The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

by Kate Summerscale

  Straight afterwards she sent Martha to Road Hill House to tell the Kents that one of their nightdresses was missing, and that she had concealed this from the police. Mrs Kent called Sarah Cox and Mary Ann Kent to the library. They insisted they had packed three nightdresses, while Martha Holley swore that only two had been in the baskets.

  Martha reported back to her mother, who at about six that evening went in person to the house: 'I saw Mrs Kent, the two Miss Kents, the housemaid, and cook; and Mr Kent spoke to me from his room door, and told me, not as a gentleman would speak, that if I did not produce the nightdress within eight and forty hours he would have me taken up by a special warrant . . . He spoke to me very gruff.'

  On Friday, 6 July, Saville's remains were taken away for burial. The Western Daily Press reported that as the coffin was being carried across the grounds of Road Hill House, 'the list bands by which the bearers carried it snapped asunder, just after the group passed the water-closet [the privy], and before they reached the lawn gate, and the coffin fell down upon the gravel, where it remained until fresh bands were brought from the house'. A crowd of villagers watched as a coach bore away the coffin and the two family mourners, Samuel and William Kent. (Women did not usually attend funerals, though they adopted their mourning clothes on the burial day.)

  Saville's funeral procession passed through Trowbridge at 9.30 a.m., reaching the village of East Coulston half an hour or so later. The boy's body was buried in the family vault alongside the remains of Samuel's first wife. The inscription on his gravestone closed with the words, 'SHALL NOT GOD SEARCH THIS OUT? FOR HE KNOWETH THE SECRETS OF THE HEART.' One newspaper report described the 'intense grief' displayed by both Samuel and William; another attributed 'intense emotion' only to Samuel. He had to be helped by a friend from the churchyard to his coach.

  Four friends of the family - three doctors and a lawyer - attended the funeral: Benjamin Mallam, Saville's godfather, who practised as a surgeon in Frome; Joshua Parsons; Joseph Stapleton; and Rowland Rodway. They shared a coach back to Road, and discussed the murder. Parsons told the others that Mrs Kent had asked him to certify Constance as a lunatic.

  Superintendent Foley continued to lead the investigation, though several other senior officers visited Road that week. The police looked in the spare rooms of Road Hill House and searched some uninhabited buildings at the bottom of the lawn. They tried to drag the river near the house, but found the water was too high - the Frome had flooded its banks only a few weeks earlier. They seemed to be getting no closer to clearing up the mystery, and even before the week was out the Wiltshire magistrates had applied to the Home Office to send a Scotland Yard detective. The request was refused. 'Now that the County Police is established,' pointed out the Permanent Under-Secretary, Horatio Waddington, 'the assistance of London officers is seldom resorted to.' The magistrates announced that they would open their own inquiry on Monday.

  Since the dispute about the nightdress was unresolved, Mrs Holley refused to take in the family's washing on Monday, 9 July. That morning Foley sent Eliza Dallimore to Road Hill House with the breast flannel he had found in the privy. 'Mrs Dallimore,' said Foley, 'you must try this piece of flannel on them girls, and on the nurse.' Its stains were now washed away, the stench of blood and dirt having become overpowering.

  Dallimore took Cox and Kerslake up to their room on the second floor and told them to undress. She asked them to try on the flannel, and found it was not wide enough for either. Next she told Elizabeth Gough to undress in the nursery. Gough complained: 'It's of no use. If the flannel fits me, that's no reason that I should have done the murder.' She took off her stays and tried on the flannel. It fitted.

  'Well, it might fit a great many,' Mrs Dallimore conceded. 'It fits me. But there's no one in the house I have fitted it on to but you.' Foley had not instructed her to try the flannel on Mrs Kent or her three stepdaughters.

  The same Monday, a week after the inquest, the five Wiltshire magistrates opened what the Somerset and Wilts Journal described as a 'profoundly secret' inquiry at the Temperance Hall, to which they summoned several of the inhabitants of Road Hill House. Mrs Kent told them that she believed the murderer was an inmate of the house, 'some one who knew the premises'. 'I have no reason to blame nurse,' she added. 'The only thing I blame her for is not telling me the instant she missed the child.'

