The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

by Kate Summerscale

  During Whicher's inquiries the Frome Times made 'an indignant protest against the conduct of some of the representatives of the press. We have been informed on reliable authority that one person penetrated into the house in the guise of a detective, - while another had the audacity to force himself into the presence of Mr Kent, and to ask of him the particulars of the murder of his son! In our opinion, this person's audacity and hard-heartedness can scarcely be equalled by the villain who perpetrated the dreadful crime.' This rhetoric, also deployed by Edlin, was made possible by the mid-Victorian sensitivity to 'exposure', to scandal and loss of privacy. The inquiries into a middle-class home, by the press and above all by the detectives, were felt as a series of assaults. Exposure could destroy, as murder made clear - when the lungs, airways, arteries, heart were suddenly opened to the air, they collapsed. Stapleton described Saville's death in these terms: the inhabitant of the 'house of life' had been 'rudely driven out by an unauthorised and violent intruder'.

  The word 'detect' stemmed from the Latin 'de-tegere' or 'unroof', and the original figure of the detective was the lame devil Asmodeus, 'the prince of demons', who took the roofs off houses to spy on the lives inside. 'The Devil Asmodeus is the Devil of Observation', explained the French novelist Jules Janin. In his book about the Road Hill murder, Stapleton used the figure of Asmodeus, 'peering into the privacies' of the Kent family house, to embody the public fascination with the case.

  'If every room of a house were seen into by a secret watcher,' wrote the Scottish detective McLevy in 1861, 'it would be a show-box even more wonderful than a travelling exhibition.' A plainclothes police officer was just such a secret watcher, a man licensed to pry. The detective hero might at any moment turn to reveal his grinning double, the voyeur.

  'Angel and devil by turns, eh?' remarks Mr Bucket.

  After Constance was bailed, Whicher told Ludlow that he saw no point in remaining in Wiltshire. 'I did not see any hope of getting further evidence by prolonging my stay,' he said in his report, 'as the only piece of further evidence would be to find the night dress which I feared was destroyed.' Ludlow agreed that he should go. He assured Whicher that he was convinced of Constance's guilt, and would send letters to that effect to Sir George Cornewall Lewis, the Home Secretary, and to Mayne. Henry Clark composed the letters at once: 'We are requested by the magistrates . . . to convey to you their thanks for the services of Mr Inspector Whicher and Mr Sgt Williamson. Although the evidence failed in establishing the guilt of the person arrested yet the magistrates are fully impressed with the idea that Miss Constance Kent is the guilty party and hope that evidence may yet be forthcoming to bring the perpetrator of the crime to justice. They are thoroughly satisfied with the exertions made by the officers above mentioned.'

  Whicher and Williamson returned to London the next day. Whicher took with him the relics of his investigation: Constance's two remaining nightdresses, her list of linen, the bloodied piece of newspaper. In the new edition of All the Year Round, the hero of The Woman in White also finished his inquiries in the country. The episode ended: 'Half an hour later I was speeding back to London by the express train.'

  That weekend there were severe thunderstorms around Road. Lightning lit the fields, the river Frome rose almost three feet, and hail thrashed down the corn.

  During the proceedings in the Temperance Hall, Mrs Kent had gone into labour. 'The agitation and suspense of awaiting the result of the re-examination proved too great for her,' reported the Bath Chronicle, 'and the consequence was, premature labour set in.' It was rumoured that the baby was stillborn, but this proved false. Mrs Kent gave birth to a boy on Monday, 30 July, a month after her first son's murder, and named him Acland Saville Kent.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  DETECTIVE-FEVER

  London, July-August 1860

  Whicher reached Paddington station in the afternoon of Saturday, 28 July, and hailed a cab to take him and his luggage to Pimlico - probably to 31 Holywell Street, off Millbank Row. This was the house in which his niece, Sarah Whicher, an unmarried housekeeper of thirty, rented a room, and it was the address he gave as his own three years later.* In the 1850s, his friend and colleague Charley Field lived at number 27, with his wife and mother-in-law, while Whicher's niece Mary Ann worked as a servant to a family of upholsterers at number 40.

