The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective (12 page)

The breast flannel was one of several loose ends in the case that the investigators - police, reporters, newspaper readers - tried to endow with meaning, to turn into a clue. While a murder went unsolved, everything was potentially significant, packed with secrets. The observers, like paranoiacs, saw messages everywhere. Objects could regain their innocence only when the killer was caught.

Since Whicher was sure that the murderer was an inmate of the house, all his suspects were still at the scene. This was the original country-house murder mystery, a case in which the investigator had to find not a person but a person's hidden self. It was pure whodunnit, a contest of intelligence and nerve between the detective and the killer. Here were the twelve. One was the victim. Which was the traitor?

To get at the inner thoughts and feelings of the Kent house-hold was more a matter of instinct than logic, what Charlotte Brontee described as 'sensitiveness - that peculiar, apprehensive, detective faculty'. A vocabulary was emerging to capture the elusive new detective methods. In 1849 the word 'hunch' was first used to mean a push or nudge towards a solution. In the 1850s 'lead' gained the meaning of a guiding indication or a clue.

Whicher observed the inhabitants of Road Hill House, their tics and intonations, the unconscious movements of their bodies and faces. He deduced their characters from their behaviour. In his own phrase, he 'reckoned 'em up'. An unnamed detective tried to explain this process to the journalist Andrew Wynter by describing how he caught a swell mobsman at a ceremony in Berkshire in 1856, when the Queen was laying the foundation stone of Wellington College, near Crowthorne. 'If you ask me to give my reason why I thought this person a thief the moment I saw him, I could not tell you,' said the detective. 'I did not even know myself. There was something about him, as about all swell mobsmen, that immediately attracted my attention, and led me to bend my eye upon them [sic]. He did not appear to notice my watching him, but passed into the thick of the crowd, but then he turned and looked towards the spot in which I was - this was enough for me, although I had never seen him before, and he had not to my knowledge attempted any pocket. I immediately made my way towards him, and tapping him on the shoulder, asked him abruptly, "What do you do here?" Without any hesitation, he said in an under tone, "I should not have come if I had known I should have seen any of you." I then asked him if he was working with any companions, and he said, "No, upon my word, I am alone;" upon this I took him off to the room which we had provided for the safe keeping of the swell mobsmen.' The detective's boldness, his instinct for a person being 'wrong', his familiarity with the swell mob and the plain, dramatic manner in which he told his story, suggest that Wynter's informant was Whicher. And there were telltale tics in his language: Whicher used the phrase 'That was enough for me' in a conversation recorded by Dickens.

It was hard to communicate in words the sorts of subtle movements on which a detective based his hunches: the momentary grimace, the fleeting gesture. The Edinburgh detective inspector James McLevy made a good go of it in the memoirs he published in 1861. As he watched a servant girl at a window, 'I could even notice the eye, nervous and snatchy, and the secret-like movement of withdrawing the head as she saw the man, and then protruding it a bit when she saw him busy.' The journalist William Russell, in one of the detective stories he published as 'Waters' in the 1850s, tried to capture the complexities of looking: 'her glare, for such it was, continuing fixed upon me - yet an introspective glare - searching the records of her own brain as well as the tablet of my face - considering, comparing both'. This formulation caught the way the accomplished detective worked: he looked keenly out at the world and, simultaneously, as sharply inwards, searching the records of his memory. The eyes of others were the books to be read, his own experience the dictionary that enabled him to read.

Whicher claimed he could see people's thoughts in their eyes. 'The eye,' he told William Wills, 'is the great detector. We can tell in a crowd what a swell-mobsman is about by the expression of his eye.' Whicher's experience 'guided him into tracks quite invisible to other eyes', wrote Wills. In faces, said McLevy, 'you can always find something readable . . . I am seldom
out
when I get my eyes on them.'

Whicher read bodies as well as faces - a twitch, a start, a rustle of hands beneath a cape, a sharp nod to an accomplice, a dart into an alley. He once arrested two well-dressed young men who had been loitering outside the Adelphi and Lyceum theatres because he 'suspected their movements' (when he searched them, he discovered that they did not have the money to pay for even the cheapest tickets in the pit, which confirmed his guess that they had been planning to pick pockets). His eye for the suspect movement had found him the diamonds stolen by Emily Lawrence and Louisa Moutot.

The seemingly supernatural sight of the early detective was crystallised by Dickens in Inspector Bucket, a 'mechanism of observation' with 'an unlimited number of eyes' who 'mounts a high tower in his mind and looks out far and wide'. The 'velocity and certainty' of Mr Bucket's interpretations was 'little short of miraculous'. The mid-Victorians were transfixed by the idea that faces and bodies could be 'read', that the inner life was imprinted on the shapes of the features and the flutter of the fingers. Perhaps the fascination stemmed from the premium placed on privacy: it was terrifying and thrilling that thoughts were visible, that the inner life, so jealously guarded, could be instantly exposed. People's bodies might betray them, like the heartbeats of the killer in Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart' (1843), which seemed to pound out his guilt. Later in the century, the unconscious give-aways of gesture and speech were to underpin the theories of Sigmund Freud.

The standard text on the art of face-reading was John Caspar Lavater's
Essays on Physiognomy
(1855). The physiognomist's 'eye, in particular, must be excellent, clear, acute, rapid and firm', wrote Lavater. 'Precision in observation is the very soul of physiognomy. The physiognomist must possess a most delicate, swift, certain, most extensive spirit of observation. To observe is to be selective.' As with detective work, the man with a good eye was the man who could discriminate, could see what mattered. 'The necessary knowledge is that of
what
to observe,' says Poe's Auguste Dupin. Detectives and physiognomists shared this excellence of the eye, which mirrored (perhaps even challenged) the Eye of Heaven that saw into the soul.

