The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

by Summerscale, Kate

  Foley then put on his spectacles, got down on his hands and knees, and, he said, looked 'minutely at every step and every spot' between the nursery and the front and back doors. 'I viewed the posts, the sides of the stairs and passage, and even the grass minutely, the gravel and steps in front of the door, and the matting in the hall, and I could see nothing.'

  In the afternoon Foley interviewed Gough in the dining room, in the presence of Stapleton and Rodway. She appeared tired, Stapleton said, but her answers were simple and consistent. She seemed 'a person of considerable intelligence'. Rodway, too, found that she answered questions 'frankly and fully, and without embarrassment'. When Foley asked her if she had any suspicions about who had killed Saville, she said she had not.

  Samuel Kent asked Rodway whether he would represent him at the inquest. The solicitor replied that it might look bad, because it could suggest that Samuel was himself a suspect. Samuel later said he was prompted to ask for Rodway's help not on his own account, but to protect William, about whom rumours were circulating in the village: 'I did not know what might transpire there, as it was reported my son William had committed the murder.'

  Benger and a group of other men emptied the ten-foot vault beneath the privy. When only six or eight inches of water remained they felt carefully with their hands all along the bottom, but found nothing. Fricker, the plumber and glazier, offered to examine the pipes, and went to the kitchen to fetch a candle. He met Elizabeth Gough, who asked him why he wanted a light. To check the cistern, he explained. She said she was sure he would find nothing there.

  Several more police officers turned up at Road Hill House in the course of the day, as well as Eliza Dallimore, the 'searcher' employed by the police to examine the bodies and belongings of female suspects. Mrs Dallimore was married to William, one of the constables already on the premises. She took Gough to the nursery.

  'What do you want with me?' Gough asked her.

  'You must undress yourself,' Mrs Dallimore replied.

  'I cannot,' said the nursemaid. Mrs Dallimore insisted that she must, and led her to the adjacent dressing room.

  'Well, nurse,' said the searcher as Gough took off her clothes, 'this is a very shocking thing about the murder.'

  'Yes, it is.'

  'Can you give any account of it, do you think?'

  Gough reiterated that at five in the morning she had woken and seen that Saville was missing. 'I thought he was with his mamma, because he generally goes in there of a morning.' According to Mrs Dallimore, she added: 'This is done through jealousy. The little boy goes into his mamma's room and tells everything.'

  'No one would murder a child for doing such a thing as that,' said Mrs Dallimore. The nurse's characterisation of Saville as a tell-tale became, for many, the clue to the crime.

  Eliza Dallimore and Elizabeth Gough went down to the kitchen. 'This is a shocking thing,' Mrs Dallimore told the servants, 'and I think the whole house is responsible for the child.'

  When Fricker, the plumber, came in from the garden with his assistant, Gough asked, 'What have you been doing, Fricker?'

  'I've been opening the water closet,' he said.

  'And you haven't found anything?'

  'No.'

  'Then you won't.' Her remarks to the plumber, before and after his examination of the pipes, were later taken as indications that she knew more than she admitted about the crime.

  Mrs Dallimore strip-searched the female servants but, on Foley's instructions, did not ask the women of the Kent family to disrobe. Instead, she examined their nightdresses. She found bloodstains on the nightdress of Mary Ann, the eldest daughter, so she passed it on to the police. They showed the garment to Parsons, who attributed the stains to 'natural causes'. Stapleton agreed that the blood was menstrual. The nightgown was none the less given to Mrs Dallimore for safekeeping.

  At about four o'clock PC Urch asked two village women – Mary Holcombe and Anna Silcox – to wash and lay out the dead child. Mary Holcombe was the charwoman who had been cleaning the kitchen when Nutt and Benger found Saville's body. Silcox was a widow who used to work as a 'monthly nurse', tending a mother and her baby in the first weeks after a birth; she lived with her grandson, a carpenter, next to Road Hill House. Parsons told the women to 'do what was right to the poor boy'.

