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.
The story the German gave in his defence sounded trumped-up from beginning to end. After disembarking from a steamer at Hull in April, he said, he had fallen in with two other German vagrants, Wilhelm Gerstenberg and Adolphe Krohn. Gerstenberg, who in build and colouring resembled Franz, pestered him to hand over some of his identification papers. Franz refused. One night in May, while Franz was asleep behind a haystack near Leeds, his two companions robbed him, taking not only the papers but also his pack and his spare clothes, which were cut from the same cloth as those he was wearing. This explained the similarity between his shirt and that seen near Kingswood, while his resemblance to Gerstenberg explained why some of the eyewitnesses thought they had seen Franz in Surrey. The destitute Franz made his way to London alone. When he reached the city he heard that a German called Franz was wanted for murder, so he quickly adopted a new name. As for the cord in his room, he said he had found it on the pavement outside a tobacconist's shop near his lodgings. His defence, then, was that he had been robbed of his clothes and papers by a German tramp who looked very like him, had changed his name for fear he would be mistaken for a murderer, and had happened to pick up a piece of cord on a London street that exactly matched the distinctive twine at the murder scene.
All this seemed the invention of a desperate and guilty man. But in the days leading up to the trial various facts emerged that seemed to corroborate Franz's account. A vagrant in Northamptonshire presented the police with some stray papers from the packet that Franz claimed had been stolen from him – he said he had found them on a heap of straw in a roadside hovel. This suggested that at least some of Franz's papers had gone astray, as he claimed. When Mademoiselle Tietjens came to see the prisoner she swore that he was not the light-haired man who had asked for her help in early June. This raised the possibility that there was indeed another light-haired German who had been associated with the darker Krohn. And it came to light that the London supplier of the hemp twine sold in Reigate, and found on Mary Halliday's body, was based in Whitechapel, just a few doors away from the stretch of pavement where Franz said he picked up the piece with which he tied his shirt.
The inquiry was slipping away from Whicher. He searched desperately for Krohn, whose capture he was convinced would make the case against Franz. He was so keen to find the missing German that he more than once expressed a conviction that he almost had him: 'I have little doubt but that the man described as Adolphe Krohn is a young Polish Jew named Marks Cohen,' he wrote to Mayne. He was proved wrong. Soon afterwards he was 'strongly impressed' that another man was Krohn, and again was mistaken. Whicher did not find him.
At the trial for Mary Halliday's murder on 8 August, Franz's counsel argued, in a passionate four-hour speech, that the circumstantial evidence in the case needed not only to be consistent with guilt but also to be inconsistent with innocence. It was said that ten of the twelve jurors went into the jury room convinced that Franz was the murderer, but when they came out they declared him not guilty. The Saxon Embassy paid his fare home.
The Times the next day, clearly convinced that Franz had killed Mrs Halliday, pointed out that circumstantial evidence was always – theoretically – consistent with innocence. Such evidence was never proof of anything: 'it is only an hypothesis binding together certain facts, though it is at the same time an hypothesis which, by a law of nature, we cannot in certain cases help believing to be the right one'.
The Kingswood investigation had unfolded like a nasty joke, a mockery of a detective's skills. It was a reminder that detective work relied on good fortune as well as acuity. 'If I was not the cleverest, of which I had grave doubts, I was certainly the luckiest of detectives,' says Inspector 'F', the narrator of Waters' Experiences of a Real Detective (1862). 'I had but held my mouth open, and fat things had dropped in of their own accord.' Whicher's luck seemed to have run out. He had probably been right about the identity of the Kingswood murderer, but once Franz was acquitted the detective's confidence started to look like something else – arrogance, perhaps, or delusion, or obsession. This was the last murder he investigated.