  The police working on the case suspected Elizabeth Gough. They thought it almost impossible that the child had been abducted from the nursery without the nursemaid's knowledge. The scenario that had shaped itself out in their minds was that Saville had woken up and seen a man in Gough's bed. To silence the boy, the lovers stopped his mouth and - by accident or design - suffocated him. Gough herself had depicted Saville as a tell-tale: 'The little boy goes into his mamma's room and tells everything.' The couple then mutilated the body to disguise the cause of death, the police surmised. If the lover was Samuel Kent, he could have disposed of the evidence when he rode off to Trowbridge. In the fuss and hurry, and because the pair had to be careful not to be seen conferring, their stories had clashed and changed: notably, their accounts of when they missed the blanket. This scenario also accounted for Gough's inadequate explanation of why she failed to rouse her mistress when she noticed that Saville was missing.

  At eight o'clock in the evening of Tuesday, 10 July - William Kent's fifteenth birthday - the magistrates directed the police to apprehend Elizabeth Gough.

  'Previous to being informed of the decision of the magistrates,' reported the Bath Chronicle, 'the girl was apparently in the highest spirits, at the house where the several witnesses stopped, and talked in a very off-handed manner of how she should have enjoyed herself at the haymaking, had not this "business" occurred. She said she was so conscious of her innocence in the matter, that she should not be afraid to go before a hundred judges and be examined.'

  Her bravado swiftly fell away. 'On being told that she would be detained for the present, she fell senseless to the ground.' The Somerset and Wilts Journal described her as having succumbed to a 'fit of hysterics'. She was 'unconscious for a few minutes'. When she had regained her senses Foley took her in a trap, a two-wheeled pony cart, to the police station in Stallard Street, Trow-bridge. The superintendent lived in the station house with his wife, his son (a lawyer's clerk) and a servant. The Dallimores - William, the constable, Eliza, the searcher, and their three children - also lived on the premises, and they were given custody of Gough. The nursemaid and the searcher shared a bed.

  During her stay at the police station Gough told Foley and his wife that she was sure Constance was not the murderer.

  'Was it you?' Foley asked.

  'No,' she said.

  She remarked to another policeman that she had decided 'never to love another child'. He asked her why. Because, she said, 'this is the second time that something has occurred to a child to which I was attached. In a former place where I lived two years there was a child I was very fond of, and it died.'

  A rumour spread that she had confessed, naming Samuel as the murderer and herself as accessory. Several other rumours came into circulation during the week, all of them implicating Samuel: people said that Saville's life was insured, that the body of the first Mrs Kent was being exhumed for a post-mortem, that Samuel was seen in the grounds of his house at three o'clock on the morning of the murder.

  On Friday Elizabeth Gough was taken back to Road to be examined. She waited at the house of Charles Stokes, a saddler who lived next to the Temperance Hall, while the magistrates went to Road Hill House. After a while the saddler's sister Ann, a maker of corsets and dresses, remarked on how long the magistrates had been gone: 'I suspect something has been found out,' she said. Gough 'manifested some alarm' and paced the room restlessly. 'I hope I shall not be called in today, for I feel I shall be as bad as I was on Tuesday,' she said, alluding to her bout of hysteria.

  'Pressing her hands to her side,' reported Ann Stokes, 'she said she felt as if the blood had gone f
rom one side to the other. She also said that she could not hold out much longer, and that she could not have held out so long but that Mrs Kent had begged of her to do so.' Gough claimed that Mrs Kent had urged her on: 'You must hold up a little longer, Elizabeth; do for my sake.' Afterwards, said Ann Stokes, Gough 'remarked that she had since the murder pulled some grey hairs from her head, which she had never done before, that no one knew how she suffered, and that if anything else occurred she thought she should die'.

  In Road Hill House the magistrates interviewed Mrs Kent and Mary Ann Kent. Neither had been able to come to the Temperance Hall, the former because her pregnancy was so advanced, the latter because she was 'seized with violent hysterical fits, on hearing that her presence would be required'.

