The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

by Summerscale, Kate

  The press stepped up its assaults on Whicher and his colleagues. 'The modern detective is generally at fault,' stated the Dublin Review – the Road Hill case had 'justly shaken' public confidence in his 'sagacity and long-headed-ness . . . The detective system in this country is essentially low and mean.' The word 'clueless' was first recorded in 1862. Reynolds magazine compared the Metropolitan Police to 'a cowardly and clumsy giant, who . . . wreaks all the meanness and malignity of his nature on every feeble and helpless creature who comes in his way'. There were echoes here of the 'meanness' Whicher showed in arresting the helpless Constance Kent. A parody in Punch in 1863 referred to 'Inspector Watcher' of the 'Defective Police'. In the Saturday Review, James Fitzjames Stephen attacked the romantic presentation of police in fiction – 'this detective worship' – arguing that in reality they were useless at solving middle-class crimes.

  In the summer of 1863 Samuel and William Kent visited Constance in Dinan, and on 10 August she returned to England to become a paying boarder at St Mary's Home in Brighton. This establishment, founded by the Reverend Arthur Douglas Wagner in 1855, was the closest thing to a convent that the Church of England could offer. A band of novice nuns, led by a Lady Superior, ran a lying-in hospital for unmarried mothers, assisted by about thirty penitents. Wagner was a disciple of Edmund Pusey, a leader of the nineteenth-century Tractarian or Oxford Movement that advocated a revival of vestments, incense, candles and sacramental confession in the Anglican Church. By joining the community that Wagner had founded at St Mary's, Constance was replacing her natural family with a religious family, freeing herself of the ties of blood. Having adopted the French spelling of her middle name, she was known as Emilie Kent.

  In London, Jack Whicher's life had emptied out. There was little sign of the former 'prince of detectives' in the newspapers. His friend Detective-Inspector Stephen Thornton dropped dead of apoplexy at his house in Lambeth in September 1861, aged fifty-eight, leaving the way clear for Dolly Williamson to be promoted Inspector in October. Williamson was put in charge of the department.

  After Kingswood, Whicher only once appears in the Metropolitan Police files on important cases. In September 1862 he and a colleague, Superintendent Walker, were sent to Warsaw at the request of the Russian rulers of the city to give advice on how to set up a detective service. The Russians were worried about the Polish nationalist insurgents, who had made assassination attempts on the Tsar's family. 'Everything seems very quiet,' the English officers reported from the Hotel Europe on 8 September, 'and no further attempts at assassination have been made, altho' . . . the government seems to be in constant apprehension. Our mission here is being kept entirely secret . . . as our personal safety might be endangered by a wrong construction being placed on the object of our visit.' Afterwards the Russians were polite about their guests – 'the two Officers . . . have entirely satisfied his Highness's expectations by the justice and sagacity of their remarks' – but did not take up their suggestions. In March 1863, when Russian soldiers were shooting insurgents in Warsaw, questions were asked in the House of Commons about the ethics of the detectives' secret mission.

  On 18 March 1864 Jack Whicher left the Metropolitan Police, aged forty-nine, with an annual pension of £133.6s.8d. He returned to his rooms in Holywell Street, Pimlico. On his discharge papers he described his marital state as single and his next of kin as William Wort, a Wiltshire coach proprietor who in 1860 had married one of the detective's nieces, Mary Ann. The discharge papers gave the reason for Whicher's early retirement as 'congestion of the brain'. This diagnosis was applied to all sorts of conditions, such as epilepsy, anxiety, vascular dementia. An essay of 1866 described the symptoms as throbbing headaches, a flushed, swollen face and bloodshot eyes, and argued that its cause was 'protracted mental tension'. It was as if Whicher's thoughts had run too obsessively on the conundrum of the Road Hill murder and his mind had become as 'over-heated' as Robert Audley's. Perhaps congestion of the brain was what happened when the detective instinct went unanswered, when the hunger for resolution was not satisfied, when the truth could not be disentangled from the seeming.

  'Nothing in the world is hidden for ever,' wrote Wilkie Collins in No Name (1862). 'Sand turns traitor, and betrays the footstep that has passed over it; water gives back to the tell-tale surface the body that has been drowned . . . Hate breaks its prison-secrecy in the thoughts, through the doorway of the eyes . . . Look where we will, the inevitable law of revelation is one of the laws of nature: the lasting preservation of a secret is a miracle which the world has never yet seen.'

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  BETTER SHE BE MAD

  April–June 1865

  On Tuesday, 25 April 1865 Constance Kent, now twenty-one, took the train from Brighton to Victoria station, under a fierce sun, and then a cab to Bow Street magistrates' court, Covent Garden. She was accompanied by the Reverend Wagner, in his vicar's garb, and by Katharine Gream, the Lady Superior of St Mary's, in full regalia (a long black cloak with a high white frill). Constance wore a loose veil. She appeared 'pale and sorrowful', said the Daily Telegraph, 'but perfectly composed'. When she reached the court shortly before four o'clock, she told the officials inside that she had come to confess to a murder.

