The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

by Kate Summerscale

  Whicher's anger about Samuel's treatment may have been sharpened by the fact that he also stood forever to be stigmatised by the case. Both men were government inspectors who had become the objects of highly critical inspection.

  In his letter, Whicher mentioned that one of the Wiltshire magistrates had been to visit him, to discuss the shift that the 'bungling' police had lost. Whicher suspected that the police had returned it to the boiler hole as bait, to lure back its owner and catch her red-handed - this might account for why the constables were posted to the kitchen on the night of 30 June. 'Foley never would explain that to me . . . Mr Kent said in his evidence that Foley told him it was to see if anyone got up to destroy anything.' When the dress vanished, Whicher concluded, the police entered 'a compact of secrecy'.

  After the revelations at Saunders' inquiry, the Wiltshire magistrates investigated the affair of the shift in the boiler hole. On 1 December they convened a public hearing, at which both Cox and Kerslake denied that the shift was theirs. Watts described finding the garment: 'It was in . . . as if to light the fire . . . pushed back as far as possible.' This meant that the shift must have been hidden after 9 a.m., when Kerslake put out the fire. Watts said the shift was flimsy, with 'a flap to tie down before, and another behind', and was nearly worn out - there were holes beneath the arms. The blood 'nearly covered the fore and hind parts. There were no marks of blood above the waist; the blood extended about 16 inches from the bottom. I should think, from the appearance, the blood had been caused from the inside.'

  Eliza Dallimore said she thought the shift was Kerslake's because it was 'very dirty and very short . . . it would not come to my knees'. The cook had told her that her 'under linen was very dirty, because she had so much work to do'. Dallimore observed that neither Kerslake nor Cox was wearing a clean shift on the Saturday of Saville's death - she had seen their underclothes when they tried on the breast flannel.

  Mrs Dallimore's enthusiastic detailing of the servants' underwear stood in strong contrast to Foley's distaste for the subject. The Superintendent said he had not discussed the discovery of the shift with the magistrates because he was too 'ashamed'. 'I did not keep it in my possession a minute. I did not like to touch it . . . I said, "You see, it is a nasty dirty chemise, so put it away" . . . I considered it would be an indecent and improper thing to expose it publicly. I have seen a great many stained garments. I don't suppose any man has seen more. One Sunday morning I searched fifty-two beds in Bath, and you may think I saw some scenes there . . . but I never saw a filthier garment than this.' He said he had wished to 'screen' the shift's owner.

  The magistrates castigated Foley but forgave him, describing him as a 'shrewd, clever' officer whose error had been prompted by feelings of decency and delicacy.

  On Henry Ludlow's instructions, the clerk read out a letter from Whicher: the shift hidden in the scullery, the detective said, 'was never mentioned to me by any member of the police during the fortnight I was engaged with them at Road assisting in the inquiry, and in daily communication with Supt Foley and his assistants . . . If, therefore, the magistrates feel annoyed at the matter being kept secret from them, I beg to state that I was no party to it . . . I wish them to know that I am in no way to blame.'

  Joseph Stapleton's book about the murder quoted a further letter from Whicher, which argued that the shift and the missing nightdress were one and the same. 'When the finding of the bloodstained garment in the flue, and the "direful secresy" that had been previously kept respecting it, oozed out,' he wrote, 'I felt quite satisfied that it was the actual nightdress in which the deed was committed . . . I have no doubt it was placed there as a temporary hiding-place, and that the police afterwards, by some negligence, let it slip through their fingers. Hence the necessity for secrecy before, as well as after, it oozed out.' Whicher's repetition of the phrase 'oozed out' is striking. He seems to have a vivid, visceral apprehension of the blood he had nearly got his hands on, echoed in his image of a dress slipping, like liquid, through the constables' fingers.

  PART THREE

  THE UNRAVELLING

  'I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and

  within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the

  appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant

  confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on

  earth was I? Paralysed, while it lasted, by the mere brush of the

  question, I let him go a little . . .'

