime scene and tried to open the back door, she was able to and nothing appeared to be awry.
Sophie, after hearing this entire (ten out of 10, as she puts it herself) explanation from Neville is shown to be very obviously upset. She tells him it’s a shame he wasn’t this meticulous when it came to the Darren Biggs murder case (the person Grace Wilmslow murdered).
Neville says she claimed self defence and that he did all he could. Sophie rebutted by saying there was a corrupt police officer on the case, Neville’s own mate, but as established in the episode, Neville had no idea. But even if he did clock there was a corrupt officer, it wouldn’t have made a difference.
Sophie disagrees, saying it would have made a difference, stating that a burner phone was taken from the crime scene and that it belonged to Daren Biggs, it would have helped Grace.
Nevile asks how and Sophie tearfully tells him that it would have shown that Grace wasn’t even mean to be there that night, that Grace had never done a drug pick-up in her life, saying that she would have got a shorter sentence. She then says that if the judge had realised she was an innocent girl caught up on something her sister should have protected her from.
Neville says he doesn’t understand, Sophie tells him that it was herself, that was who was supposed to be there that night couriering the drugs and that it was her life, how she kept her and Grace fed, clothed and a roof over their heads, never meaning for it to be her sister’s life.
But that one night, Sophie was ill in bed and Grace said she’d go in her place and Sophie even more tearfully says that she let her.
She then says that the burner phone, there were months, even years of texts showing it was her working with Biggs, not Grace.
Neviles asks her if that’s the truth, why didn’t she say anything, she could have cleared Grace’s name. Sophie says she didn’t have it in her, that she was a coward and she always had been. She gets angry and shouts at Neville and says that if he’d just done his job properly and did what he was supposed to, she would be in prison now and Grace would still be here and still be alive.
In a final line, Sophie says she hates Neville. She’s then arrested and Neville is devastated.