The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective (21 page)

Jack Whicher's investigation had let light into the closed-up house, thrown the windows open to the air; but in doing so it had exposed the family to the prurient imaginings of the outside world. There was a necessary grubbiness to the police procedures: breasts were measured, nightclothes examined for marks of sweat and blood, indelicate questions asked of nice young ladies. In
Bleak House,
Dickens imagines the feelings of Sir Leicester Dedlock when his house is searched: 'the noble house, the pictures of his forefathers, strangers defacing them, officers of police coarsely handling his most precious heirlooms, thousands of fingers pointing at him, thousands of faces sneering at him'. While the crime fiction of the 1830s and 1840s had inhabited the rookeries of London, sensational crime in the 1850s had begun to invade the middle-class home, in fiction and in fact. 'Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families,' says Bucket. 'Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families . . . you have no idea . . . what games goes on.'

During Whicher's inquiries the
Frome Times
made 'an indignant protest against the conduct of some of the representatives of the press. We have been informed on reliable authority that one person penetrated into the house in the guise of a detective, - while another had the audacity to force himself into the presence of Mr Kent, and to ask of him the particulars of the murder of his son! In our opinion, this person's audacity and hard-heartedness can scarcely be equalled by the villain who perpetrated the dreadful crime.' This rhetoric, also deployed by Edlin, was made possible by the mid-Victorian sensitivity to 'exposure', to scandal and loss of privacy. The inquiries into a middle-class home, by the press and above all by the detectives, were felt as a series of assaults. Exposure could destroy, as murder made clear - when the lungs, airways, arteries, heart were suddenly opened to the air, they collapsed. Stapleton described Saville's death in these terms: the inhabitant of the 'house of life' had been 'rudely driven out by an unauthorised and violent intruder'.

The word 'detect' stemmed from the Latin
'de-tegere'
or 'unroof', and the original figure of the detective was the lame devil Asmodeus, 'the prince of demons', who took the roofs off houses to spy on the lives inside. 'The Devil Asmodeus is the Devil of Observation', explained the French novelist Jules Janin. In his book about the Road Hill murder, Stapleton used the figure of Asmodeus, 'peering into the privacies' of the Kent family house, to embody the public fascination with the case.

'If every room of a house were seen into by a secret watcher,' wrote the Scottish detective McLevy in 1861, 'it would be a show-box even more wonderful than a travelling exhibition.' A plainclothes police officer was just such a secret watcher, a man licensed to pry. The detective hero might at any moment turn to reveal his grinning double, the voyeur.

'Angel and devil by turns, eh?' remarks Mr Bucket.

After Constance was bailed, Whicher told Ludlow that he saw no point in remaining in Wiltshire. 'I did not see any hope of getting further evidence by prolonging my stay,' he said in his report, 'as the only piece of further evidence would be to find the night dress which I feared was destroyed.' Ludlow agreed that he should go. He assured Whicher that he was convinced of Constance's guilt, and would send letters to that effect to Sir George Cornewall Lewis, the Home Secretary, and to Mayne. Henry Clark composed the letters at once: 'We are requested by the magistrates . . . to convey to you their thanks for the services of Mr Inspector Whicher and Mr Sgt Williamson. Although the evidence failed in establishing the guilt of the person arrested yet the magistrates are fully impressed with the idea that Miss Constance Kent is the guilty party and hope that evidence may yet be forthcoming to bring the perpetrator of the crime to justice. They are thoroughly satisfied with the exertions made by the officers above mentioned.'

Whicher and Williamson returned to London the next day. Whicher took with him the relics of his investigation: Constance's two remaining nightdresses, her list of linen, the bloodied piece of newspaper. In the new edition of
All the Year Round,
the hero of
The Woman in White
also finished his inquiries in the country. The episode ended: 'Half an hour later I was speeding back to London by the express train.'

That weekend there were severe thunderstorms around Road. Lightning lit the fields, the river Frome rose almost three feet, and hail thrashed down the corn.

During the proceedings in the Temperance Hall, Mrs Kent had gone into labour. 'The agitation and suspense of awaiting the result of the re-examination proved too great for her,' reported the
Bath Chronicle,
'and the consequence was, premature labour set in.' It was rumoured that the baby was stillborn, but this proved false. Mrs Kent gave birth to a boy on Monday, 30 July, a month after her first son's murder, and named him Acland Saville Kent.

CHAPTER TWELVE
DETECTIVE-FEVER

London, July-August 1860

Whicher reached Paddington station in the afternoon of Saturday, 28 July, and hailed a cab to take him and his luggage to Pimlico - probably to 31 Holywell Street, off Millbank Row. This was the house in which his niece, Sarah Whicher, an unmarried housekeeper of thirty, rented a room, and it was the address he gave as his own three years later.
*
In the 1850s, his friend and colleague Charley Field lived at number 27, with his wife and mother-in-law, while Whicher's niece Mary Ann worked as a servant to a family of upholsterers at number 40.

