Millicent Pebmarsh is the overarching antagonist of the Poirot mystery The Clocks as well as the film adaptation of the same name in Agatha Christie's Poirot. Pebmarsh is an elderly blind neighbor on a quiet suburban English street, as well as a mole secretly selling information to enemy forces of the country in hopes of Britain's conquest by other territories.
In the film adaptation, she was portrayed by the late Anne Massey in her final role.
Biography[]
In the book, it's the times of the Cold War, and Millicent Pebmarsh, a blind, elderly former schoolteacher who now teaches blind children, covertly runs a treason operation where she's given espionage secrets of Britain by at least one clandestine traitor collaborating with her, translating them into Braille to be sent past the "iron curtain" where it makes its way to Russia. In the film, what changes is it's the Second World War, and Pebmarsh lost two sons in combat out of the country and refuses to lose her other son also dispatched by the military. By the same means and accomplices, she sells war secrets to Germany, in hopes a quick invasion from Britain being weak enough will prevent more British soldiers from dying. Pebmarsh stationed her home/base near a husband and wife, Rachel and Matthew Waterhouse, who are German immigrants and secretly Germanic Jewish, hiding in England to seek asylum from persecution and war criminals. Pebmarsh presumably knew and planned to expose them for the sake of selling them out to Nazi forces.
Pebmarsh was being closed in on by secret agent Colin, who is the son of Poirot's friend Superintendent Battle in the books and the son of his other friend Colonel Johnnie Race in the movie. When one of his female agents he was in love with found the address of the operations, she wrote it down, leading to Pebmarsh dispatching one of her female agents to chase after her. Her government contact also went after them with the intention of shooting them both to leave no witnesses. He never had to: when they scuffled on the road, both of them were killed in a car collision. Colin's only lead was the note she left behind, which he read as a crescent moon, then "M61".
In the book, she has a daughter named Rosemary Sheila, who preferred being addressed as Sheila since she was six. In the film, they're not related and her name is Sheila Webb. Both Sheilas are embroiled in a murder she's a witness to at Pebmarsh's home, which she was sent over to in the movie by her boss, Katherine Martindale, one of the killers, as a means of setting her up. Sheila finds the dead man, Quentin Duguesclin, stabbed to death with a kitchen knife by Josiah Bland after being drugged with chloral hydrate, and surrounded by clocks all set to the same time, 4:13. She also sees, in the book, her own clock with her name "Rosemary" on it, and in the movie, her heirloom clock from her estranged mother, which Martindale appropriated as part of the setup. 413 is the room Sheila was having an affair with a professor in at a hotel, all circumstantial as meaningless diversions to finger Sheila as the killer. The police know her name is Rosemary because her aunt, Mrs. Lawton, told them so, which looks all the more incriminating for her.
Sheila finds Pebmarsh arriving at home just when she's screaming and running out of the house in terror, right into agent Colin. She reports her scare to him and he reports it to the police, believing she's innocent. But the circumstantial evidence looks abysmal for her, especially when she's found to have taken her clock for the sake of not being glaringly incriminated for a crime she didn't commit. Colin becomes infatuated with her and finds her innocent, but the police still charge her anyway and hold an inquest in court. After that, Sheila's friend, Edna in the book and Nora in the film, and an actress named Merlina Rival, whose real name is Flossie Gapp, are both killed, which makes it all the more confusing as to how it relates to Sheila or the information leaks. It doesn't as Martindale strangle Sheila's friend in a phone booth with her own scarf when she realized Martindale was lying about when she called Sheila over to Pebmarsh's house. Rival was killed, stabbed in the book and shot in the movie, having posed as the dead man's wife to further divert the police at the behest of the real killers, but she demanded more money before she fled.
In the book, a ten-year-old Geraldine Brown, in a fashion like the movie Rear Window, is found by Colin to have been watching the neighborhood's activities and writing it down using opera glasses and notebook, having little to do with her broken leg. She's crucial in identifying a laundromat service Duguesclin was smuggled in through when drunk as part of the set up, ripped from an unpublished crime novel Martendale came across in her stenography profession from a client. Along with Poirot seeing through all the red herrings and tracing the real evidence, he identifies and has arrested the real killers, Martindale and Bland, with Josiah's wife Hilde Martindale in on the conspiracy to pose as his first wife Valerie Brand to inherit her fortune. In the book, this is before finding Pebmarsh.
In the movie, it's after, both ways revealing the crucial damning evidence when Colin looks at the note again: he was reading it upside down. It was never "crescent M 61". it was always "19 W crescent", 19 Wilbraham Crescent street. The address for Pebmarsh's home. In the movie, Pebmarsh's home is searched for the records and she's arrested with her accomplices, confessing her motives proudly. Poirot expresses disdain, as he holds a grudge against the Nazis for sieging his homeland of Belgium. The Waterhouses are bought in and reveal they're Jewish, under which Colin agrees to grant them asylum. Colin proposes to Shelia and they're engaged.
In the book, as Pebmarsh is Sheila's mother, when Colin is set to marry her, that's when he figures out the note and Pebmarsh's guilt. But for his new mother-in-law, he extends her the courtesy of giving her two hours to surrender. She chooses the leaks over her daughter and grabs a knife to arm herself with. Colin swiftly takes the knife from her and takes her into custody, Pebmarsh sticking to her actions and refusing them as wrong. Both stories close with the note of all it took with the note was a new, imaginative perspective, and the astonishing coincidence of how the similar addresses the note led to (as the Blands lived at 61 on the same street) ended up finding solutions for everything from twists of fate.
