The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

by Summerscale, Kate

  The suspicion that Constance Kent or Elizabeth Gough was mad kept surfacing in the press. It was even suggested that Mrs Kent had killed her son during a fit of puerperal mania. While Constance waited in prison, a Mr J.J. Bird wrote to the Morning Star to suggest that the murder of Saville was the act of a somnambulist. 'Most people know with what precision and care sleepwalkers act,' he said. 'The parties suspected should be watched by night for some time.' He cited a case in which a hallucinating somnambulist, his eyes open and fixed, had stabbed an empty bed three times. If sleepwalkers could commit unconscious violence, he said, it was possible that Saville's murderer was unaware of his or her own guilt. Perhaps the killer had a double consciousness. The idea that madness could take this form, that several selves could inhabit one body, fascinated mid-century alienists and newspaper readers. Bird's letter was reprinted over the next week in several provincial papers.

  On Monday, 23 July, Whicher briefed Dolly Williamson on the investigation so far. He took him to Bath, to Beckington and to Road. On Tuesday, Whicher put a placard on the door of the Temperance Hall: '£5 reward – Missing from the residence of Mr Kent, a lady's nightdress, supposed to have been thrown in the river, burnt, or sold in the neighbourhood. The above reward will be paid to any person finding the same, and bringing it to the Police Station, Trowbridge.' The same day he prepared the evidence he had gathered against Constance – Henry Clark, the magistrates' clerk, wrote up the findings on four foolscap pages. On Wednesday, Whicher went to Warminster to serve a subpoena on his key witness, Emma Moody, and sent Williamson to William's boarding school at Longhope, Gloucestershire, to see what he could glean about the boy.

  As the rain came down, the two detectives searched the grounds of Road Hill House for the nightgown.

  * * *

  In that weekend's instalment of The Woman in White – the thirty-fourth – the hero had discovered the secret that Sir Percival Glyde had tried so desperately to hide, a shame that lay in his family's past. His knowledge, though, was not enough; to catch the villain, he had to find the proof. Whicher's predicament was similar. In the Sarah Drake case, he had elicited the confession he needed by presenting his suspect with her apron; if only he could find Constance's nightdress he might secure the same: the physical evidence and a confession in one.

  Poe's Dupin observes: 'Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.' Unremarkable events were inscribed with hidden stories, if you knew how to read them. 'I made a private inquiry last week,' remarks Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone. 'At one end of the inquiry there was a murder, and at the other end there was a spot of ink on a tablecloth that nobody could account for. In all my experience along the dirtiest ways of this dirty little world, I have never met with such a thing as a trifle yet.'

  Since he could not find the nightdress, Whicher returned to the moment at which it had vanished. He asked Sarah Cox, the maid, when she had sent it to be washed. The Monday after the murder, she told him, just before the inquest. At about ten o'clock on 2 July she had collected the family's dirty linen from their bedrooms. 'That of Miss Constance was generally thrown down either in the room or on the landing, some of it on Sunday, and some on Monday.' Constance's nightdress was on the landing, Cox remembered. It was not stained, she said, just lightly soiled as usual. 'It appeared to have been dirtied, as one would have been which had been worn nearly a week by Miss Constance.' Cox took the clothes to a lumber room on the first floor to sort out. Once she had done this, she asked Mary Ann and Elizabeth to enter the items in the laundry book while she packed them in the baskets for collection by Mrs Holley. She remembered packing three nightdresses – Mrs Kent's, Mary Ann's and Constance's – and she remembered Mary Ann noting them in the book. (Elizabeth wrapped her clothes in a separate bundle and listed them in a separate book.)

  When Whicher questioned Cox more closely, she recalled that Constance had visited the lumber room while the laundry was being organised. The maid had already packed the clothes – 'I had it all in except the dusters' – and Mary Ann and Elizabeth had gone, leaving the laundry book. Constance 'stepped a step inside the room . . . She asked me if I would look in her slip pocket, and see if she had left her purse in it.' Cox searched the basket that contained the larger items until she found the slip. She pulled it out and checked the pocket. 'I told her the purse was not there. She then asked me if I would go down and get her a glass of water. I did so. She followed me to the top of the back stairs as I went out of the room. When I returned with the glass of water I found her where I had left her. I don't think I was gone a minute.' Constance drank the water, put the glass down and headed up to her room. Cox put the dusters in with the rest of the laundry and finished by laying a tablecloth over one basket, a dress belonging to Mrs Kent over the other.