  Parsons was talking to Samuel Kent in the library at about five o'clock when a messenger called at Road Hill House with instructions for the doctor to conduct a post-mortem examination of the body. The coroner, on being informed by the police of the child's murder, had scheduled an inquest for Monday. With Samuel's agreement, Parsons asked Stapleton to help him examine the corpse.

  When he saw the body, Stapleton noted the 'expression of repose' on the child's face: 'Its upper lip, retracted slightly by the mortal spasm, had stiffened upon the upper teeth.' The doctors opened the boy's stomach and found the remains of his supper, which had included rice. To check whether he had been drugged, Parsons smelt for traces of laudanum or any other narcotic, but could detect none. The stab to his chest, a bit more than an inch wide, had pushed the heart out of place, punctured the diaphragm and grazed the outer edge of the stomach. 'It would have required very great force,' said Parsons, 'to inflict such a blow through the nightdress and to the depth to which it had penetrated.' This was a child of 'remarkably fine development', the doctor said. From the rips in the boy's clothes and his flesh, Parsons surmised that the weapon was shaped like a dagger. 'It could not have been done by a razor,' he said. 'It must have been, I think, a sharp-pointed, long, wide and strong knife.' He initially believed the cause of death was the cut to the throat.

  The post-mortem examination uncovered two oddities. One was the 'blackened appearance round the mouth' that Parsons had noted earlier; the mouth was 'such as we do not usually see in dead bodies, as if something had been pressed tightly against it'. This something, he suggested, might have been 'the violent thrusting of a blanket into the mouth to prevent it crying, or it could have been done with a hand'.

  The other mystery was the lack of blood. 'A sufficient quantity of blood . . . has not been accounted for,' reported Parsons, 'as would have flowed from the body, if the throat were cut in the closet, as blood from the arterial vessels would have produced a greater quantity of sparkles on the walls.' If the boy's throat had been cut while he was alive, 'the pulsations would have thrown out jets of blood'. Yet the blood was no longer in his body either: the internal organs, said Parsons, were completely drained.

  The two doctors found Samuel Kent in tears when they returned to the library. Stapleton comforted him, assuring him that Saville had died swiftly. Parsons confirmed this: 'The child suffered much less than you will.'

  Superintendent Foley watched over the body in the laundry. Towards evening, he reported, Elizabeth Gough came in and kissed her former charge on the hand. Before the superintendent went home he asked for something to eat or drink: 'I scarce wet my lips or ate a mouthful all day.' Samuel poured him a glass of port wine and water.

  The life of the house went on. Holcombe cut the grass on the lawn with the mowing machine. Cox and Kerslake made the beds. As was her custom on a Saturday evening, Cox took a clean nightdress from Constance's room to air before the kitchen fire. Constance's linen was easily distinguished from that of her sisters, said Cox, because it was 'of a very coarse texture'. Her nightdresses had 'plain frills', while Mary Ann's had lace and Elizabeth's embroidery.

  On Saturday night the older girls slept apart: Elizabeth went downstairs to share her stepmother's bed, 'as papa stayed up' till morning, and Constance joined Mary Ann, 'for the sake of company'. Elizabeth Gough, after helping Mrs Kent and Mary Amelia dress for bed, went upstairs to sleep in Cox and Kerslake's room. Eveline, presumably, was wheeled into her parents' bedroom, leaving the nursery empty; and only William went to bed alone.

  Foley watched over Saville's corpse again the next day. All the Misses Kent came to kiss the boy's body, as did Elizabeth Gough. Afterwards the nursemaid told
Mrs Kent that she had kissed 'the poor little child'. According to one report, Mrs Kent said that Gough 'appeared very sorry and cried because he was dead'; but according to another, she said that Gough 'frequently spoke of him with sorrow and affection, but I did not see her cry'. The female suspects in the case were constantly scrutinised for kisses and tears, the tokens of innocence.

  On Sunday night Constance slept alone. William locked his door 'from fear'.