In the nineteenth century the idea was gaining ground that human witness (confession or eyewitness evidence) was too subjective to be trusted. Jeremy Bentham's A Treatise on Judicial Evidence (1825), for instance, argued that testimony needed to be backed up by material proof. Only things would do: the button, the boa, the nightgown, the knife. As Waters' Inspector 'F' puts it: 'I believe that a chain of circumstantial evidence in which there shall be no material break . . . [is] the most reliable testimony upon which human judgment can be based – since a circumstance cannot be perjured, or bear corrupt testimony.' The same preference could be discerned in the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: 'he ushers in the scientific and analytical literature in which things play a more important part than people', observed the French writers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt in 1856. Objects were incorruptible in their silence. They were mute witnesses to history, fragments – like Darwin's fossils – that could freeze the past.
Yet the Kingswood case and the Road Hill case showed up the slipperiness of things, made it clear that objects as well as memories were endlessly open to interpretation. Darwin had to decipher his fossils. Whicher had to read his murder scenes. A chain of evidence was constructed, not unearthed. Forrester's lady detective puts it simply: 'The value of the detective lies not somuch in discovering facts, as in putting them together, and finding out what they mean.' The mutilated body at Road Hill might be evidence of rage, or of the impersonation of rage. The open window could indicate an escape route, or the cunning of a killer still ensconced in the house. At Kingswood, Whicher found the most definitive kind of clue: a piece of paper bearing a name and a physical description. Even this, it turned out, could point to the opposite of what it seemed – the theft of an identity rather than identity itself.
A new mood was taking hold in England. By contrast with the vigorous, buoyant 1850s, the next decade was to be characterised by unease, self-doubt. Queen Victoria's mother died in March 1861 and her adored husband, Prince Albert, in December. The Queen went into mourning, and spent the rest of her life in black.
In the early 1860s the emotions aroused by the Road Hill murder went underground, leaving the pages of the press to reappear, disguised and intensified, in the pages of fiction. On 6 July 1861, almost exactly a year after the murder, the first instalment of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret appeared in Robin Goodfellow magazine. This novel, a huge bestseller when it was published in full in 1862, featured a wicked stepmother (a governess who married a gentleman), a brutal, mysterious murder at an elegant country house, a body thrust into a well; its characters were fascinated with madness and with detective work, and terrified of exposure. Braddon's story gave expression to the disquiet and excitement that Saville Kent's murder had awakened.
Constance Kent was refracted into every woman in the book: the sweet-faced, possibly insane murderess Lady Audley; the tomboyish, spirited daughter of the house, Alicia Audley; the impassive lady's maid Phoebe Marks ('Silent and self-contained, she seemed to hold herself within hersel
f, and take no colour from the outer world . . . that is a woman who can keep a secret'); and the lonely, passionate Clara Talboys, sister to the murdered man: 'I have grown up in an atmosphere of suppression. . . . I have stifled and dwarfed the natural feelings of my heart, until they have become unnatural in their intensity; I have been allowed neither friends nor lovers. My mother died when I was very young . . . I have had no one but my brother.'
Jack Whicher surfaces in the figure of the tormented amateur detective Robert Audley, who conducts a 'backward investigation', a journey into his suspect's past. Where Inspector Bucket in Bleak House is suave, twinkling with secret knowledge, Robert Audley is racked with a guilty fear that he is insane. Who is the monomaniac, he wonders: is it the childlike woman he suspects of madness and murder, or by fixing on her is he merely proving himself in the grip of an obsessive delusion?
Was it a monition or a monomania? What if I am wrong after all? What if this chain of evidence which I have constructed link by link is constructed out of my own folly? What if this edifice of horror and suspicion is a mere collection of crochets – the nervous fancies of a hypochondriacal bachelor? . . . Oh, my God, if it should be in myself all this time that the misery lies.
Whicher's chain of evidence at Road could be proof of his suspect's guilt or of his own delusions, just as his chain of evidence at Kingswood had proved. The uncertainty was torture: 'Am I never to get any nearer the truth,' asks Robert Audley, 'but am I to be tormented all my life by vague doubts, and wretched suspicions, which may grow upon me till I become a monomaniac?' Yet if he succeeds in solving the mystery it might only magnify the horror: 'why should I try to unravel the tangled skein, to fit the pieces of the terrible puzzle, and gather together the stray fragments which when collected may make such a hideous whole?'