  At eleven o'clock, Cox and Elizabeth Gough set off to testify at the Red Lion, as the coroner had requested. Cox left the lumber room unlocked, she told Whicher, knowing that Mrs Holley would be arriving to collect the baskets within the hour.

  Whicher put his mind to Cox's account. 'When I am deeply perplexed,' says the narrator of the fictional Diary of an Ex-Detective (1859), 'it is my practice to go to bed, and lie there till I have solved my doubts and perplexities. With my eyes closed, but wide awake, and nothing to disturb me, I can work out my problems.' From the start, a detective was imagined as a solitary thinker, who needed to withdraw from the sensory world to enter the free, fantastical world of his hypotheses. By piecing together the information he had gathered, Whicher compiled a story about the nightdress.

  He reckoned that Constance asked Cox to look for the purse as a way of getting her to unpack the basket, so the girl could see where her nightdress had been placed. Then, when Cox was downstairs getting the water, Constance darted back into the room, snatched up her nightdress and hid it, perhaps beneath her skirts (the fashion for full skirts was at its peak in 1860*). Importantly, this was not the bloodied nightdress, which Whicher believed Constance had already destroyed, but a clean substitute that she had donned on Saturday. The reason for stealing it back from the basket was mathematical: if it seemed that an unstained nightdress had been lost by the laundress, the bloody one in which Constance had killed Saville would not be missed.

  Whicher wrote:

  I am of opinion that the night dress she wore when the murder was committed was afterwards burnt or concealed by her, but still she would be apprehensive that the Police might ask her how many night dresses she had when she came from school and to prepare for that contingency, she I believe, resorted to a very artful stratagem to make it appear that the one she was deficient of was lost by the washerwoman, the week after the murder, which I suspect she carried out in the following manner.

  The family soiled linen was collected as usual the Monday (two days) after the murder and amongst it was a night dress belonging to Miss Constance, the one I assume she put on after the murder. After the linen was collected it was taken into a spare room on the first floor where it was counted by the House Maid and entered into the Washing Book by the elder sister. It was then placed in two clothes baskets by the Housemaid but just before she quitted the room Miss Constance came in and asked her to unpack the baskets . . . to see if she had left her purse in her slip pocket . . . this I believe was part of her stratagem to ascertain which basket her night dress was in, as she immediately asked the Housemaid to go down stairs and fetch her a glass of water, which she did, leaving her by the room door, where she found her on her return with the water, and during this time I am of opinion she obtained possession of the night dress which had then been entered in the washing book and took it again into use which at the end of the week when the washing came home she calculated it would be missed, and the Laundress blamed, and that would account for her being one short if interrogated on that point.

  To conceal the destruction of the evidence, Whicher believed, Constance engineered things so
that an innocent nightdress was believed lost, by someone other than herself. Her sister and the housemaid would swear that the nightdress went in the basket; also that it was not bloodstained. She directed attention away from the stained nightdress, away from the house. It was a sidestep, a concealment of murder at one remove.

  As Mr Bucket says in Bleak House, when struck by the cleverness of a murderer: 'It is a beautiful case – a beautiful case.' Then he corrects himself, remembering that he is addressing a respectable young lady. 'When I depict it as a beautiful case, you see, miss,' he goes on, 'I mean from my point of view.'

  The detective's job was to reconstruct history from tiny indicators, clues, fossils. These traces were both pathways and remnants: trails back to the tangible event in the past – in this case a murder – and tiny scraps of that event, souvenirs. Like the natural historians and archaeologists of the mid-nineteenth century, Whicher tried to find a story to bind the fragments he had found. The nightdress was his missing link, an imagined object that made sense of his other discoveries, the equivalent of the skeleton that Charles Darwin needed in order to prove that men had evolved from apes.

