The next morning the police took him by train to Trowbridge. The news of his arrest was sent on by telegraph, and hundreds of people lined the track from Wolverton, via Oxford and Chippenham. At one stop a man put his head into the carriage and asked which was the murderer. The bricklayer shook his clenched, handcuffed fists and confided to the policeman next to him: 'I've a good mind to give him a rattle in the guts.' When they reached Trowbridge police station the magistrates remanded the prisoner until Monday. He had 'a florid complexion', said the Somerset and Wilts Journal, 'and a large head, singularly flat at the crown. He complained of headache greatly, and refused any food.'
By Monday the bricklayer was protesting his innocence. He supplied an alibi for the night of 29 June – he had been at an inn in Portsmouth, he said, having a boil on his back bathed in sugar-water – and he wrote down his name for the magistrates: John Edmund Gagg. When he was asked what had driven him to confess to a murder he had not committed, he said, 'I confessed because I was hard up, and thought it better if I could be hung. I am sick and tired of my life.' He had a history of falls, carbuncles, fits, 'an overflow of blood to the head', but was apparently sane. The strain of an unsolved murder could tell on a fragile man already under pressure. Like many, Gagg was haunted by the crime. His decision to confess took the ambition of the amateur detective to an extreme: he solved the murder by claiming it as his own.
The magistrates sent a message to Jack Whicher at Scotland Yard, asking him to track down Gagg's wife in London. Whicher notified them that she was 'a most respectable woman living by her own industry, with her mother and children'. Gagg's alibis in Portsmouth proved solid. On Wednesday, 22 August he was discharged, and the magistrates paid his train fare to Paddington.
That week Elizabeth Gough told the Kents that she wished to leave their employ. The Somerset and Wilts Journal explained that she had 'been subject to a most disagreeable surveillance by the house-hold'. It was later reported by the Frome journalist Albert Groser in a letter to The Times that after Saville's murder the Kents had not let their little girls, Mary Amelia and Eveline, sleep in Gough's room. On Monday, 27 August she left Road Hill House with her father and returned with him to Isleworth, Surrey, to join her mother, her two younger sisters and two younger brothers in the family bakery.
On 29 August the case of the Reverend Bonwell, which Whicher had investigated in 1859, reached its conclusion: the Church of England defrocked Bonwell as punishment for his scandalous affair and his attempt to conceal the birth and death of his child. A week afterwards, on 5 September, more than twenty thousand Londoners gathered to see William Youngman, the Walworth murderer, executed outside Horsemonger Lane gaol. This was the largest gallows crowd since Frederick and Maria Manning had been hanged on the same spot in 1849. On the day of his death Youngman breakfasted on cocoa, bread and butter. Outside, boys played leapfrog beneath the gallows, and the public house facing the 'drop' did a roaring trade. When Young-man fell through the trapdoor, 'quivering and twisting in the air', reported the News of the World, 'several persons of both sexes, who had been tippling all morning, burst out into unrestrained crying'. Just over a month had passed since the quadruple murder of Youngman's mother, brothers and sweetheart. In the final instalment of The Woman in White, on 25 August, Count Fosco's description of England as 'the land of domestic happiness' was unmistakably ironic.
The last of the wheat and corn was harvested with scythes in the fields around Road in September. At the beginning of the month two petitions were sent to the Home Secretary – one organised by the Bath Express, one by the Somerset and Wilts Journal – asking for a special commission to investigate the Road murder. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, the Home Secretary, turned down these pleas, but at the suggestion of the Wiltshire magistrates he quietly appointed E.F. Slack, a Bath solicitor, to conduct an investigation. The source of Slack's authority was at first unclear, and William Dunn, acting for the Kents, expressed the family's reluctance to cooperate: 'for aught we know you may be acting under the instructions of the detective officer whose former proceedings in this case have been condemned by the almost universal voice of the country'. Eventually, Slack divulged that he was working for the government. The Bath Express, among others, was disparaging about the way Lord Palmerston's Liberal administration was handling the inquiry – the paper described Cornewall Lewis as timid, terrified of criticism, and absurdly secretive.
