Warning: Spoilers ahead for The Thursday Murder Club
Welcome to Coopers Chase, a retirement village that’s so charming it could only be in the United Kingdom. It’s a haven for those who live there, and not your typical old folks’ home. Coopers Chase is an immaculately designed playground for seniors, where meals are served with bottles of fancy wines, and the residents’ apartments are more striking than your dream home. In Netflix’s The Thursday Murder Club, based on the book series by Richard Osman, Coopers Chase is home to the titular club, where its three members, Elizabeth (Helen Mirren), Ron (Pierce Brosnan), and Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley), try to solve cold cases on Thursdays. They’re joined by Joyce (Celia Imrie), a prospective new member with a medical background, to help them figure out mysteries.
But this paradise for seniors is under threat. The co-owner of Coopers Chase, Ian Ventham (David Tennant), is hell-bent on selling the property to developers. There’s hope as the other co-owner, Tony Curran (Geoff Ball), is determined to stop Ventham. That’s great news for the people of Coopers Chase—until Curran is beaten to death in his own home. Suddenly, the Thursday Murder Club has some serious work to do, especially since prime suspect Ventham winds up dead just days later.
We break down the twists and turns in the ending of The Thursday Murder Club.
Who killed Tony Curran?
After the passing of Ventham, the Thursday Murder Club has its eyes set on Bobby Tanner (Richard E. Grant), a secret third co-owner of Coopers Chase, who’s been missing for years. Tanner has quite the reputation as a ruthless crimelord, and is known for removing body parts of people who wrong him. Elizabeth tracks Tanner’s alias Derek Ward to the flower shop Thorny Blooms and finds Tanner violently pruning flowers. She makes a surprising discovery: Tanner isn’t the murderer, nor was he involved in any way in either death. She uncovers the Coopers Chase owners’ secret and illegal empire of bringing in European workers that they employ for cheap labour, and take their passports away so they cannot escape. Using this information against Tanner, Elizabeth demands that he sell Coopers Chase (as he’s now the sole owner) to a bidder of her choosing. In exchange, she won’t reveal Tanner’s whereabouts.
This revelation clues Elizabeth in on the real killer: Bogdan (Henry Lloyd Hughes), the groundskeeper at Coopers Chase. The owners brought Bogdan in from Poland and took his passport, making it impossible for him to go back and see his ailing mother, who, like Elizabeth’s husband Stephen (Jonathan Pryce), suffers from dementia. Bogdan reveals that he went to Curran to try and get his passport back, but that Curran attacked him, forcing Bogdan to kill Curran in self-defense. While this is what Bogdan says, we never actually see what happened, leaving the actual happenings of Curran’s death slightly open-ended.
The case of the woman in white
The Thursday Murder Club opens with the murder club trying to solve a cold case from the 1970s, in which a woman named Angela Hughes fell out of a second-floor window. She also had a knife in her stomach. According to police reports, Angela Hughes was discovered by her boyfriend, Peter Mercer, within seconds of Hughes falling out the window. Mercer disappeared soon after, as did the alleged robber who pushed Hughes out the window. Neither of them was ever seen again. The person responsible for Hughes was never found, and the facts just don’t add up. Why didn’t Mercer try and stop Hughes from bleeding out, given that he saw her fall out the window and was there to help? Murder club member Ron sums it up succinctly: “Stinks like a rat up a drain pipe.”
The Thursday Murder Club ties the present-day mystery to the ‘70s cold case. Bogdan is ordered by Ventham to start digging at the back of the cemetery to begin property development, circumventing the protest at the entrance. By chance, Bogdan digs up a gravesite that has bones laid on top of it—bones belonging to Peter Mercer. The police are able to identify the bones as Peter Mercer’s. Finding Mercer is a complete accident, but it leads Elizabeth to solve the case.
It’s none other than Elizabeth’s friend Penny Gray (Susan Kirby), a former police officer and former member of the murder club, who killed Mercer. She was convinced Mercer killed Hughes, but because of the police’s boys-club mentality, they let him walk without proper interrogation. Penny took it upon herself to right this wrong, killing Mercer and burying him at Coopers Chase cemetery, with her husband John’s (Paul Freeman) help. She never would have been caught had Ventham not tried to develop the property.
Speaking of Ventham, the cold case also helps explain who killed Ventham. Ian Ventham would have likely gone to the police after finding mysterious bones, and with developments looming, Penny’s husband, John, gave Ventham a lethal injection of fentanyl to stop the discovery of Mercer’s bones. Panicked over his wife, Penny, nearing death, John acted impulsively to try and protect the truth about his wife’s murder from getting out.
Elizabeth and company confront John, who doesn’t deny their accusations. Instead of taking him to the police, they allow him his wish of a last moment alone with his wife, Penny. They oblige, knowing that John will inject both himself and Penny with fentanyl, taking their own lives to avoid arrest.
The fate of Cooper’s Chase
One last mystery remains for the residents of Coopers Chase: who will purchase the property? With the possibility of the building being redeveloped as apartment buildings or a bougie event space, the residents are unsure of their futures. Thankfully, there’s hope, as Coopers Chase is sold to Joyce’s daughter, Joanna (Ingrid Oliver, who’s married to the author of The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman). Joanna sees what a positive impact Coopers Chase has had on Joyce and keeps it as it is, free from the keen hands of land developers.
In the final moments of The Thursday Murder Club, Joyce is made an official member of the Thursday Murder Club. We see Ron and his son Jason (Tom Ellis) watching football together, Elizabeth and Stephen dancing on their anniversary, and Ibrahim and Joyce sharing photographs and enjoying memories. While things are peaceful for now, there’s no doubt that another case is just around the corner for these intrepid club members.