The Jade Peacock
The most valuable things in a room are rarely on display.
The scene
The Sequeira Museum of Colonial Art, a grand converted church in Old Goa, March 1963. The museum holds the private collection of the late Manuel Sequeira, donated to the new Indian government as a gesture of goodwill, its centerpiece a jade peacock made for a Vijayanagara king in the sixteenth century.
The victim
Dr. Pradeep Anand, 46, the museum's first Indian curator, found dead in the storage vault by the cleaning staff at 6am. Cause of death: blunt trauma to the back of the head. The jade peacock's plinth is empty.
The suspects
- Celeste Sequeira (Grandniece)
- Marcus Tavares (Assistant Curator)
- Professor Saraswati Rao (Visiting Art Historian)
- Constable Ferreira (Overnight Guard)
- Govind Bhat (Shipping Contractor)
Every one of them is hiding something, and their alibis form a single shared timeline. Somewhere in it, one statement cannot possibly be true. Find the contradiction and you have found the killer. This is as far as any file goes without spoiling it, the rest is yours to work out.