  3

  SHALL NOT GOD SEARCH THIS OUT?

  2–14 July

  On Monday, 2 July 1860, after months of wind and rain, the season turned: 'there is, after all, some chance of our having a taste of summer', reported the Bristol Daily Post. At 10 a.m. the coroner for Wiltshire, George Sylvester of Trowbridge, opened the inquiry into Saville Kent's death. As was customary, he convened the inquest in the village's main public house, the Red Lion inn. A long, low stone building with a wide doorway, the Red Lion sat at the dip in the centre of the village, where Upper Street and Lower Street converged. Both of these roads – lined with old cottages – led up towards Road Hill, the summit of which was half a mile from the pub.

  Among the ten jurors were the innkeeper of the Red Lion, a butcher, two farmers, a shoemaker, a stonemason, a millwright and the registrar for local births and deaths. Most of them lived either in Upper Street or Lower Street. The Reverend Peacock was foreman. Rowland Rodway, despite his misgivings, watched the proceedings on Samuel Kent's behalf.

  The jury followed the coroner to Road Hill House to look at Saville's body in the laundry room. Superintendent Foley let them in. The corpse was that of a 'pretty little boy', reported the Bath Chronicle, 'but it presented a horrible spectacle, from its hideous, gaping wounds which gave it a ghastly appearance; still, the child's face wore a placid, innocent expression'. The jurors also inspected the drawing room, the nursery, the master bedroom, the privy and the grounds. As they left to return to the Red Lion an hour and a half later, Foley asked the coroner which members of the house-hold would be required as witnesses. Just the housemaid, who had fastened the windows, said the coroner, and the nursemaid, who had charge of the boy when he was abducted.

  Sarah Cox and Elizabeth Gough headed down to the Red Lion together. Cox had sorted the week's washing into two large baskets, which she left in a lumber room for the laundress, Hester Holley. Before noon Mrs Holley and her youngest daughter, Martha, collected the baskets and carried them back to their cottage. They also took with them the laundry book, in which Mary Ann Kent had listed each item placed in the baskets. (Mary Ann's stained nightdress, which had been in the custody of Eliza Dallimore, the policeman's wife, was returned to her the same morning.)

  As soon as Mrs Holley got home, within five minutes, she and all three of her daughters (one of them, Jane, the wife of William Nutt) opened the baskets and went through the clothes. 'It was not our custom to open the clothes so soon after receiving them,' said Mrs Holley later. Her reason for doing so was surprising: 'We heard a rumour that a nightdress was missing.' The Holley women discovered that Constance's nightdress, though listed in the book, was not in either of the baskets.

  Down in the village the Red Lion had become so crowded with spectators that the coroner decided to move the inquest to the Temperance Hall, which lay a few minutes' walk up Lower Street towards Road Hill House. The hall was 'crammed to suffocation', reported the Trowbridge and North Wilts Advertiser. Foley produced Saville's nightclothes and his blanket, both matted with blood, and passed them to the jury.

  Cox and Gough were first to give evidence. Cox described locking the house on Friday night, and finding the drawing-room window open the following morning. Gough gave a detailed account of putting Saville to bed on Friday night, and finding him missing in the morning. She described him as a cheerful, happy, good-tempered child.

  The coroner next took evidence from Thomas Benger, who had discovered the body, and Stephen Millet, the butcher. Millet handed over the piece of bloodied newspaper found at the scene, and remarked on the quantity of blood in the privy: 'From my trade as a butcher I am acquainted with the loss of blood from animals when dying.' He estimated he had seen a pint and a half on the privy floor.

  'My impression,' said Millet, 'is that the child was held with his legs upwards, and his head hanging down, and his throat cut in that position.' The spectators gasped.

  No one could identify the piece of newspaper found by the privy. A reporter suggested that they were fragments of the Morning Star. Cox and Gough testified that Mr Kent did not take that paper: he subscribed to The Times, the Frome Times and the Civil Service Gazette. This suggested – faintly – that an outsider had been at the murder scene.

