To be a Stay Close fan is to juggle a lot of questions at once as the mystery unravels around two missing-person cases in a seaside British town. But if you’re here, that means you’re ready for some answers — so expect some massive spoilers ahead. The first mystery is the disappearance of Carlton Flynn, the son of wealthy (and shady) businessman Del Flynn (Ross Boatman). Detective Michael Broome (James Nesbitt) realizes the investigation into Carlton’s whereabouts shares a suspicious number of similarities with the cold case of Stewart Green (Rod Hunt), another rich man who disappeared on the same day 17 years earlier. Carlton and Stewart were both last seen near Vipers, a nightclub outside of town. 

The seven subsequent episodes of Stay Close continue to suggest that the person behind Stewart’s disappearance — or, possibly, murder — also harmed Carlton. But the mystery’s finale reveals that the true answer isn’t nearly so cut-and-dried. While Stewart's fate accidentally leads to Carlton's disappearance, very different people actually caused these crimes.

So, who killed Stewart Green? 

By the midpoint of the finale, we know one thing is true: Stewart is dead. For much of the series, Stay Close hints at two main suspects for the crime: Megan Pierce (Cush Jumbo), who goes by her given name of Cassie during the time of the murder, and her then-fiancé Ray Levine (Richard Armitage). As we learn during the finale, Megan is lured to the forest behind Vipers by someone. There, she finds Stewart’s bloody corpse and runs away. Ray sees Cassie sprinting through the woods and goes to figure out what she’d seen. Like Megan, Ray discovers Stewart’s body. Unlike Megan, Ray picks up the body, takes it to a concealed location, hacks it into tiny pieces and drops it into a body of water — all to protect Megan, whom he believes murdered Stewart. 

But neither Ray nor Megan killed Stewart. Instead, the true murderer is Lorraine Griggs (Sarah Parish), detective Broome’s girlfriend in the present timeline and a longtime bartender at Vipers. Toward the end of the finale, Lorraine admits that she is actually a serial killer who uses the commotion caused by Carnival to mask her crimes. Before the murders, Lorraine had been in an abusive marriage and lost her baby due to her husband’s violence. She’d killed her spouse out of grief and rage. In retaliation against the dangerous men in the world, Lorraine has killed one seemingly abusive man a year during Carnival and hidden their bodies in the bomb shelter outside of Vipers. Stewart — who was violently obsessed with Megan — was Lorraine’s victim in 2004, and she’d ensured that Megan would stumble upon his body so that she’d know she was “safe” from him. Ray’s friend Guy Tatum (Thomas Dominique) was Lorraine’s most recent victim, in 2021. 

The person stalking Megan throughout Stay Close’s present timeline isn’t Stewart, although certain breadcrumbs attempt to convince viewers that it’s him. Rather, the stalker is Rudy, one of Stewart’s business associates. Rudy believes Megan had stolen Stewart’s fortune — which partially belonged to Rudy, which nobody besides Rudy knows about. Megan reveals that she took some of Stewart’s money but gave the rest of it to Stewart’s widow, Sarah (Belinda Stewart-Wilson). 

Did Lorraine kill Carlton Flynn? 

Toward the end of the finale, Lorraine confesses to killing Carlton, too. Her confession is suspect, though, since his body is not with the rest of her countless victims in the underground bunker. As we soon learn, Lorraine is lying. She didn’t kill Carlton; she wasn’t even connected to his still technically unconfirmed death. Instead, Megan’s husband Dave (Daniel Francis) and daughter Kayleigh Shaw (Bethany Antonia) may have inadvertently killed Carlton. 

The pieces around Carlton’s disappearance don’t come into focus until the very end of the finale. Kayleigh finally tells her mom what happened the night she met Carlton at Vipers during Carnival 2021. A flashback sequence begins with Carlton attempting to drug Kayleigh, and how she steals his car keys. He then chases her and friend Bea (Rachel Andrews) into the woods behind Vipers. These are the same woods in which Lorraine had killed her victims. Carlton makes it out of the forest alive and then attempts to attack Kayleigh in the parking lot. During their scuffle, Kayleigh pushes a drunken Carlton into the trunk of his own car.

The flashback continues as Kayleigh and Bea drive away in Carlton’s vehicle. At a safe distance from Vipers, the girls leave the car before they’re picked up by Dave, who drives his daughter and her friend home without any questions. Kayleigh knows Carlton will be able to escape the car once he’s sober; Bea, meanwhile, has no idea a body was in the trunk in the first place. 

If this is where the story ended, Carlton would have eventually made it out of the woods. Unfortunately for him, Dave recognizes Carlton’s car once the details of his disappearance hits the news. Aiming to protect his daughter from whatever she may have done, Dave pushes Carlton’s car into a lake — with Carlton likely still in the trunk, drowning him. In the flashback of this scene, we can hear the sound of someone banging on a window, which is meant to signify Carlton’s desperate bid to escape. But we never actually see Calton in the trunk. It’s still possible Carlton escaped from the car long before it slid into the water. Stay Close wants us to believe Carlton is dead — yet the show itself has proven that our first assumptions about a crime can be dead wrong. As Taylor Swift once said, “No body, no crime” — at least for now.