So I’d always had it stick in my craw about how 2 of the 3 endings were not physically possible ever since I first watched the movie. And the thought of Mr. Green throwing out his own bogus reason for being blackmailed to avoid the real reason coming out.
But, while writing the Ms. Scarlet character study and walking thru why the Mrs. Peacock ending didn’t add up, I realized that if I could come up with an entire backstory for Mr. Green from a single Tim Curry sight gag, I should at the very least try to do the same for her character as well.
So, for this study I am going to see what toss-away lines from the film I can milk to make Mrs. Peacock a plausible multi-murderer.
As you know from my previous breakdowns of the plot, there are a couple of logistic and story problems with Mrs. Peacock not only being physically capable of committing the murders, but also wanting to. The first two are perfectly understandable and convincing, as stated earlier: she had means, motive, and opportunity to kill Mr. Boddy and the cook.
The trouble starts after that. The first, biggest set of hurdles involves the third murder: the motorist. At the time he shows up, he appears for all the world (and the movie audience, most importantly) to be a simple bystander with the bad luck of having his car break down in front of the house during a storm.
It isn’t until after the motorist is locked in the lounge and the party splits up to search the house that we see the killer finding the blackmail materials. It would only be right then that the killer, if they aren’t Col. Mustard, would learn that the motorist is an informant. But by then the killer would’ve already gotten the key from Wadsworth. So, why steal the key?
This is where we can appeal to Mrs. Peacock’s paranoid personality that had been played up a lot in the film so far. If she had just killed two people in cold blood, it would not only make sense to cast dispersions about, but I can definitely see her wanting the key to the weapons cupboard regardless of whether or not the motorist was a concern.
Getting the key would in itself be a tactical advantage that I can see her go for.
So, we can come up with a character driven reason for why she would get the key and looking over the blackmail materials can give her motive enough to want to wipe out the whole blackmailing ring. Let’s cover the remaining 2 hurdles I see: getting away from Prof. Plum in time to do the murders, and knowing about the secret passages.
At first, the only separations we see are Col. Mustard/Ms. Scarlet in the music room and Wadsworth/Mrs. White in separate rooms making empty threats to possible killers hiding in the darkness. But that’s just the splits they show us. So since there’s no timer running on screen to show us exactly when and for how long the scenes last, let’s go ahead and say that just because they didn’t show her and Prof. Plum being separated, doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.
So let’s just assume that she could’ve gotten away from him for long enough to go up, find the blackmail evidence, discover the rest of the accomplices, and then go murder the motorist and make it back to Prof. Plum with him being none the wiser.
If we accept that, we can probably give a pass to the timing of the other 3 murders later. But there’s one thing we need to figure out before any of that falls into place:
To paraphrase a different character from a different ending: “How could I have known about the secret passage?”
This question never comes up for Mrs. Peacock in her ending, and it’s a bit of a show-stopper. Wadsworth says that it was easy for Ms. Scarlet to know because Yvette could’ve told her. But Mrs. Peacock has no relationship at all to the maid.
This is where we can milk the response Wadsworth gives for knowing about the secret passages during his recap of the murders: “This house belongs to a friend of mine. I’ve known all along.”
Well, what friend of an FBI agent (which is what Wadsworth is in the Mrs. Peacock ending) would own a mansion? Considering that all the blackmail victims have ties to D.C., we can speculate that someone who owns a mansion nearby would no doubt be involved in politics to a degree. And although Mrs. Peacock doesn’t openly express any familiarity with the house itself, she doesn’t actively comment on it as if she’s never been there before like some of the other guests do: namely Prof. Plum and Ms. Scarlett – seen trying to find it for the first time.
So it might be possible that she’d been to the house before, or maybe just heard about it from others in the mansion-owning elite of D.C. she would be socializing with as the wife of a Senator.
There’s also the possibility that if Yvette knew about the secret passages and would tell Ms. Scarlett, perhaps the cook also know about them and told Mrs. Peacock.
Perhaps she never knew who ratted her out and was on friendly terms with the cook. It’s possible that they stayed in touch and the cook told her about how the big creepy house she’s working at now has these secret passages going all over the place and she accidentally opened one hanging a ham hock on a hook in the freezer.
And who’s to say exactly when Mrs. Peacock pieced together who told Mr. Boddy her guilty secret? Perhaps when Wadsworth described how she received her bribes as being “used greenbacks in plain envelopes under the door of the men’s room” it clicked that she never told anyone but the cook about that particular detail.
Not to mention that when Wadsworth breaks down how the murders were done, he described how the killer used them for the first 2, so she had to have known about them before arriving. Although I usually gloss over this because the killer didn’t need to use the secret passage from the kitchen to the study in order to kill anyone. It was just a convenient way to avoid getting caught, at least for one of them.
So, if we take some liberties about the timeline, and how many people knew about the secret passages, it all can work for Mrs. Peacock; the corrupt Senator’s wife who is selling inside info to a foreign power and saw the opportunity to take out an entire blackmailing ring single-handedly.
With no help from the FBI who apparently knew about it all the whole time…