Lady Audley's Secret was one of the earliest and best of the 'sensation' or 'enigma' novels that dominated the 1860s literary scene, labyrinthine tales of domestic misery, deception, madness, intrigue. They dealt in what Henry James called 'those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries that are at our own doors . . . the terrors of the cheerful country house, or the busy London lodgings'. Their secrets were exotic, but their settings immediate – they took place in England, now, a land of telegrams, trains, policemen. The characters in these novels were at the mercy of their feelings, which pressed out, unmediated, onto their flesh: emotion compelled them to blanch, flush, darken, tremble, start, convulse, their eyes to burn and flash and dim. The books, it was feared, worked on their readers in the same way.
In 1863 the philosopher Henry Mansel described such novels as 'indications of a widespread corruption, of which they are in part both the effect and the cause: called into existence to satisfy the cravings of a diseased appetite, and contributing themselves to foster the disease, and to stimulate the want they supply'. Mansel expressed himself with unusual force, but his views were widespread. Many feared that sensation novels were a 'virus' that might create the corruption they described, forming a circle of excitement – sexual and violent – that coursed through every stratum of society. These books, the original psychological thrillers, were seen as agents of social collapse, even in the way they were consumed – they were read in the scullery and the drawing room, by servants and mistresses alike. They alluded to real crimes, such as the Road Hill case, to add a frisson of authenticity. 'There is something unspeakably disgusting in this ravenous appetite for carrion,' wrote Mansel, 'this vulture-like instinct which smells out the newest mass of social corruption, and hurries to devour the loathsome dainty before the scent has evaporated.' Sensation novels called forth their readers' brutish sensations, their animal appetites; they threatened religious belief and social order in a similar way to Darwinism. Mansel noted that the typical jacket illustration to one of these novels was of 'a pale young lady in a white dress, with a dagger in her hand' – the scene Whicher had conjured at Road.
Joseph Stapleton's book about the killing, The Great Crime of 1860, was published in May 1861, with an endorsement from Rowland Rodway. Stapleton was fantastically well-informed: he knew the suspects in the case and he had heard the local gossip. Henry Clark, the magistrates' clerk, had supplied him with information about the magistrates' inquiries and the police investigations, and Samuel Kent had briefed him on the family's history. Stapleton hinted heavily at Constance's guilt. Yet his book's tone was often frenzied and bizarre – the dark suggestions he threw out were not only about the identity of the murderer but about the decay and collapse of English society, a racial catastrophe.
In prose as heated as that of the sensation novelists, Stapleton urged his readers to 'think of the human hearts that pulsate' in the homes of the new middle classes, 'of the human passions that riot there . . . of family wrongs, of family conflicts, of family disgraces, covered over only by the miserable tinsel of gentility; flashing out here and there, fitfully, into a sudden, devouring, and inextinguishable flame'. He likened such families to volcanoes: 'in many an English house-hold, the amenities of social life are found to clothe with grace a rugged and a shallow crust. The tempest . . . gathers strength in those deep recesses where the crater is instinct with fire; and . . . it bursts out, in its fully fury, to hurl parents, children, servants, into one common, inevitable, and promiscuous destruction.'
The public had been corrupted by the Road Hill murder, Stapleton suggested. 'As the mystery attached to the crime has been deepened and prolonged, suspicion has become a passion.' He gave a lurid account of the spectators at Saville's inquest, comparing them to the women at a Spanish bullfight. 'Women had crowded into the room to hear how a throat had been cut,' he wrote, 'and they held young children in their arms to gaze upon the bloody relic.' It was as if the domestic angel of Victorian fantasy momentarily gave way to a bloodthirsty ghoul: 'Her sympathies for suffering are suspended till her instincts have been indulged; and, when curiosity and the love of the horrible have been satiated, the Englishwoman recovers from her eclipse and comes forth among us in the brightness of her better attributes again.' In Stapleton's eyes, the observers of a murder investigation were themselves transformed, briefly mutated by the vision of violence. Though he was eager to assign all the appetite for gore to the working-class women of the village, and to liken them to foreigners for good measure, the greedy curiosity about this case extended to all the English social classes, and both sexes. He was himself hungry for the matter of the murder, as his book made clear.