Slack talked to everyone involved with the case. He conducted private interviews over three weeks, in his office in Bath, in a pub in Beckington and in the drawing room of Road Hill House. At one point he learnt that a small plot of land in the grounds was known as 'Miss Constance's garden', and ordered that it be dug up. Nothing of significance was found. He tried to interview the five-year-old Mary Amelia Kent, but was thwarted by Dunn, who argued that his client's daughter was too young to be examined. Dunn later described how it had been established that she was unfit to testify: when asked how old she was, she incorrectly gave her age as four; she claimed her family went to church daily, though Christ Church was not open every day; and she could not spell her murdered brother Saville's name: 'Please, sir, I have not been taught that.'
On Monday, 24 September, Slack closed his inquiry, letting it be known that he believed Constance Kent quite innocent. Her purse, he said, had been discovered behind her chest of drawers, which supported her claim to have been searching for it when she asked Sarah Cox to look through the laundry baskets on the day of the inquest. At Slack's behest, Superintendent Wolfe arrested Elizabeth Gough in Isleworth.
On Monday, 1 October, Gough was brought before the magistrates at the Trowbridge police court. The Kent family arrived in a fly, 'and were fortunate to get in unobserved', said the Bristol Daily Post, 'and therefore without any unpleasant demonstration from those congregated in the locality'.
In court, Gough sat with her hands drawn up to her throat, as if in prayer or protection. She was even 'thinner and more pale and careworn', according to the Bristol Daily Post, and watched the proceedings of the next four days with 'feverish anxiety'.
Gough's prosecutor argued that no one could have abducted and killed Saville alone, and that if two people had done it, one was surely the nurse. He questioned the credibility of Gough's statements so far. Why would she assume Saville's mother had taken him that morning, since she was too pregnant to lift him? Why did she change her story about the time at which she noticed the loss of the blanket? How could she see whether Saville was in his cot without getting out of her bed?
When Samuel Kent took the stand he was asked why he had been reluctant to let anyone draw up a plan of his house, why he had ridden to Trowbridge on the morning his son disappeared, and why he had locked the two policemen in the kitchen that night. He expressed confusion about the events of the day of Saville's death: 'my mind is so disturbed that there are many things I am not so clear about as I could wish'. On the question of the constables' incarceration in the kitchen, he said, 'I bolted the door that the house might appear as usual, and that no one might know there was a policeman in the house.' Foley was asked about the incident. 'I did not desire him to lock them up,' said the Superintendent. 'I was very much surprised when I heard of it.' He tried to make light of his part in the botched job with a weak, but pointed joke: 'They were, I understood, to have the whole range of the house, but they only had the kitchen range.' Samuel wept when he recounted the moment at which Peacock had told him of his son's murder.
The testimony of the rest of the Kent family was distinguished by its blandness. Mary Kent reluctantly lifted her thick black mourning veil to give her evidence; she was barely audible, and was repeatedly requested to speak up. She said of Gough: 'This girl, to the best of my belief, was particularly kind to the child, and seemed very fond of him; he was very fond of her; I can't tell whether she was much distressed that morning; I was too much occupied with my own and my husband's feelings . . . The boy was a nice little, playful, good-tempered, chatty boy, and a genera
l favourite; I don't know of any one who entertained revengeful feelings against my family or little boy.'
Mary Ann Kent said, 'The poor little one who was murdered was my brother.' Elizabeth said, 'I am . . . the sister of the poor little fellow who was murdered.' They divulged little else beyond the times at which they had gone to bed and awoken on the night of his death.
Constance, with a veil pulled over her face, testified that Saville 'was a merry, good-tempered lad, fond of romping. I was accustomed to play with him often. I had played with him that day. He appeared to be fond of me, and I was fond of him.' William, who had been summoned from his boarding school near Gloucester, answered the questions put to him with 'Yes, sir' and 'No, sir' – 'not a strong-looking youth', remarked the Bristol Daily Post. Elizabeth brought the five-year-old Mary Amelia into the courtroom to testify, but an argument broke out about whether she was fit to do so: did she know her catechism or understand an oath? Eventually she was removed from the court without being examined.
