The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

by Kate Summerscale

  Parsons explained to Whicher the conclusions he had drawn from the post-mortem. He had become convinced that Saville must have been partly or fully suffocated before he was attacked with a knife. This would account for the darkness around his lips, and the lack of blood on the privy walls: the boy's heart had been stilled before the wound was inflicted on his throat, so that his blood, instead of exploding in jets and sparkles, had leaked slowly away into the vault beneath the lavatory. The real murder weapon, Parsons believed, was not a knife but a length of cloth. Joseph Stapleton, with whom Parsons had performed the post-mortem, disagreed with the suffocation theory: Stapleton was sure that the throat-cutting was the cause of death, and that the blackening of Saville's lips was a result of his being left head-down in the privy. He suggested that most of the boy's blood had soaked into the blanket.

  The difference in the doctors' views had important implications. If Saville was suffocated, and the stab wounds were made merely to disguise the cause of death, he might have been killed impulsively in order to secure his silence. The killers could have been his nursemaid and his father, surprised in bed. It was much harder to believe in this scenario if Saville was the victim of a furious knife attack.

  Parsons didn't countenance the scenario anyway. He was sure that Constance was the killer. When he had examined the nightdress lying on her bed on the Saturday of the murder, he said, he found it not just clean but 'remarkably clean'. He thought it was a fresh nightgown, rather than one that had been six days in use. He had indicated as much to Foley, but the Superintendent had ignored the hint. Parsons told Whicher that Constance had a history of instability and spite. He was convinced, he said, that she was 'affected with homicidal madness', and he imagined that the cause lay in her blood.

  Nineteenth-century physicians who specialised in mental illness, known as mad-doctors or alienists, believed that most madness was hereditary: the mother was the strongest source, and the daughter the most likely recipient. The first Mrs Kent was said to have undergone a bout of insanity while pregnant with Constance, and a child born in such circumstances was thought all the more liable to go mad herself: in 1881 George Henry Savage wrote that two babies he encountered at Bethlehem asylum 'were saturated with insanity while still in the womb . . . these infants seemed to be perfect little devils from birth'. Another theory - psychological rather than physiological - was that brooding on one's hereditary taint of madness could itself bring it on (this idea drove the plot of Wilkie Collins' 'Mad Monkton', a short story of 1852). The result was the same. Parsons told Whicher that he 'would not sleep in a house where Miss Constance was without having his door secured'.

  There was a danger that Parsons' allegations about Constance would rebound on him. In the late 1850s several medical men were found to have consigned sane women to asylums - the ease of getting a doctor to testify to a woman's madness had become a national scandal. A parliamentary select committee investigated the phenomenon in 1858, and The Woman in White was dramatising it in 1860. The public was familiar, now, with the figure of the physician who falsely declared a woman insane.

  Back in Road, Whicher put the breast flannel on display in the Temperance Hall and invited the villagers to identify it. This flannel, said the reporter for the Somerset and Wilts Journal, must have been used to administer chloroform to Saville or to stifle his screams; the only other explanation for its presence in the privy, he wrote, was that it was 'accidentally dropped from the murderer while bending over to accomplish the bloody work, which would appear to indicate a person in a state of comparative nudity'. From the fact of the flannel, the reporter conjured up the image of an almost naked woman stabbing the boy in the privy. He had become so infected with the search for significance that he had forgotten a fourth possibility: the flannel might have nothing to do with the murder at all.

  Whicher pointed out in his report that the privy was used by all the servants of Road Hill House, and by visiting tradesmen and women. The flannel had not been found with the body, but on the 'soft soil' in the cesspool beneath it. The detective observed that 'it is quite possible it was down the privy before the murder, and if the person it belongs to has been shewn it since they may from fear of being suspected deny any knowledge of it'.* It took a cool head to accept that an apparently banal object was, sometimes, truly banal, and that people might lie not because they were guilty, but because they were scared. Whicher identified one further possibility: perhaps the murderer had dropped the flannel in the privy to trick the police: 'It may have been put there by design,' he noted, 'to throw suspicion on an innocent person.'