  When the magistrates returned to the hall they summoned Gough. Eight reporters had turned up, but none was admitted - the proceedings were strictly private, they were told. A policeman stood outside to make sure no one got close enough to the doors to eavesdrop.

  At about seven o'clock that evening, the magistrates adjourned the inquiry and told Gough she was free to spend the weekend with her father and cousin, who had arrived that afternoon from Isleworth, near London, as long as she returned to the Temperance Hall on Monday. She said she would remain at the police station in Trowbridge. The magistrates probably reassured her before releasing her, for when she reached the town she 'appeared quite cheerful', reported the Bath Chronicle, 'and jumped from the trap in a lively manner'.

  On Tuesday, 10 July, an editorial in the Morning Post, an influential national newspaper, ridiculed the efforts of the Wiltshire police to discover Saville's killer. It criticised the rushed, peremptory way the coroner had conducted the inquest, and demanded that the investigation into the child's death be taken over by 'the most experienced of detectives'. The article argued that the security of all the homes of England rested on uncovering the secrets of Road Hill House. It acknowledged that this would mean violating a sacred space:

  Every Englishman is accustomed to pride himself with more than usual complacency upon what is called the sanctity of an English home. No soldier, no policeman, no spy of the Government dare enter it . . . Unlike the tenant of a foreign domicile, the occupier of an English house, whether it be mansion or cottage, possesses an indisputable title against every kind of aggression upon his threshold. He defies everybody below the Home Secretary; and even he can only violate the traditional security of a man's house under extreme circumstances, and with the prospect of a Parliamentary indemnity. It is with this thoroughly innate feeling of security that every Englishman feels a strong sense of the inviolability of his own house. It is this that converts the moorside cottage into a castle. The moral sanctions of an English home are, in the nineteenth century, what the moat, and the keep, and the drawbridge were in the fourteenth. In the strength of these we lie down to sleep at night, and leave our homes in the day, feeling that a whole neighbourhood would be raised, nay, the whole country, were any attempt made to violate what so many traditions, and such long custom, have rendered sacred.

  These sentiments were felt deeply in Victorian England. On a visit to the country in the late 1840s Dr Carus, physician to the King of Saxony, noted that the English house embodied 'the long-cherished principle of separation and retirement' that lay 'at the very foundation of the national character . . . it is this that gives the Englishman that proud feeling of personal independence, which is stereotyped in the phrase, "Every man's house is his castle." ' The American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that domesticity was the 'taproot' that enabled the British to 'branch wide and high. The motive and end of their trade and empire is to guard the independence and privacy of their homes.'

  The Morning Post of 10 July 1860 held that 'in spite of all these proverbial sanctities, a crime has just been committed which for mystery, complication of probabilities, and hideous wickedness, is without parallel in our criminal records . . . the security of families, and the sacredness of English house-holds demand that this matter should never be allowed to rest till the last shadow in its dark mystery shall have been chased away by the light of unquestionable truth'. The horror of this case was that the corruption lay inside the 'domestic sanctum', that the bolts, locks and fastenings of the house were hopelessly redundant. 'The secret lies with someone who was within . . . the house-hold collectively must be responsible for this mysterious and dreadful event. Not one of them ought to be at large till the whole mystery is cleared up . . . one (or more) of the family is guilty.' The Morning Post article was reprinted in The Times the next day, and in newspapers throughout the country over the rest of the week. 'Let the best detective talent in the country be engaged,' demanded the Somerset and Wilts Journal.

  On Thursday a Wiltshire magistrate renewed his plea to the Home Secretary to send a detective to Road, and this time the request was granted. On Saturday, 14 July, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Lord Palmerston's Home Secretary, instructed Sir Richard Mayne, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, to dispatch 'an intelligent officer' to Wiltshire as soon as possible. 'Inspector Whicher to go,' Mayne scribbled on the back of the Home Office directive.

  The same day Detective-Inspector Jonathan Whicher received his orders to head for Road.