  The Bow Street office, the first and most famous of the London magistrates' courts, occupied two stucco-fronted terrace houses in the disreputable district around Covent Garden market and the opera house. A policeman stood guard outside, under a gaslamp and a carving of the royal arms. Constance and her companions were shown down a narrow passage to a single-storey courtroom behind the main building. The room was criss-crossed with metal railings and wooden platforms; the sun shone through a skylight in the ceiling; a clock and several oil paintings hung on the discoloured walls. Sir Thomas Henry, the chief magistrate of Bow Street, was sitting at the Bench. Constance handed him the letter that she had brought with her. She took a seat. The room, on an April day as hot as midsummer, was close and airless.

  Henry read the letter, written on silky notepaper in a confident, flowery hand:

  I, Constance Emilie Kent, alone and unaided, on the night of the 29th of June, 1860, murdered at Road-hill-house, Wiltshire, one Francis Saville Kent. Before the deed was done no one knew of my intention, nor afterwards of my guilt. No one assisted me in the crime, nor in the evasion of discovery.

  The magistrate looked at Constance. 'Am I to understand, Miss Kent,' he asked, 'that you have given yourself up of your own free act and will on this charge?'

  'Yes, sir.' Constance spoke 'firmly, though sadly', said The Times.

  'Anything you may say here will be written down, and may be used against you. Do you quite understand that?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'Is this paper, now produced before me, in your own handwriting, and written of your own free will?'

  'It is, sir.'

  'Then let the charge be entered in her own words.' The magistrates' clerk wrote down the murder charge on a blue form, asking Constance only whether she spelt her middle name 'Emily' or 'Emilie'.

  'It is quite indifferent,' she replied. 'I sometimes spell it one way, and sometimes the other.'

  'I observe that on this paper, which you say is your own handwriting, it is spelt 'Emilie".'

  'Yes, sir.'

  Henry asked her if she would sign her confession. 'I must again remind you,' he added, 'that it is the most serious crime that can be committed, and that your statement will be used against you at your trial. I have had the words written copied upon this charge sheet, but I do not wish you to sign it unless you desire to do so.'

  'I will do so if necessary,' said Constance.

  'It is not absolutely necessary,' Henry told her. 'There is no occasion for you to sign the charge unless you wish it. I will have your statement attached to the depositions, and I will again ask you if you have made it by your own desire, and without any inducement from any quarter whatever to give yourself up.'

  'Yes.'

  Henry turned
his attention to the Reverend Wagner, and asked him to identify himself. Wagner was a well-known figure, an Eton-and Oxford-educated curate who had used his inherited riches to build five churches in Brighton, for which he commissioned ornate windows and altar-pieces from artists such as Edward Burne-Jones, Augustus Pugin and William Morris. He established the seaside town as a centre of the Anglo-Catholic movement. Some considered him a papist, and a danger to the English Church.

  'I am a clerk in holy orders and perpetual curate of St Paul's Church, Brighton,' said Wagner. The vicar had a handsome, fleshy face, inset with small, appraising eyes. 'I have known Constance Kent nearly two years – since the summer of 1863.'

  Constance interrupted: 'In August.'

  'About twenty-one months?' asked Henry.

  'Yes,' said Wagner. 'As far as I can remember an English family wrote to me, asking for her admission to St Mary's . . . in consequence of her having no home, or of some difficulty respecting her. The "home", or rather "hospital", as it is now called, is a house for religious ladies, and is attached to St Mary's Church. She came about that time as a visitor, and has been there up to the present day.'

  'Now, Mr Wagner,' said Henry, 'it is my duty to ask you if any inducement has been made to the prisoner in any way to make this confession.'

  'None whatever has been made by me. The confession is entirely her own voluntary act, to the best of my belief. It was about a fortnight ago, as far as I can recollect, that the circumstance first came to my knowledge. It was entirely her own proposition that she should be taken before a London magistrate. She herself proposed to come to London for the purpose. The nature of the confession she made to me was the same, in substance, as the statement produced in her own writing, and copied upon the charge sheet.'

  Wagner added that when he spoke of Constance's confession he was referring to her public statement, not to anything that she had told him in private.

  'I will not go into that point here,' replied Henry. 'It may be gone into at the trial, perhaps very fully.' He turned to Constance again, clearly uneasy about the priest's role in her surrender. 'I hope you understand that whatever you say must be entirely your own free and voluntary statement, and that no inducement that may have been held out to you is to have any effect upon your mind.'

  'No inducement ever has, sir.'

  'I am anxious you should most seriously consider that.'

  Wagner spoke up: 'I wish to mention that many are in the habit of coming to confess to me as a religious exercise, but I never held out any inducement to her to make a public confession.'

  'Yes,' said Henry, a little sternly, 'I think you ought to mention that. Did you in the first instance induce her to make the confession to you?'

  'No, sir. I did not seek her out or in any way ask her to come to confession. She herself wished to do so.'

  'If you think that the confession she now makes has been induced in consequence of anything which she has said to you, or which you have said to her, you ought to say so.'

  'I never even recommended it,' insisted Wagner. 'I have been simply passive. I thought she was doing right, and I did not dissuade her.'

  'But do you say that you did not persuade her?'