  The breast flannel was one of several loose ends in the case that the investigators - police, reporters, newspaper readers - tried to endow with meaning, to turn into a clue. While a murder went unsolved, everything was potentially significant, packed with secrets. The observers, like paranoiacs, saw messages everywhere. Objects could regain their innocence only when the killer was caught.

  Since Whicher was sure that the murderer was an inmate of the house, all his suspects were still at the scene. This was the original country-house murder mystery, a case in which the investigator had to find not a person but a person's hidden self. It was pure whodunnit, a contest of intelligence and nerve between the detective and the killer. Here were the twelve. One was the victim. Which was the traitor?

  To get at the inner thoughts and feelings of the Kent house-hold was more a matter of instinct than logic, what Charlotte Brontee described as 'sensitiveness - that peculiar, apprehensive, detective faculty'. A vocabulary was emerging to capture the elusive new detective methods. In 1849 the word 'hunch' was first used to mean a push or nudge towards a solution. In the 1850s 'lead' gained the meaning of a guiding indication or a clue.

  Whicher observed the inhabitants of Road Hill House, their tics and intonations, the unconscious movements of their bodies and faces. He deduced their characters from their behaviour. In his own phrase, he 'reckoned 'em up'. An unnamed detective tried to explain this process to the journalist Andrew Wynter by describing how he caught a swell mobsman at a ceremony in Berkshire in 1856, when the Queen was laying the foundation stone of Wellington College, near Crowthorne. 'If you ask me to give my reason why I thought this person a thief the moment I saw him, I could not tell you,' said the detective. 'I did not even know myself. There was something about him, as about all swell mobsmen, that immediately attracted my attention, and led me to bend my eye upon them [sic]. He did not appear to notice my watching him, but passed into the thick of the crowd, but then he turned and looked towards the spot in which I was - this was enough for me, although I had never seen him before, and he had not to my knowledge attempted any pocket. I immediately made my way towards him, and tapping him on the shoulder, asked him abruptly, "What do you do here?" Without any hesitation, he said in an under tone, "I should not have come if I had known I should have seen any of you." I then asked him if he was working with any companions, and he said, "No, upon my word, I am alone;" upon this I took him off to the room which we had provided for the safe keeping of the swell mobsmen.' The detective's boldness, his instinct for a person being 'wrong', his familiarity with the swell mob and the plain, dramatic manner in which he told his story, suggest that Wynter's informant was Whicher. And there were telltale tics in his language: Whicher used the phrase 'That was enough for me' in a conversation recorded by Dickens.

  It was hard to communicate in words the sorts of subtle movements on which a detective based his hunches: the momentary grimace, the fleeting gesture. The Edinburgh detective inspector James McLevy made a good go of it in the memoirs he published in 1861. As he watched a servant girl at a window, 'I could even notice the eye, nervous and snatchy, and the secret-like movement of withdrawing the head as she saw the man, and then protruding it a bit when she saw him busy.' The journalist William Russell, in one of the detective stories he published as 'Waters' in the 1850s, tried to capture the complexities of looking: 'her glare, for such it was, continuing fixed upo
n me - yet an introspective glare - searching the records of her own brain as well as the tablet of my face - considering, comparing both'. This formulation caught the way the accomplished detective worked: he looked keenly out at the world and, simultaneously, as sharply inwards, searching the records of his memory. The eyes of others were the books to be read, his own experience the dictionary that enabled him to read.

  Whicher claimed he could see people's thoughts in their eyes. 'The eye,' he told William Wills, 'is the great detector. We can tell in a crowd what a swell-mobsman is about by the expression of his eye.' Whicher's experience 'guided him into tracks quite invisible to other eyes', wrote Wills. In faces, said McLevy, 'you can always find something readable . . . I am seldom out when I get my eyes on them.'