  PART TWO

  THE DETECTIVE

  'I set forth to pave the way for discovery -

  the dark and doubtful way'

  From The Woman in White (1860), by Wilkie Collins

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A MAN OF MYSTERY

  1 October 1814- 15 July 1860

  It was still light as Whicher's train rolled towards west Wiltshire on that Sunday in 1860. Usually by July the pastures were broken up with blocks of yellow - tawny wheat or bright gold corn - but this year the summer had come so late that the crops were green as grass.

  At 6.20 p.m. the train pulled into Trowbridge - a forest of factory towers and chimneys - and Whicher stepped out onto the railway station's narrow platform. The first building he came to as he left the ticket hall was John Foley's police station on Stallard Street, a two-storey structure dating from 1854, when the local force was founded. This was where Elizabeth Gough was being detained, of her own volition, until her examination was resumed the next day.

  Trowbridge had made money from cloth for centuries. The coming of the railway in 1848 had brought even more prosperity - now, with a population of eleven thousand, it was the biggest factory town in the south of England. Wool mills and dyeing houses spread out to the left and right of the station - about twenty of them, powered by more than thirty steam engines. These were the factories that Samuel Kent inspected. On a Sunday evening they lay idle, but in the morning the machines would start to pound and whirr, and the air would thicken with smoke, soot, the smells of urine (collected in tubs from public houses and used to scour wool) and of the vegetable dyes streaming into the river Biss.

  Whicher hired a porter to carry his luggage to the Woolpack Inn, Market Place, half a mile from the station. The pair crossed the bridge over the Biss - a small, slow tributary of the Avon - and walked to the town centre. They passed the houses of the Parade, a terrace built by rich Georgian clothiers, and the side streets crammed with weavers' cottages. Trade had been poor that year. Many sheep had died over the harsh winter, so wool was scarcer than usual, and the competitive mill-owners of northern England were selling their muslin cheap.

  When Whicher reached the Woolpack, on the corner of Red Hat Lane, he paid the porter sixpence and went in. The inn was a compact stone building, with an arch at its centre, which offered rooms at is.6d. a night. Wine, cider, spirits and home-brewed ale were sold at the bar. Whicher may have ordered a drink or two: when in a tight spot, he once told Dickens, 'I couldn't do better than have a drop of brandy-and-water to keep my courage up.'

  Jonathan Whicher was born in Camberwell, three miles south of London, on 1 October 1814. His father was a gardener, probably one of the village's many market gardeners, who grew cherries, lettuces, roses
and willow for sale in the city. He may have tended the lawns and flowerbeds of the richer residents of the district - Camberwell was studded with the stucco villas and ornamental cottages of merchants seeking an airy retreat from London.

  On the day of Jonathan's baptism, 23 October, the curate of St Giles parish church also christened the child of another gardener, and the babies of a shoemaker, a cabinetmaker, two coachmen, a flutemaker and a labourer. In one of the many variants to which his surname was prey, Jonathan was recorded as the son of Richard and Rebecca Whitcher. He was known as Jack. He had an older sister, Eliza, and at least one older brother, James. Another sister, Sarah, was born in August 1819, when he was four. That summer was remembered for its abundance of Camberwell Beauties, the large, velvety, dark-claret butterflies first seen in the area in 1748.

  In the mid-1830s Jack Whicher was still living in Camber-well, probably in Providence Row, a small terrace of cottages at the northern, poorer end of the village. The cottages lay on Wyndham Road, close to a mill and backing onto nursery gardens, but in a wretched neighbourhood - 'as proverbial for its depravity as for its ignorance', according to a report published by the local school. Wyndham Road was frequented by shifty types - hawkers, costermongers, chimney sweeps - and by outright villains.

  When Jack Whicher applied to join the Metropolitan Police in the late summer of 1837 he was just old enough, at twenty-two, and just tall enough, at five feet eight inches, to meet the entrance requirements. He passed the tests for literacy and physical fitness, and two 'respectable house-holders' of his parish vouched for his good character. Like more than a third of the early recruits, he was working as a labourer when he submitted his application.

  On 18 September, Whicher became a police constable. His weekly wage - about PS1 - was only a slight improvement on his previous earnings, but his future was now a little more secure.