  The district was changing swiftly. To the west, Victoria railway station was almost complete, and to the north Sir Charles Barry's gothic Palace of Westminster was also nearly finished - the 'Big Ben' clock had been put in place a year before, though as yet it had only one hand and no chime. On the new Westminster bridge thirteen limelight lamps had been installed that summer: these were powered by a series of tiny explosions of oxygen and hydrogen that made the sticks of lime so hot that they burnt white, giving off a brilliant incandescence. Dickens visited Mill-bank one warm day in January 1861, and headed west along the river: 'I walked straight on for three miles on a splendid broad esplanade overhanging the Thames, with immense factories, railway work, and what not, erected on it, and with the strangest beginnings and ends of wealthy streets pushing themselves into the very Thames. When I was a rower on that river it was all broken ground and ditch, with here and there a public house or two, an old mill, and a tall chimney. I had never seen it in any state of transition, though I suppose myself to know this rather large city as well as anyone in it.'

  The part of Millbank in which Whicher lived was a noisy, industrial riverside neighbourhood of mean yellow terraces, dominated by the great six-pronged flower of Millbank prison. The novelist Anthony Trollope described the area as 'extremely dull, and one might almost say, ugly'. Holywell Street was separated from the prison's boundary wall only by gasometers, a sawmill and a marble works. Number 31 backed onto these, and faced a huge brewery and a burial ground. Broadwood's piano factory lay a block north, and Seager's gin distillery a block south. Just beyond the distillery, coal barges were moored at the wharfs, while on the far side of the river lay the vast potteries and putrid bone-grinding factories of Lambeth. Paddle steamers carried Londoners to and from work, churning up the sewage poured into the Thames - the air was thick with the stench rising off the river.

  On Monday, 30 July, Jack Whicher went to his office at Scotland Yard, just over a mile north of Holywell Street, along the Thames past the noxious slums of the 'Devil's Acre' and then the high buildings of Westminster and Whitehall. The public entrance to the police headquarters was in Great Scotland Yard, though its address was 4 Whitehall Place. There was a large clock on the wall that looked over the yard, a weathervane on the roof, and fifty rooms within. These had housed the Metropolitan Police administration since 1829, and the detective force (in three small chambers) since its formation in 1842. The boarding house that Dolly Williamson shared with other single officers stood in a corner of Great Scotland Yard, behind Groves the fishmongers. In another corner was a public house, outside which a drunken old woman sold pigs' trotters on Saturday nights. To the north of the yard was Trafalgar Square, and to the south the river.

  Sir Richard Mayne, whose office was also in Scotland Yard, rated Whicher above all other policemen: in the late 1850s 'every important case was placed in his hands by Sir Richard', reported Tim Cavanagh in his memoirs. Commissioner Mayne, now sixty-six, 'was about five feet eight inches, spare, but well-built', wrote Cavanagh; he had a 'thin face, a very hard compressed mouth, grey hair and whiskers, an eye like that of a hawk, and a slightly limping gait, due, I believe, to rheumatic affection of the hip-joint'. He was 'respected but feared by all in the service'. When Whicher and Williamson got back to work, Mayne duly signed their expenses, including claims for extra pay for being out of town (eleven shillings a day for an inspector, six shillings for a sergeant). The Commissioner passed Whicher a slew of letters from members of the public proposing solutions to the Road Hill case. The letters, addressed to Mayne or the Home Secretary, kept coming throughout the month.

  'I beg to offer you an idea which suggested
itself to me and which might tend to unravel the mystery,' wrote a Mr Farrer. 'I send it to you in perfect confidence, and hope you will keep my name as its author, a strict secret . . . That Eliz Gough the Nurse may have had William Nutt passing the night with her, and the child (FS Kent) waking up, and fearing he might alarm his parents by crying out, they strangled him, and whilst Nutt conveyed the body to the closet she remade the bed.' Mr Farrer added a postscript: 'As Willm Nutt is connected by marriage with the Laundress' family he may have been enabled to abstract the night dress so as to throw suspicion on another party.'