  From The Turn of the Screw (1898), by Henry James

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  LIKE A CRAVE

  1861-1864

  The inquiries into the Road Hill murder petered out. At the beginning of 1861 the Lord Chief Justice turned down a proposal to open a new inquest into Saville Kent's death, dismissing the allegations that the coroner had acted improperly in failing to examine Samuel. The Bath police collected a few more clues, or rumours of clues, which found their way into the newspapers in January but were taken no further: a pair of India-rubber galoshes had been seen at the foot of the back stairs soon after the murder; a pair of stockings had gone missing. Joseph Stapleton claimed that some damp and dirty socks were found in a cupboard under the back stairs. The Frome Times said that Constance Kent, when at Miss Ducker's school in Bath many years earlier, 'in retaliation for a supposed slight, destroyed and then threw down a water-closet some property belonging to her governess'. At this school, it was reported elsewhere, she had tried to cause an explosion by turning on the gas.

  In a letter to a Swiss friend on 1 February, Charles Dickens expanded on his theory about the culprits. 'You talk of the Road Murder, I suppose, even at Lausanne? Not all the Detective Police in existence shall ever persuade me out of the hypothesis that the circumstances have gradually shaped out to my mind. The father was in bed with the nurse: The child was discovered by them, sitting up in his little bed, staring, and evidently going to "tell Ma". The nurse leaped out of bed and instantly suffocated him in the father's presence. The father cut the child about, to distract suspicion (which was effectually done), and took the body out where it was found. Either when he was going for the Police, or when he locked the police up in his house, or at both times, he got rid of the knife and so forth. It is likely enough that the truth may be never discovered now.'

  It might be as Poe suggested in 'The Man of the Crowd' (1840): 'There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told . . . mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burthen so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave.'

  Joseph Stapleton was gathering material for his book in defence of Samuel. In February he wrote to William Hughes, the Chief Superintendent of the Bath police, asking him formally to refute the rumours that Mr Kent 'led a life of habitual debauchery' with his female servants. On 4 March Hughes replied, confirming that he had examined more than twenty people on this matter: 'they all most emphatically assert that there is not the slightest foundation for any such rumour. From all I could glean on the subject, I feel convinced that his conduct towards his female servants was the very reverse of familiar, and that at all times he has treated them rather with undue haughtiness than familiarity.'

  Later that month, Samuel applied to the Home Secretary to take early retirement from the civil service - he was by now more than halfway through his six months' leave. He asked to be granted a pension of PS350, his full salary. 'In June 1860 I was overtaken by that great calamity, the murder of my child,' he explained, 'a calamity which has not only embittered the rest of my life, but has overwhelmed me with popular prejudice and calumny through the confounded representations of the public press . . . My family is large my income limited and I cannot without much deprivation resign upon my official pension.' In response, Cornewall Lewis observed that this was 'a strange proposal as ever I heard of - inform him that his request cannot be acceded to'. The ne
wspapers reported a rumour that Constance had in March confessed to a relative that she had killed Saville, but the detectives who had worked on the case found it 'unadvisable' to reopen the investigation.

  On Thursday, 18 April 1861 the Kents left Road. Constance was sent to a finishing school in Dinan, a walled medieval town in northern France, and William returned to his school in Longhope, where he boarded with about twenty-five other boys aged between seven and sixteen. The rest of the family moved to Camden Villa in Weston-super-Mare, a resort on the north coast of Somersetshire. Mrs Kent was again pregnant.

