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) — Watched her family’s private collection get signed over to a government she doesn’t trust, piece by piece, including the peacock she always assumed would be hers.
- Marcus Tavares (Assistant Curator) — Has catalogued every item in this museum twice over, and knows exactly what the jade peacock is really worth, which is not what the insurance paperwork says.
- Professor Saraswati Rao (Visiting Art Historian) — Travelled from Delhi specifically to examine the peacock before it went on permanent display, and asked, pointedly, to see it alone.
- Constable Ferreira (Overnight Guard) — Was the only person with a key to the storage vault after 9pm, a fact he volunteered before anyone thought to ask.
- Govind Bhat (Shipping Contractor) — Handles every crate that leaves this museum for exhibitions abroad, for a fee everyone agrees is suspiciously reasonable.
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.
How to read this case
A dead curator, an empty plinth, and a vault that only a handful of people could unlock after hours turns this into a question of opportunity as much as motive. The theft and the killing may not have happened for the same reason, or even by the same hand, so treat them as two puzzles sharing one corpse until the evidence forces you to join them. Provenance paperwork, shipping manifests, and who was seen carrying what out of a converted church at dawn matter here as much as any witness statement.
Why play it
The Jade Peacock is a museum heist wearing a murder mystery’s clothes, equal parts art-world greed and the quieter colonial-era question of who a six-hundred-year-old peacock actually belongs to now that the empire that took it is gone. It is a favourite for players who like their clues hidden behind paperwork rather than testimony, insurance valuations, shipping manifests, and a provenance file nobody has read closely enough. If you enjoy a mystery where the motive is history itself, not just money, this is the one.
That is as far as any file goes without spoiling it. The rest, the confession, the weapon, the one lie that breaks the whole timeline, is yours to work out in the game.
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