  Joshua Parsons was the next witness. He reported his summons to the house and the conclusions of his post-mortem: Saville had been killed before three in the morning; his throat had been cut and his chest punctured, and he also showed signs of suffocation. Three pints of blood should have come out of the body 'at a gush', he said, but much less had been found.

  After Parsons' evidence, the coroner tried to bring the inquest to a close, but the Reverend Peacock, as foreman of the jury, said that his fellow jurors wanted to examine Constance and William Kent. Peacock himself dissented – he felt the family should be left alone – but he was obliged to report that the others were insistent. Some jurors were demanding to interview everyone in the Kent family: 'Try them all; show no respect to one more than to another,' 'Give us the whole.' The villagers, said Stapleton, suspected the coroner of protecting the Kents: 'One law for the rich and another for the poor.' Unwillingly, the coroner agreed that Constance and William be interviewed, but on condition that the examination take place at their home, so as not to 'expose those children to insult'. He was disturbed by the way the pair were 'spoken of loudly in terms of execration, as being the murderers'. The jury returned to the house.

  The interviews, which took place in the kitchen, were brief – three or four minutes each.

  'I knew nothing whatever of his death, until he was found,' said Constance. 'I know nothing whatever of the murder . . . Everyone was kind to the child.' When asked about Elizabeth Gough, she said, 'I have found the nursemaid generally quiet and attentive, and perform her duties in every respect as could be wished.' According to the Somerset and Wilts Journal, she 'gave evidence in a subdued and audible tone, without betraying any special emotion, her eyes fixed on the ground'.

  William's evidence was virtually identical, but expressed with greater warmth: 'I know nothing nor heard anything of this circumstance till the morning – I wish I had. Saville was a great favourite with all. I have always found the nursemaid very kind and attentive. I know nothing whatever of the murder.' His manner was more engaging than that of his sister: 'he gave his evidence clearly and well, his eyes being fixed on the coroner throughout'. By comparison, Constance was muted, shuttered.

  Back at the Temperance Hall, the coroner told the jurors that it was their job to find out how Saville had met his death, not who had killed him. With reluctance, they signed a sheet blaming a 'person or persons unknown' for the murder. 'It is unknown,' said one, 'but there is a very strong suspicion which don't at all settle on my stomach.' 'So with me,' said another man. 'The same here,' said another. A shoemaker stood up to say that most of his fellow jurors believed that the murderer was an inmate of Road Hill House. He accused Parsons, the Reverend Peacock and the coroner of trying to hush the matter up.

  The coroner ignored their disquiet. He comforted the jury with the thought that 'although the action was concealed from the eyes of men, yet it was seen and recorded by One above', and at 3.30 in the afternoon he declared the inquest closed. 'I say, gentlemen, it is the most extraordinary and mysterious murder that has ever been committed, to my knowledge.'

  In Road Hill House after the inquest Foley handed the key to the laundry room to Mrs Silcox, who had laid Saville out. She finished arranging the body for burial. Elizabeth Gough and Sarah Cox then took it upstairs in a 'shell',
the thin interior case of a coffin. Mrs Kent instructed Gough to 'screw down' the case.

  Saville's mother was later asked if the nursemaid had kissed the corpse when she closed the coffin. 'It was then very much changed,' Mrs Kent said, 'and I do not think she could have kissed it at that time.'

  On Monday night Constance asked Gough to share her bed.

  At about eleven the next morning, Hester Holley returned the laundry book to Sarah Cox and collected her weekly payment of seven or eight shillings. She did not mention the missing nightdress. 'I never said anything to her about anything missing,' she later admitted. 'That's where my mistake was. I was in a hurry, like, but I knew it was missing.'

  In the afternoon James Morgan, the parish constable, and four police constables called at Mrs Holley's cottage to question her about the breast flannel: they wanted to know if she had ever seen it among the clothes sent by the Kents. She said she had not, and when asked whether this week's laundry was all in order, said that 'the clothes were all right by the book'.

  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.