Stapleton suggested that the murder was evidence of 'a national decay': 'An imputed degradation of race has become amongst ourselves a national reproach,' he wrote, 'just because we recognise in it the natural consequences and expression of a long ancestral series of debasing pleasures, grovelling occupations, and corrupting sins.' He was subscribing here to the theory of racial degeneration: if human beings could evolve, as Darwin argued, they could surely regress as well. A family's decadent past could tell on its children, dragging the race backwards. Mansel, too, cited the Road Hill murder as evidence of degeneration, along with the spread of alcoholism, consumerism, hysteria, pollution, prostitution and adultery. Stapleton, though eager to absolve Samuel of the murder, implied that his former colleague's corruptions and pretensions had undone his family. Dipsomania could mark a man's offspring, said the doctor, as could other kinds of intemperance, such as greed for money or an excess of sexual desire.
The unsolved murder at Road played out the sensation novelist's vision of Britain. The case didn't deliver meaning; only a jolt, like electricity. Its influence was evident in Charlotte Yonge's The Trial (1863), about a middle-class adolescent boy accused of murder, and in the anonymous Such Things Are (1862), about smart young ladies with horrifying criminal histories: 'Time was . . . when the English girl was looked upon, both abroad and at home, as the type of all that was pure and innocent, but things are altered now.' The reverberations of the case could be discerned in the books that depicted a crude police officer defiling a refined domestic scene – Grimstone of
the Yard, for instance, with his 'greasy little memorandum book' and 'stumpy pencil' in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Aurora Floyd (1863).
The novelist Margaret Oliphant blamed it all on the detectives. Sensation fiction, she said, was 'a literary institutionalisation of the habits of mind of the new police force'. The 'literary Detective', she wrote in 1862, 'is not a collaborateur whom we welcome with any pleasure into the republic of letters. His appearance is neither favourable to taste or morals.' A year later she complained of 'detectivism', the 'police-court aspect of modern fiction'.
In the wake of the Road Hill murder, detectives were, in Robert Audley's words, 'stained with vile associations, and unfit company for honest gentlemen'. Audley was disgusted at the detective persona he himself had adopted: 'His generous nature revolted at the office into which he had found himself drawn – the office of spy, the collector of damning facts that led on to horrible deductions . . . onward upon the loathsome path – the crooked by-way of watchfulness and suspicion.'
In the feverish figure of Robert Audley, compelled to seek what he fears, 'sensation' and 'detectivism' were fused. The detective could be understood as a sensation-addict himself, hungry for the shudder and thrill of crime. James McLevy, the Edinburgh detective whose two volumes of memoirs were bestsellers in 1861, confessed to the unsettling excitement of his work. He depicted his desire to retrieve stolen goods as an animal urge, like the thief's desire to steal: 'It is scarcely possible to imagine a detective's feelings on pulling out of a mysterious bag the very things he wants. Even the robber, when his fingers are all of a quiver in the rapid clutch of a diamond necklace, feels no greater delight than we do when we retract that watch from the same fingers now closed with a nervous grasp.' McLevy said that he was drawn to danger, to mystery, to 'places where secret things have been done'. The yearning he felt for a 'wanted' man was physical: 'every look . . . seemed to send a back energy down through my arm, imparting something like a crave in the fingers to lay hold of him'. With a creepy eroticism, McLevy compared capturing a villain to seizing a lover: 'what a glorious grip that was I got of him . . . I would not have exchanged it for the touch of a bride's hand, with the marriage ring upon her finger . . . such was my weakness, that when I saw Thomson struggling ineffectually in the grasp of the officer, one whom I had so often sighed for in secret, and eyed in openness . . . I absolutely burned to embrace the dauntless leader of the gang.' McLevy portrayed himself as a solitary man whose energies were diverted and his emotions warped by his obsession with the cases he worked on, the crooks he craved. Like Jack Whicher, and most fictional detectives since, he was unmarried, his solitude the price of his excellence.
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher Page 21