  Whicher read bodies as well as faces - a twitch, a start, a rustle of hands beneath a cape, a sharp nod to an accomplice, a dart into an alley. He once arrested two well-dressed young men who had been loitering outside the Adelphi and Lyceum theatres because he 'suspected their movements' (when he searched them, he discovered that they did not have the money to pay for even the cheapest tickets in the pit, which confirmed his guess that they had been planning to pick pockets). His eye for the suspect movement had found him the diamonds stolen by Emily Lawrence and Louisa Moutot.

  The seemingly supernatural sight of the early detective was crystallised by Dickens in Inspector Bucket, a 'mechanism of observation' with 'an unlimited number of eyes' who 'mounts a high tower in his mind and looks out far and wide'. The 'velocity and certainty' of Mr Bucket's interpretations was 'little short of miraculous'. The mid-Victorians were transfixed by the idea that faces and bodies could be 'read', that the inner life was imprinted on the shapes of the features and the flutter of the fingers. Perhaps the fascination stemmed from the premium placed on privacy: it was terrifying and thrilling that thoughts were visible, that the inner life, so jealously guarded, could be instantly exposed. People's bodies might betray them, like the heartbeats of the killer in Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart' (1843), which seemed to pound out his guilt. Later in the century, the unconscious give-aways of gesture and speech were to underpin the theories of Sigmund Freud.

  The standard text on the art of face-reading was John Caspar Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy (1855). The physiognomist's 'eye, in particular, must be excellent, clear, acute, rapid and firm', wrote Lavater. 'Precision in observation is the very soul of physiognomy. The physiognomist must possess a most delicate, swift, certain, most extensive spirit of observation. To observe is to be selective.' As with detective work, the man with a good eye was the man who could discriminate, could see what mattered. 'The necessary knowledge is that of what to observe,' says Poe's Auguste Dupin. Detectives and physiognomists shared this excellence of the eye, which mirrored (perhaps even challenged) the Eye of Heaven that saw into the soul.

  'There is nothing truer than physiognomy,' says the narrator of Dickens' short story 'Hunted Down' (1859), 'taken in connection with manner.' He explains how he formed his judgement of a man named Slinkton. 'I took his face to pieces in my mind, like a watch, and examined it in detail. I could not say much against any of his features separately; I could say even less against them when they were put together. "Then is it not monstrous," I asked myself, "that because a man happens to part his hair straight up the middle of his head, I should permit myself to suspect, and even to detest him?" ' Yet he defends his violent dislike of Slinkton's centre parting: 'An observer of men who finds himself steadily repelled by some apparently trifling thing in a stranger is right to give it great weight. It may be the clue to the whole mystery. A hair or two will show where a lion is hidden. A very little key will open a very heavy door.' Faces and bodies held clues and keys; tiny things answered huge questions.

  In his account of the Road Hill murder, Stapleton claimed that the secrets of the Kent family were written all over their faces. 'Nothing perhaps reveals more faithfully the history and secrets of a family than the countenances and expression of its children,' he wrote. 'Upon their countenances, in their behaviour and in their tempers, in their faults, and even in their very gestures and expression, there is written the history of their homes; as surely as upon the growing plant are found features correspondent to the nature of the soil in which it grew, to the storm that has torn its young tendrils and beat upon its tender shoots, to the care that pruned and watered it . . . Most truly may the physiognomy of children be regarded as the best index of the family weather.' Stapleton's rhetoric drew on the swirl of early Victorian ideas that had culminated in Darwin's The Origin of Species, published the year before - Darwin looked forward to a time 'when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor'. People had become the sum of their pasts.

  All the visitors to Road Hill House in the weeks after the murder scanned the inhabitants for clues. Most literally, the medical men examined Saville's corpse to read the story that it told. Others studied the faces and bodies of the living inmates of the house. Rowland Rodway said of Elizabeth Gough: 'I observed on her face traces of emotion and fatigue.' Albert Groser, a young reporter who sneaked into the house on the day of the murder, noticed Gough's 'agitated, troubled' demeanour. But where their suspicions were aroused by the nursemaid's frowns and fidgets, Whicher was to find his traces in absences, silences.