  Dickens compared the detectives to the astronomers Leverrier and Adams, who in 1846 simultaneously and separately discovered Neptune by observing deviations in the orbit of Uranus. These scientists, said Dickens, found a new planet as mysteriously as the detectives uncovered a new form of crime. In his book about Road Hill, Stapleton also likened astronomers to detectives. 'The detective instinct, brightened by genius,' he wrote, 'marked unerringly the place of that missing planet which no eye had seen, and whose only register was found in the calculations of astronomy.' Leverrier and Adams gathered their clues from observation, but they made their discovery by deduction, by guessing at the existence of one planet through its possible influence on another. It was a work of logic and imagination, like Darwin's theory of evolution and Whicher's theory about Constance's nightdress.

  'To look at a star by glances, to view it in a sidelong way,' says Dupin in 'The Murders in the rue Morgue', 'is to behold the star distinctly.'

  The Wiltshire police, meanwhile, were campaigning to discredit Whicher. His theory about the murderer was opposed to theirs, and he may have made it clear that he thought the investigation had been bungled in the fortnight before he was summoned from London. His manner – at best quiet and self-sufficient, at worst dismissive – may have riled them further. Things were only made worse by the arrival of his talented young colleague Dolly Williamson.

  On Wednesday, 25 July, Superintendent Wolfe and Captain Meredith went to Constance's school in Beckington and interviewed the Misses Williams and Scott, as Whicher had done a week earlier. They then briefed the Bath Chronicle about their visit. The teachers 'spoke in the highest terms of Constance, saying that she was a well-conducted pupil in every respect . . . and that so assiduous was she to her studies, that she became a successful competitor at the half-yearly examination, and carried off the second prize. This fact, we certainly think, precludes the possibility of her having brooded over this fearful deed, as has been hinted at in some quarters, prior to coming home for the holidays.'

  Wolfe told the Bath Chronicle and the Trowbridge and North Wilts Advertiser that he had traced Constance's life since childhood and discovered no evidence of insanity, 'her infancy having been most rational'. 'The unfounded rumour, which has been so industriously circulated, to the effect that the deceased child entertained a strong antipathy to Miss Constance, is as false as it is wicked,' said the Chronicle.

  The Frome Times played down the importance of William and Constance's flight to Bath, and of the madness in their mother's line. Instead, it repeated information from 'an intimate friend of the family' that Constance and Saville were on very good terms, 'as may be proved by the fact that on the very day before his sad death he presented her with a bead ring, which he had made for her'. The Bristol Post repeated the theory that the true murderer was framing the 'frolicsome, mischievous' Constance.

  Several newspapers voiced scepticism about the case against Constance. 'The new episode in the history of the case we regard as tentative only,' said the Bath Chronicle on Thursday, 'and upon a consideration of it, we are by no means inclined to declare the enquiry materially advanced'. There was 'not a tittle' of new evidence. The Manchester Examiner was similarly unconvinced: 'This step savours of a disposition on the part of a London detective to incriminate somebody as a salve to public opinion'.

  On Wednesday a Mr Knight Watson of Victoria Street, a new thoroughfare that cut through Pimlico, called at Scotland Yard and asked to speak to a detective. He knew a woman called Harriet, he said, who had previously worked for the Kents and who might be able to provide Whicher with useful information about the family. Detective-Sergeant Richard Tanner volunteered to interview the woman, now a housemaid in Gloucester Terrace, near Paddington. Dick Tanner had worked regularly with Whicher since joining the division in 1857. Commissioner Mayne gave him the go-ahead.

  The next day Tanner wrote a report for Whicher on his meeting with Harriet Gollop. She had worked for the Kents as housemaid and parlourmaid for four months in 1850, he said, when they lived in Walton-in-Gordano, Somersetshire.