  The Kents instructed a Trowbridge auctioneer to dispose of their belongings. Two days after their departure he opened Road Hill House to the public for viewing. He had already had so many enquiries that he had taken the unprecedented step of selling the catalogues, at a shilling apiece, and limiting them to one per person - seven hundred were purchased. At 11 a.m. on Saturday, the crowds swarmed over the building. In the drawing room the visitors took turns at lifting the central bay window to test its weight, and in the nursery they made their own appraisals about whether Elizabeth Gough could have seen into Saville's cot from her bed (the consensus was that she could). They minutely examined the staircases and doors. Superintendent John Foley, who had been enlisted to keep order, was besieged by requests from young ladies to see the privy, where spots of blood were still visible on the floor. The visitors took less interest in the furniture up for sale. In his opening address the auctioneer conceded that the contents of the house were 'not of a very elegant character', but argued that they were well-made, 'and I would observe that the effects have not only an artificial, but an historical value attached to them. They have been witnesses to a crime which has astonished, terrified, and paralysed the civilised world.'

  The sums achieved on the paintings were disappointing - an oil of Mary Queen of Scots by Federico Zuccari, for which Samuel Kent claimed to have been offered PS100, went for PS14. But Mr and Mrs Kent's splendid Spanish four-poster fetched an impressive PS7.15s., and the washstand and ware from their bedroom PS7. The auctioneer also sold 250 ounces of silver plate, more than five hundred books, several cases of wine, including golden and pale sherries, a lucernal microscope (when used with a gaslight, this could project enlarged images onto a wall), two telescopes, some pieces of iron garden furniture and a fine yearling. Samuel's 1820 port (an exceptionally rich, sweet vintage) went for eleven shillings a bottle, his mare for PS11.15s., his carriage for PS6 and his pure-bred Alderney (a small, fawn cow that yielded creamy milk) for PS19. The Kents' chamber organ was acquired for the Methodist chapel in Beck-ington. A Mr Pearman of Frome paid about PS1 each for Constance's bed, Elizabeth Gough's bed and Eveline's cot, which Saville had used as a baby, bringing the total raised by the sale to PS1,000. The cot from which Saville had been abducted was not put up for auction, in case it found its way to the 'Chamber of Horrors' in Madame Tussaud's waxworks museum.

  During the sale a pickpocket stole a purse containing PS4 from a woman in the crowd. Though Foley's men locked the doors to Road Hill House, conducted a search and arrested a suspect, the culprit was not found.*

  Samuel and Mary Kent's last child, Florence Saville Kent, was born in their new home on the Somersetshire coast on 19 July 1861. Over the summer the factory commissioners discussed where they could send Samuel. Posts came up in Yorkshire and Ireland, but they feared that he would be unable to exercise his authority in these areas, where the hostility towards him was great. In October, though, a job fell vacant for a sub-inspector of factories in north Wales, and the Kent family moved to Llangollen in the Dee valley.

  An Englishwoman who lived in Dinan in 1861 later wrote to the Devizes Gazette about Constance Kent: 'I never saw her, but everyone I know did, and all describe her as a flat-faced, reddish-haired ugly girl, neither stupid nor clever, lively nor morose, and only remarkable for one particular trait, viz, her extreme tenderness and kindness to very young children . . . In the whole school in which she was a pupil she was the one who would probably be the least remarked if all were seen together.' Constance did her best to become invisible, and was known at the school by her second name, Emily, but the other girls were aware of her identity. She was the object of gossip and bullying. By the end of the year Samuel had removed her to the care of the nuns of the Convent de la Sagesse, on a cliff above the town.

  For several months Whicher withdrew from the public eye, working only on cases unlikely to attract attention. Just one was covered in any depth by the newspapers - his capture of a clergyman who had obtained PS6,000 by forging his uncle's will. Whicher's young colleague Timothy Cavanagh, then a clerk in the Commissioner's office, claimed that the Road Hill murder had undone 'the best man the Detective Department ever possessed'. The case 'almost broke the heart of poor Whicher' - he 'returned to head-quarters thoroughly chapfallen. This was a great blow to him . . . the commissioner and others losing faith in him for the first time.' According to Cavanagh, the Road Hill case changed Dolly Williamson as well. When Williamson came back from Wiltshire, he put away his playfulness, his penchant for practical jokes and dangerous games. He became subdued, detached.