The servants of Road Hill House made ingenious – and touching – attempts to help Gough by showing that a stranger might have taken Saville. On Tuesday, Sarah Kerslake, the cook, told the court that she and Sarah Cox, the maid, had experimented on the drawing-room window that very morning. They wanted to establish whether someone standing outside the house could have pulled it down to within six inches of the ground, the condition in which it had been found on the day Saville died. 'People said it could not be done from the outside, and Cox and I were determined to see whether it could or not; we found that it could be done from the outside quite easy.' The chairman of the magistrates pointed out that, even if they were right, it remained impossible that the window had been opened from the outside in the first place.
When Sarah Cox was called the next day, she told the court that she had followed up this experiment by trying to adjust the shutters of the drawing-room window from outside the house, but had been unsuccessful because the wind had been too strong. Superintendent Wolfe took issue with her: he had witnessed the exercise, he said, and the wind had nothing to do with its failure. He added that he had conducted his own experiment that morning, and it had confirmed his theory that Gough could not have detected the child's loss as she described. In Wolfe's experiment Mrs Kent took Eveline, now twenty-three months old, into the nursery, and Elizabeth Kent tucked her into Saville's crib. PC Dallimore's wife Eliza, who was a similar size to Gough, then knelt on the nursemaid's bed to test whether she could see the child. She reported that she could see only a small portion of pillow.
It was Eliza Dallimore's amateur detective work that excited the strongest disapproval in court. When she took the stand she gave detailed accounts of conversations between herself and Gough while the nursemaid was lodged at the police station in early July.
On one occasion, said Eliza Dallimore, Gough asked: 'Mrs Dallimore, do you know there's a nightdress missing?'
'No – whose was it?'
'Miss Constance Kent's,' said Gough. 'You may depend upon it that nightdress will lead to the discovery of the murderer.'
On another occasion Mrs Dallimore asked her whether Constance might be the killer. 'I don't think Miss Constance Kent would do it,' said Gough. Asked if William could have helped the girl commit the crime, Gough exclaimed, 'Oh, Master William is more fit for a girl than a boy.' As for Mr Kent: 'No, I could not think for a moment that he committed the murder. He's too fond of his children.'
One evening Mrs Dallimore asked Gough, again: 'What do you think of Miss Constance doing the murder?'
'I can't say anything about that,' the nursemaid replied, 'but I saw the nightgown put into the basket.'
William Dallimore came in and, having overheard the end of the conversation, asked, 'Then you saw the nightgown put into the basket, nurse, as well as Cox?'
'No,' said Gough. 'I have nothing to say about that. I have enough of my own to contend with.' With this, said Eliza Dallimore, she went to bed.
Mrs Dallimore also reported other remarks Gough had made to her, some of them seemingly suspicious – for instance, her prediction that the plumber would not find any evidence in the privy, and her description of Saville as a teller of tales.
Gough's counsel, Mr Ribton, tried to discredit Mrs Dallimore's evidence by making sarcastic allusions to her 'marvellous memory', and by mocking her. Mrs Dallimore mentioned that breast flannels were worn by young women as well as the elderly and ill: 'I wear one myself.' This provoked whoops of laughter, which were renewed when Ribton retorted, 'I shall not take the liberty of asking you your age, ma'am.'
Mrs Dallimore was dismayed by the levity of the courtroom. 'I don't think so serious a matter should be turned to ridicule,' she said. 'It gives me the horrors to think about it.'
'You are very irritable, are you not?' asked Ribton.
'Yes, sir. Perhaps you are too.'
'Then don't give us the horrors,' said Ribton. 'How about the breast flannel? It fits you nicely?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Very nicely indeed?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Perhaps you have been wearing it?' This was greeted with more laughter.
'It's a very serious thing, sir, who done the murder.'