  The theory that Nutt and Gough had killed the boy was, overwhelmingly, the most popular. A writer who thought Constance 'most cruelly used and made a scapegoat' argued that the medical evidence indicated a knife with a 'skew point' had been used in the murder - 'very likely a shoemakers knife very much used.' Nutt was a shoemaker. 'The throat was cut from one ear to the other dividing it all down to the spine, this is more indicative of the power and determination of a man than a nervous girl of 16,' and, 'Shoemakers often have two knives and one might be down the Closet.' A correspondent from Mile End took a similar view, as did the chaplain of the Bath Union Workhouse, Bath, the master of the workhouse in Axbridge, Somersetshire, Mr Minot of Southwark and a Mr Dalton, writing from a hotel in Manchester. A tailor from Cheshire wanted Gough 'put under strickt servilance'.

  A curate from Lancashire, himself a magistrate, gave the fullest account of the theory:

  Though the suspicions I am about to mention have frequently from the commencement of the enquiry been broached in my own family, yet I should have thought it unfair to give them wider range had not the public press (the Morning Post) hinted at the individual named - I mean in the matter of the Kent murder.

  Is it not possible that the nursemaid may have had a paramour either in the house or so well acquainted with the premises that he could gain ready access in the night . . . Of course, from what we have heard one's thoughts fall at once on Nutt . . . If he be an admirer of the girl, should not medical examination establish whether she was likely to have received nightly visits or not? He had all means at command - knives &c - he had the night to work in. He is a connection of the laundress and if the laundress knew of anything going on between these two a suspicion flashed for a moment upon her mind, especially as he had found the body so easily - may she not have been the one to conceal the night-dress and so immediately changed the direction of anything which might then exist in the form of suspicion and fasten it upon that eccentric Miss Kent who sometime ago had run away in man's attire. All these are of course mere suspicions - but when all seems so wide of the mark so far - it leads one to think that the persons employed have gone to work with an a priori view of the case, and rejected or at any rate neglected what did not tell in favour of their own suspicions . . . having had a little experience on the Bench in rather a wild district I have learned to study people's possible motives more than I should otherwise have done.

  In early August Sir George Cornewall Lewis, the Home Secretary, received two letters identifying Elizabeth Gough and a lover as the murderers. One was from a Guildford barrister, who wrote patronisingly of Whicher's efforts: 'A policeman may be a good hand at discovering a criminal: but it requires intellect and a mind enlarged by observation to detect a crime and unravel a mystery.' The other letter was from Sir John Eardley Wilmot of Bath, a baronet and former barrister, who took such a passionate interest in the case that he persuaded Samuel Kent to let him visit Road Hill House and interview a few of the inmates. Horatio Waddington, the formidable Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office, forwarded the letters to Mayne. 'This is now the favourite theory,' Waddington wrote on one of the envelopes, in a spiky hand. 'I should like to hear Inspector Whicher's remarks upon these two letters, surely if the girl had a lover, somebody must have known or at least suspected it.' Once Whicher had complied, with a report outlining his counter-arguments ('I fear that Sir John has not gone sufficiently into the facts . . .'), Waddington agreed: 'I rather incline to the opinion of the police man.'

  When Eardley Wilmot sent another letter, this time suggesting that Gough had a soldier boyfriend, Waddington wrote on the envelope: 'I never heard of this soldier before. I don't know where he picked him up.' The Permanent Under-Secretary scratched his comments on the ensuing stream of letters from the baronet: 'A strange infatuation as it seems to me'; 'This Gentleman has a monomania on the subject'; and 'Does he wish to be employed as a Detective, or what?'

  The letter-writers suggested a few other suspects. George Larkin of Wapping confided:

  Sir, For three successive weeks I have had the Frome Murder in my Mind every time I wake and cannot get rid of the thought of it. That Mr Kent is the Murderer has appeared to me in the following manner and that his offering a reward is all a delusion (Bosh) my impression is that Mr Kent has gone to the Nurse Maids Room for some Purpose, that the child has woke and recognised its Father that the Father through Fear of an Exposure in the Family strangled it in the Room after the Nurse Maid had gone to sleep that he there carried it to the Closet and cut the Throat.

  A resident of Blandford, Dorset, wrote, 'I firmly believe that Mrs Kent killed the child at Road,' while Sarah Cunningham of west London claimed that 'step by step I can trace the murderer in the brother of William Nutt and the son-in-law of Mrs Holly the Laundress'.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Maugham wrote from Hanover Square, London,

  With grace allow me to suggest . . . that inquiries be made as to whether chloroform was kept in the house where the child was murdered . . . if not, whether any had been purchased in the neighbourhood, or at the towns, or villages, where the children of Mr Kent's family had been at school . . . I would further suggest whether any weapon was taken from or purchased in the neighbourhood of the schools.