  In the summer of 1861 Whicher was given charge of a murder investigation for the first time since Road Hill. It was an apparently straightforward case. On 10 June a fifty-five-year-old woman called Mary Halliday was found dead in a rectory at Kingswood, near Reigate, Surrey, where she had been keeping house while the vicar was away. Mrs Halliday seemed to have been the victim of a botched burglary - a sock stuffed into her mouth, probably to silence her, had suffocated her. The intruder or intruders had left clues: a beech cudgel, some lengths of unusual hemp cord tied around the victim's wrists and ankles, and a packet of papers. These papers included a letter from a famous German opera singer, a begging letter signed 'Adolphe Krohn', and identification documents in the name of Johann Karl Franz of Saxony.

  The police had descriptions of two foreigners who had been in the area that day, one short and dark, the other taller and fairer; they had been seen in a pub, in fields near the rectory and in a Reigate shop, where they had bought the same kind of cord as that found at the murder scene. The descriptions of the taller of the two matched the details on the identification papers. A PS200 reward was offered for the capture of the pair, presumed to be Krohn and Franz.

  Whicher sent Detective-Sergeant Robinson to interview Mademoiselle Therese Tietjens, the celebrated opera singer whose letter had been found in the rectory, at her house in St John's Wood, near Paddington. She said that a young, tallish German with light-brown hair had turned up on her doorstep a week earlier, pleading poverty and asking for her help in returning to Hamburg. She had promised to pay his expenses, and had given him a letter to this effect. Whicher asked Dolly Williamson to check the sailings to Hamburg and to make enquiries at the Austrian, Prussian and Hanseatic embassies and consulates.

  Extra constables were sent to the sugar-baking district of Whitechapel, in the East End, where many itinerant Germans took lodgings. Several German tramps were taken in for questioning. One by one, Whicher ruled them out. 'Altho' he somewhat answers the description of one of the men concerned in the murder of Mrs Halliday,' he reported of a suspect on 18 June, 'I do not think he is one of them.'

  The next week, though, Whicher told Mayne he had found Johann Franz: a twenty-four-year-old German vagrant picked up in Whitechapel who claimed his name was Auguste Salzmann. At first, Whicher could find no eyewitnesses to confirm that this was one of the Kingswood Germans. On the contrary: 'He has been seen by three persons from Reigate and Kingswood who saw two foreigners in the neighbourhood the day before and on the day of the murder, but they are unable to identify him as one of them,' Whicher wrote to Mayne on 25 June. 'He has also been seen by PC Peck, P Division, who met the two men at Sutton on the morning of the murder, but he cannot recognise him. Altho' these persons have failed to identify him, I have no doubt but he is "Johann Carl Franz" the owner of the book left behind, and as there ar
e other persons who saw the two foreigners in the neighbourhood, I beg to suggest that Serjeant Robinson should fetch them to London to see the prisoner.' Whicher's self-assurance - or his fixation - paid off. On 26 June witnesses from the pub and the string shop in Reigate agreed that this was the taller and fairer of the two Germans who had visited the town. Whicher declared himself 'thoroughly confident' of securing a conviction.

  He sent photographs of the identification papers to officials in Saxony, who confirmed their authenticity, adding that their owner had a prison record. Whicher also discovered that two days after the murder the suspect had given his landlord a blue checked shirt for safekeeping. The shirt exactly matched the description of that worn by one of the men seen at Kingswood, and wrapped around it was a piece of cord just like that which had bound the murder victim's body. The detectives traced the maker of the cord, who confirmed that he had spun the string which was found round the shirt and round Mrs Halliday's ankles: 'They are all off the same ball. I am quite sure of it.' More eyewitnesses agreed that they had seen the prisoner in Surrey. Even PC Peck said he now believed the suspect was one of the men he met at Sutton. Whicher had put together a strong chain of circumstantial evidence. On 8 July the prisoner admitted he was Franz. He was committed for trial.