Mrs Dallimore was a real-life version of a nineteenth-century fictional heroine: the amateur female detective, as featured in W.S. Hayward's The Experiences of a Lady Detective (1861) and Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective (1864). Her investigations, like those of Mrs Bucket in Bleak House, were as spirited and probing as the inquiries made by her policeman husband and his fellow officers. Inspector Bucket, though, refers to his wife, respectfully, as 'a lady of natural detective genius', while Mrs Dallimore was treated as a gossip and a fool. In theory, detection was understood as a distinctly feminine talent – women had the opportunities for 'intimate watching', said Forrester, and an instinct for deciphering what they saw. In practice, a woman who indulged in detection was perceived as a sister to Mrs Snagsby in Bleak House, whose jealous curiosity drives her 'to nocturnal examinations of Mr Snagsby's pockets; to secret perusals of Mr Snagsby's letters . . . to watching at windows, listenings behind doors, and a general putting of this and that together by the wrong end'.
In his summing-up on Thursday, Ribton said he had 'seldom seen anything so disgraceful in a witness as the evidence of the woman Dallimore, or more calculated to send a thrill of horror through everybody, and make them fear for their lives, their liberties, their characters'. Mrs Dallimore had taken Whicher's place as the spy incarnate. Ribton dealt with Gough's contradictions about the blanket by suggesting that she had noticed its loss early in the day and then, in the confusion and distress of the morning, had forgotten she had done so. He dismissed the fact that the flannel fitted her, arguing that it might in any case have no connection to the crime.
The magistrates released the nursemaid, to wild applause, on condition that her family put up a £100 bond to ensure that she would return for further examination if necessary. This was paid by one of Gough's two uncles, who had come to take her home. The party caught the last train to Paddington, via Chippenham, which left Trowbridge at 7.50 p.m. At every stop along the route people were gathered on the station platforms to peer in through the carriage windows.
'If the late Edgar Poe had sat down to invent a tale of mystery,' observed The Times two days after Elizabeth Gough's release, 'he could not have imagined anything more strange and perplexing . . . The matter – remains still as dark as ever. If three or four persons meet they are nearly sure to have so many different theories . . . People are unquiet . . . There has been an uncontrollable desire to get at the bottom of the Road childmurder.'
The unrest and disorder were in evidence in Road the next day. On Sunday, 7 October, six well-dressed, moustachioed men rode into the grounds of Road Hill House laughing, smoking and joking. One sandy-haired fellow rode a black horse and wore a black suit and a Scotch cap; another, on a grey horse, had light frizzy hair. They saw a girl at a window and shou
ted, 'There is Constance!' When confronted by Samuel Kent they took off.
As Mr and Mrs Kent made their way to Christ Church the same day a large party yelled and hooted at them: 'Who murdered his boy?' 'Who killed the child?' At this, Mrs Kent almost collapsed in distress. When police surveillance of Road Hill House was lifted the next week, the Somerset and Wilts Journal reported, 'inquisitive gentlefolk' took to driving through the Kents' grounds. According to the Western Daily Press, two policemen continued to accompany Samuel to Christ Church each Sunday.
The Manchester Examiner, identifying another species of thrill-seeker, claimed that Constance Kent had received several offers of marriage. The Somerset and Wilts Journal denied this: 'She has had unnumbered invitations from strangers to visit them, however, some being from the aristocracy.' This newspaper, despite hinting at Constance's guilt, repeated the idea that Whicher's accusation of her might prove a crime much worse than murder: 'If Mr Whicher's opinion was wrong, then beyond all question a crime infinitely exceeding in enormity the murder of Francis Saville Kent has been since committed, from which, Constance, poor girl, will suffer till her dying day.'
The local police continued to hound Elizabeth Gough. At the end of October Superintendent Wolfe passed on to Scotland Yard a rumour that she had once been dismissed from service in Knightsbridge for 'harbouring soldiers'. Whicher tersely reported back that Wolfe's information 'appears incorrect' – there was no evidence of the nursemaid ever having been employed in that part of London. A few weeks later it emerged that a servant called Elizabeth Gough, with a missing front tooth, had once been dismissed for 'misconduct' from a house-hold in Eton, Berkshire. The Eton employer went to the Gough family bakery in Isleworth to identify her, Whicher reported, but discovered that she was not his former maid.
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher Page 18