'There is nothing truer than physiognomy,' says the narrator of Dickens' short story 'Hunted Down' (1859), 'taken in connection with manner.' He explains how he formed his judgement of a man named Slinkton. 'I took his face to pieces in my mind, like a watch, and examined it in detail. I could not say much against any of his features separately; I could say even less against them when they were put together. "Then is it not monstrous," I asked myself, "that because a man happens to part his hair straight up the middle of his head, I should permit myself to suspect, and even to detest him?" ' Yet he defends his violent dislike of Slinkton's centre parting: 'An observer of men who finds himself steadily repelled by some apparently trifling thing in a stranger is right to give it great weight. It may be the clue to the whole mystery. A hair or two will show where a lion is hidden. A very little key will open a very heavy door.' Faces and bodies held clues and keys; tiny things answered huge questions.

In his account of the Road Hill murder, Stapleton claimed that the secrets of the Kent family were written all over their faces. 'Nothing perhaps reveals more faithfully the history and secrets of a family than the countenances and expression of its children,' he wrote. 'Upon their countenances, in their behaviour and in their tempers, in their faults, and even in their very gestures and expression, there is written the history of their homes; as surely as upon the growing plant are found features correspondent to the nature of the soil in which it grew, to the storm that has torn its young tendrils and beat upon its tender shoots, to the care that pruned and watered it . . . Most truly may the physiognomy of children be regarded as the best index of the family weather.' Stapleton's rhetoric drew on the swirl of early Victorian ideas that had culminated in Darwin's
The Origin of Species
, published the year before - Darwin looked forward to a time 'when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor'. People had become the sum of their pasts.

All the visitors to Road Hill House in the weeks after the murder scanned the inhabitants for clues. Most literally, the medical men examined Saville's corpse to read the story that it told. Others studied the faces and bodies of the living inmates of the house. Rowland Rodway said of Elizabeth Gough: 'I observed on her face traces of emotion and fatigue.' Albert Groser, a young reporter who sneaked into the house on the day of the murder, noticed Gough's 'agitated, troubled' demeanour. But where their suspicions were aroused by the nursemaid's frowns and fidgets, Whicher was to find his traces in absences, silences.

In his report to Sir Richard Mayne, Whicher outlined what he had noticed about the Kent family. Mr and Mrs Kent were 'doating' towards their younger children. William was 'very dejected'. Constance and William had a 'sympathy' and a 'close intimacy' ('close' in 1860 meant secretive). Whicher took account of how the family reacted to Saville's death. When Elizabeth Gough was 'telling the two elder Miss Kents that the child had been taken away during the night', he wrote,
'Miss Constance opened her door dressed, heard what was being said, but made no remark.'
Constance's composure, then and afterwards, might seem to betoken an easy conscience, a peaceful inner life, but a more sinister construction could be put on it. Coolness was a prerequisite for an artful crime.

The puzzle of the Road Hill case lay in the killer's peculiar combination of heat and cold, planning and passion. Whoever had murdered, mutilated and defiled Saville Kent must be horribly disturbed, possessed by unnaturally strong feelings; yet the same person, in remaining so far undiscovered, had shown startling powers of self-control. Whicher took Constance's cold quiet as a clue that she had killed her brother.

Whicher's confrontation with Constance over the nightdress may have been designed as an experiment on her nerves. If so, her unruffled blankness only confirmed his suspicions. As with the expressionless manner, so with the vanished nightdress: the clues lay in the gaps, in the hints of things hidden. What Whicher thought he saw in Constance was as slight as what Mr Bucket detected in the murderess Madame Hortense, 'her arms composedly crossed . . . [but] something in her dark cheek beating like a clock'. And Whicher's conviction of his suspect's guilt was as sure as Bucket's: 'By the living Lord it flashed upon me . . . that she had done it!' Or, in the words of Wilkie Collins' Sergeant Cuff, the fictional detective whom Whicher inspired: 'I don't suspect. I know.'

Even before Whicher's arrival, the Road Hill case had spawned would-be sleuths among the readers of English newspapers. They sent their tips to the police. 'I have had a dream which has given me a deal of uneasiness,' wrote a man from Stoke-on-Trent. 'I dreamed I saw 3 men making up the plot at a house near Finished Building, about half a mile from the sean of murder . . . I can give a minute description of the men I saw in my dream.' A newspaper vendor in Reading, Berkshire, suspected a man who had visited her shop on 4 July because he had asked 'in a tremulous way' whether there was anything about the murder in the previous day's
Daily Telegraph.

On the day that Whicher reached Road another stranger had visited the village, introducing himself as a professor of phrenology. He offered to examine the heads of the murder suspects: by feeling the contours of their skulls, he claimed, he could determine who was guilty. A bump behind the ear indicated destructiveness; the part of the skull just above that was the seat of secretiveness. This was probably the same phrenologist who a week earlier had written from Warminster, five miles away, offering his services to the police. He practised a 'tried, disinterested science', he assured them: 'I find it as easy to detect the murderer's head, as it is to select a tiger from a sheep.' The police declined the offers - in 1860 phrenology was widely dismissed as quackery. But in some ways it was a close cousin of detective work. Much of the excitement about detection lay in its novelty, its mystery and its aura of science, the same qualities that had once attended phrenology. Poe wrote of his own detective stories: 'These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious - but people think them more ingenious than they are - on account of their method and air of method.'

It was possible that Whicher's speculations were no better founded than those of any other observer of the crime. Detectives, like phrenologists, might be masters of mystification, men who cloaked common sense in complexity, dressed up guesses as science.