  In a note to Mayne, Whicher observed that Joshua Parsons had not detected any trace of chloroform in Saville's body. 'As regards the suggestion that a weapon might have been purchased in the Neighbourhood or brought from School by Miss Kent, inquiry has been made on that point already.'

  On most of the letters from the public Whicher scrawled 'There is nothing in this to assist the enquiry'; occasionally he expanded, impatiently, 'all the points having been duly considered previously by me', or 'I saw all the persons alluded to while I was on the spot and am satisfied they are not connected with the murder.'

  The only letter to offer information, rather than speculation, was from William Gee, of Bath: 'As to Mr Kent himself I learn from the widow of a schoolmaster a friend of mine that 4 years ago he was so straitened as not to be able to pay the Bills of the Son PS15 or PS20 half-yearly. I cannot reconcile his occupying so handsome a mansion (second to few in the neighborhood) with the way in which he [illegible] a poor Teacher.' Samuel's failure to pay his son's school bills suggested he was as cash-strapped as Joseph Stapleton implied; it also indicated a carelessness about William's welfare.

  The letters to Scotland Yard were the fruit of a new English obsession with detection. The public was fascinated by murder, especially when it was domestic and mysterious, and was becoming engrossed by the investigation of murder, too. 'I like a good murder that can't be found out,' says Mrs Hopkinson in Emily Eden's novel The Semi-Detached House (1859). 'That is, of course, it is very shocking, but I like to hear about it.' The Road Hill case took the national enthusiasm for baffling crimes to a new level. In The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins dubbed this mania 'a detective-fever'.

  While the press and the public condemned Whicher's prurient, impertinent speculations, they freely made their own. The first detective in English literature, like them, was an armchair detective: Poe's Auguste Dupin solved crimes not by searching for clues at the scene but by picking them out of newspaper reports. The time of the professional police detective had barely begun; the era of the amateur was already in full flower.

  In an anonymous penny pamphlet printed in Manchester - the sixteen-page Who Committed the Road Murder?
Or, The Track of Blood Followed - 'a Disciple of Edgar Allan Poe' poured scorn on Whicher's investigation. 'Hitherto the brilliant "Detective's" effort has been to associate that nightdress with Miss Constance Kent; to prove that her guilt is wrapped up in it! and to find out where it is. All wrong! I perceive her purity in its loss; and, in its loss, another's guilt. The thief purloined that dress to shield herself, by casting suspicion on one of her own sex.' The pamphleteer had already absorbed one tenet of detective fiction: the solution must always be labyrinthine, indirect, paradoxical. The lost nightdress must mean just the opposite of what it seemed to mean: 'I perceive her purity in its loss'.

  The author wondered if the village had been searched thoroughly for bloodstained clothing, if the Road Hill House chimneys had been examined for scraps of burnt evidence, if the records of local knife-sellers had been checked. He or she used an unsettling piece of imaginative reconstruction to argue that, since Saville's throat was cut from left to right, the murderer must be left-handed: 'Draw an imaginary line on the body of a chubby child . . . An ordinary person, committing such a crime, would (in an ordinary way) place his left hand on the child's breast and cut towards him with his right hand.'

  The newspapers too made their conjectures. The Globe blamed William Nutt, the Frome Times pointed at Elizabeth Gough, the Bath Express hinted at William Kent's guilt. The Bath Chronicle - in an article that provoked a libel suit - fixed on Samuel:

  If the hypothesis that a girl had an illicit intrigue, and that the other party to that intrigue preferred murder to exposure, be well founded, we must unhappily endeavour to find some one to whom such exposure would have been ruin, or at all events would have produced a state of things so terrible to himself that in a moment of wild terror he seized the most dreadful means of avoiding it. Who is there to whom such terms would at all apply? . . . at that strange, pale hour of morning when we have all the power of thought, almost painfully vivid, but are without the same will and wise resolution which come when we arise and buckle ourselves to the duties of the day . . . A weak, bad, terrified, violent man sees a child between him and ruin - and the fearful deed is madly done.