  In his report to Sir Richard Mayne, Whicher outlined what he had noticed about the Kent family. Mr and Mrs Kent were 'doating' towards their younger children. William was 'very dejected'. Constance and William had a 'sympathy' and a 'close intimacy' ('close' in 1860 meant secretive). Whicher took account of how the family reacted to Saville's death. When Elizabeth Gough was 'telling the two elder Miss Kents that the child had been taken away during the night', he wrote, 'Miss Constance opened her door dressed, heard what was being said, but made no remark.' Constance's composure, then and afterwards, might seem to betoken an easy conscience, a peaceful inner life, but a more sinister construction could be put on it. Coolness was a prerequisite for an artful crime.

  The puzzle of the Road Hill case lay in the killer's peculiar combination of heat and cold, planning and passion. Whoever had murdered, mutilated and defiled Saville Kent must be horribly disturbed, possessed by unnaturally strong feelings; yet the same person, in remaining so far undiscovered, had shown startling powers of self-control. Whicher took Constance's cold quiet as a clue that she had killed her brother.

  Whicher's confrontation with Constance over the nightdress may have been designed as an experiment on her nerves. If so, her unruffled blankness only confirmed his suspicions. As with the expressionless manner, so with the vanished nightdress: the clues lay in the gaps, in the hints of things hidden. What Whicher thought he saw in Constance was as slight as what Mr Bucket detected in the murderess Madame Hortense, 'her arms composedly crossed . . . [but] something in her dark cheek beating like a clock'. And Whicher's conviction of his suspect's guilt was as sure as Bucket's: 'By the living Lord it flashed upon me . . . that she had done it!' Or, in the words of Wilkie Collins' Sergeant Cuff, the fictional detective whom Whicher inspired: 'I don't suspect. I know.'

  Even before Whicher's arrival, the Road Hill case had spawned would-be sleuths among the readers of English newspapers. They sent their tips to the police. 'I have had a dream which has given me a deal of uneasiness,' wrote a man from Stoke-on-Trent. 'I dreamed I saw 3 men making up the plot at a house near Finished Building, about half a mile from the sean of murder . . . I can give a minute description of the men I saw in my dream.' A newspaper vendor in Reading, Berkshire, suspected a man who had visited her shop on 4 July because he had asked 'in a tremulous way' whether there was anything about the murder in the previous day's Daily Telegraph.

  On the day that Whicher reached Road another stranger had visited the village, introducing himself as a professor of phrenology. He offered to examine the heads of the murder suspects
: by feeling the contours of their skulls, he claimed, he could determine who was guilty. A bump behind the ear indicated destructiveness; the part of the skull just above that was the seat of secretiveness. This was probably the same phrenologist who a week earlier had written from Warminster, five miles away, offering his services to the police. He practised a 'tried, disinterested science', he assured them: 'I find it as easy to detect the murderer's head, as it is to select a tiger from a sheep.' The police declined the offers - in 1860 phrenology was widely dismissed as quackery. But in some ways it was a close cousin of detective work. Much of the excitement about detection lay in its novelty, its mystery and its aura of science, the same qualities that had once attended phrenology. Poe wrote of his own detective stories: 'These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious - but people think them more ingenious than they are - on account of their method and air of method.'

  It was possible that Whicher's speculations were no better founded than those of any other observer of the crime. Detectives, like phrenologists, might be masters of mystification, men who cloaked common sense in complexity, dressed up guesses as science.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SHAPE-SHIFTERS

  18 July

  The warm weather held on Wednesday, though clouds passed over the West Country in the afternoon, obscuring a partial eclipse of the sun. The local police maintained a strict surveillance on Road Hill House, and distributed a thousand handbills advertising the PS200 reward for information that led to the conviction of Saville's murderer.

  Whicher broadened his inquiries further. He took the train from Trowbridge to Bristol, and hired a cab for two hours in Bath. There he interviewed the police and the owner of the Greyhound Hotel about an odd episode that had taken place four years earlier, in July 1856.