  At that time the first 'Mrs Kent' was alive but during her service there 'Mrs Kent' never slept with 'Mr Kent' she always occupied separate sleeping apartments, and during the whole of her (Harriet Gollop's) time there, 'Mrs Kent' appeared very unhappy and miserable. At that time a 'Miss Pratt' was the governess in the family and her bedroom was close to that of 'Mr Kent' and also the servants in the establishment believed that an improper intimacy was going on between her and 'Mr Kent' and the wife thought so also. The Miss Pratt alluded to is now 'Mrs Kent' the mother of the child that has been murdered.

  Gollop claimed that Miss Pratt had 'the entire control of all the children and that "Mr Kent" gave directions to all the servants to consider "Miss Pratt" as their mistress'. The former housemaid had evidently disliked this arrangement. ' "Harriet Gollop" says that the first "Mrs Kent" was a very ladylike person and she considered her perfectly sane.'

  Whicher saw the letter on Friday morning. Gollop's evidence gave substance to the rumour that Samuel Kent and Mary Pratt were lovers while the first Mrs Kent was alive, and it painted a dark picture of life in the Kent house-hold. But Whicher could make no use of it. The maid's recollections weakened the case against Constance – if the first Mrs Kent was sane, her daughter was less likely to be mad – and they might lend credence to the idea that Samuel, as a confirmed adulterer, had killed his son after being surprised in bed with Gough.

  In the mid-Victorian home, servants were often feared as outsiders who might be spies or seducers, even aggressors. The Kent house-hold, with its high turnover of domestic staff, had seen plenty of dangerous servants. There were Emma Sparks and Harriet Gollop, who acted as informants on the family's sex lives and peccadilloes. There were two that Samuel Kent summoned up as possible suspects: a cook whom he had got imprisoned, and a nursemaid he had sacked without pay because she had been in the habit of pinching the children. Both, it emerged, had been at least twenty miles from Road on the night of the murder.

  Samuel claimed that a servant had left Road Hill House early in 1860 swearing revenge on Mrs Kent and her 'horrid children', particularly Saville. The boy had probably told on her: perhaps she was the pincher, or perhaps she was the nursemaid whom Samuel had banned from consorting with her sweetheart in the cottages next to the house. 'She had left in a dreadful rage,' said Samuel. 'She had been excessively insolent.' And deep in the family there was the former servant who had transformed herself into the mistress of the house, the governess who had ensnared the master, coaxed him into betraying his first wife and neglecting his first children.

  Female servants could corrupt children as well as their parents. In Governess Life: Its Trials, Duties, and Encouragements, a manual of 1849, Mary Maurice warned that 'frightful instances have been discovered in which she, to whom the c
are of the young has been entrusted, instead of guarding their minds in innocence and purity, has become their corrupter – she has been the first to lead and to initiate into sin, to suggest and carry on intrigues, and finally to be the instrument of destroying the peace of families'. Forbes Benignus Winslow, an eminent alienist, in 1860 described such women as 'sources of moral contamination and mental deterioration from which the most vigilant parents are not always able to guard their children'.

  The prevailing theory about Saville's murder also cast a servant as the serpent in the house. Elizabeth Gough, by this account, lured the father into a betrayal so complete that it ended in his killing his son. In the newspapers, the gap-toothed Gough became an object of sexual fantasy. The reporter for the Western Daily Press found her appearance 'decidedly pleasing, and altogether superior to her station in life'. The Sherborne Journal described her as an 'exceedingly good-looking' young woman, who at night 'lay . . . on a French bedstead without curtains, near the door of the bedroom'. She was dangerously embedded in the family, a step away from the master's quarters.

  The detective was another member of the working classes whose pernicious imaginings could sully a middle-class home. Usually, as with the case of Sarah Drake and her dead boy, his investigations were confined to the servants' quarters. Occasionally, as at Road, he ventured upstairs. An article in House-hold Words in 1859 attributed the weaknesses in the police force to the origins of its officers: 'It is never a wise or safe proceeding to put arbitrary authority or power in the hands of the lower-classes.'

  The second week of Whicher's investigation had yielded no new evidence at all – only a new idea: a thought about a nightdress.