  'I do say so.'

  Henry lifted up Constance's letter of confession. 'This is the paper you wish to hand in as your statement, is it?' he asked. 'It is not too late even now . . . You are not bound to make any statement unless you desire to do so.'

  The chief clerk asked her if the document was in her own handwriting.

  'Yes,' she said, 'it is.'

  Henry asked Wagner if he knew Miss Kent's handwriting but he said he did not, having never seen her write.

  The clerk read Constance's confession back to her and she confirmed its accuracy. She signed it, using the original spelling of her middle name: Emily. When Henry explained that he would be committing her for trial she sighed, as if in relief, and sat back in her chair.

  In the course of this examination Superintendent Durkin and Inspector Williamson had entered the chamber, having been summoned from Scotland Yard.

  'The offence was committed in Wiltshire,' observed Henry, 'and the trial must be in that county. It will therefore be necessary to send her to be examined before the magistrates in that county. Inspector Williamson was present at the former inquiry, and knows what took place and who were the magistrates.'

  'Yes, Sir Thomas,' said Dolly Williamson. 'I do.'

  'And the residences of the magistrates?'

  'One of them resides at Trowbridge.'

  'One justice of the peace can hear the case in the first instance,' said Henry. He asked where Detective-Inspector Whicher was, and Williamson told him that he had retired.

  Williamson took Constance Kent and Miss Gream to Paddington railway station, where, with Detective-Sergeant Robinson, who had worked on the Kingswood case, they caught the 8.10 p.m. train to Chippenham. During the journey Constance was silent, even when the Inspector tried to prompt her with friendly questions. This was the first time she had been back to Wiltshire since 1861. She seemed, Williamson said, 'in a state of deep dejection'. The party reached Chippenham just before midnight and then took a post-chaise – a closed, four-wheeled carriage – on to Trowbridge, about fifteen miles away. Again Williamson tried to interest Constance in conversation, asking her if she knew how far they were from the town, but met with silence. The driver of the chaise got so lost on the country lanes that they did not reach Trowbridge until 2 a.m. At the police station, Constance was looked after by a Mrs Harris, the wife of the new Superintendent (John Foley had died the previous September, aged sixty-nine).

  The press greeted Constance's confession with astonishment. Several newspapers were reluctant to accept the validity of her statement. After all, some disturbed people committed crimes; others, like the troubled bricklayer who had claimed to have killed Saville Kent, pretended to have done so, perhaps in the hope that confession to a crime might bring relief from a morbid, unfocused sense of guilt and misery. Maybe Constance was 'mad instead of guilty', suggested the Daily Telegraph; the past five years of 'slow agony' could have deprived her of her senses, incited her to a false confession. 'Better a hundred times that she should prove a maniac than a murderess.' Yet the lucidity and 'terrible courage' of her words, the newspaper admitted, 'do not look at all like insanity'. The Morning Star suggested that Constance had murdered her half-brother out of 'passionate fondness' for William. Quasi-romantic friendships between brothers and sisters were familiar to a Victorian audience – in the cloistered, chaperoned middle-class family, a sibling might be a young man or woman's only close acquaintance of the opposite sex. The London Standard thought there was something fishy about Constance's statement, which she had supposedly penned herself: 'There is an attorney's stamp upon it.' The London Review, hinting that sinister papist forces were at work, found 'in the language of the document palpable indications of a foreign hand and a strange influence'.

  The Time, though, took Constance at her word, and offered an explanation for the crime that assigned feelings of violent hatred to half of the English population. 'From twelve or fourteen to eighteen or twenty is that period of life in which the tide of natural affection runs the lowest, leaving the body and the intellect unfettered and unweakened in the work of development, and leaving the heart itself open for the strong passions and overwhelming preferences that will then seize it . . . sad to say, it is the softer sex especially which is said to go through a period of almost utter heartlessness.' Girls were 'harder and more selfish' than boys; in preparation for the sexual passion to come, their hearts were emptied of all tenderness. And when a girl happened also to have a 'peculiar brooding, imaginative, inventive tendency . . . the dream seems to grow and become an inner life, unchecked by social feeling and by outward occupation, till a mere idea, equally causeless and wicked, fills the soul'. The newspaper, in defiance of the idea of the middle-class Victorian woman as an 'angel in the house', was suggesting that most adol
escent girls were given to murderous desires: 'Constance Kent, it is said, only did what myriads of her age and sex only wish should come to pass by other agency than their own.'

  Some newspapers reported that Constance had already written to her father in Wales, to spare him the shock of first hearing of her confession through the pages of the press. But an anecdote recounted in the Somerset and Wilts Journal contradicted this. An acquaintance of Samuel Kent noticed that he was in good spirits when he visited the Welsh town of Oswestry, near his home in Llangollen, on the morning of Wednesday, 26 April. At about 2 p.m., he was seen buying a newspaper at the railway station. While reading the newspaper, which carried an account of his daughter's confession at Bow Street the previous afternoon, he became 'temporarily paralysed' before rushing up the main street to a hotel, from which he ordered a carriage and immediately started for home. He failed to keep an appointment he had made in Oswestry that afternoon.