The district was changing swiftly. To the west, Victoria railway station was almost complete, and to the north Sir Charles Barry's gothic Palace of Westminster was also nearly finished - the 'Big Ben' clock had been put in place a year before, though as yet it had only one hand and no chime. On the new Westminster bridge thirteen limelight lamps had been installed that summer: these were powered by a series of tiny explosions of oxygen and hydrogen that made the sticks of lime so hot that they burnt white, giving off a brilliant incandescence. Dickens visited Mill-bank one warm day in January 1861, and headed west along the river: 'I walked straight on
for three miles
on a splendid broad esplanade overhanging the Thames, with immense factories, railway work, and what not, erected on it, and with the strangest beginnings and ends of wealthy streets pushing themselves into the very Thames. When I was a rower on that river it was all broken ground and ditch, with here and there a public house or two, an old mill, and a tall chimney. I had never seen it in any state of transition, though I suppose myself to know this rather large city as well as anyone in it.'

The part of Millbank in which Whicher lived was a noisy, industrial riverside neighbourhood of mean yellow terraces, dominated by the great six-pronged flower of Millbank prison. The novelist Anthony Trollope described the area as 'extremely dull, and one might almost say, ugly'. Holywell Street was separated from the prison's boundary wall only by gasometers, a sawmill and a marble works. Number 31 backed onto these, and faced a huge brewery and a burial ground. Broadwood's piano factory lay a block north, and Seager's gin distillery a block south. Just beyond the distillery, coal barges were moored at the wharfs, while on the far side of the river lay the vast potteries and putrid bone-grinding factories of Lambeth. Paddle steamers carried Londoners to and from work, churning up the sewage poured into the Thames - the air was thick with the stench rising off the river.

On Monday, 30 July, Jack Whicher went to his office at Scotland Yard, just over a mile north of Holywell Street, along the Thames past the noxious slums of the 'Devil's Acre' and then the high buildings of Westminster and Whitehall. The public entrance to the police headquarters was in Great Scotland Yard, though its address was 4 Whitehall Place. There was a large clock on the wall that looked over the yard, a weathervane on the roof, and fifty rooms within. These had housed the Metropolitan Police administration since 1829, and the detective force (in three small chambers) since its formation in 1842. The boarding house that Dolly Williamson shared with other single officers stood in a corner of Great Scotland Yard, behind Groves the fishmongers. In another corner was a public house, outside which a drunken old woman sold pigs' trotters on Saturday nights. To the north of the yard was Trafalgar Square, and to the south the river.

Sir Richard Mayne, whose office was also in Scotland Yard, rated Whicher above all other policemen: in the late 1850s 'every important case was placed in his hands by Sir Richard', reported Tim Cavanagh in his memoirs. Commissioner Mayne, now sixty-six, 'was about five feet eight inches, spare, but well-built', wrote Cavanagh; he had a 'thin face, a very hard compressed mouth, grey hair and whiskers, an eye like that of a hawk, and a slightly limping gait, due, I believe, to rheumatic affection of the hip-joint'. He was 'respected but feared by all in the service'. When Whicher and Williamson got back to work, Mayne duly signed their expenses, including claims for extra pay for being out of town (eleven shillings a day for an inspector, six shillings for a sergeant). The Commissioner passed Whicher a slew of letters from members of the public proposing solutions to the Road Hill case. The letters, addressed to Mayne or the Home Secretary, kept coming throughout the month.

'I beg to offer you an idea which suggested itself to me and which might tend to unravel the mystery,' wrote a Mr Farrer. 'I send it to you in perfect confidence, and hope you will keep my name as its author, a strict secret . . . That Eliz Gough the Nurse may have had William Nutt passing the night with her, and the child (FS Kent) waking up, and fearing he might alarm his parents by crying out, they strangled him, and whilst Nutt conveyed the body to the closet she remade the bed.' Mr Farrer added a postscript: 'As Willm Nutt is connected by marriage with the Laundress' family he may have been enabled to abstract the night dress so as to throw suspicion on another party.'

The theory that Nutt and Gough had killed the boy was, overwhelmingly, the most popular. A writer who thought Constance 'most cruelly used and made a scapegoat' argued that the medical evidence indicated a knife with a '
skew
point' had been used in the murder - 'very likely a shoemakers knife
very much used.'
Nutt was a shoemaker. '
The throat was cut from one ear to the other dividing it all down to the spine,
this is more indicative of the power and determination of a man than a nervous girl of 16,' and, 'Shoemakers often have
two
knives and
one
might be
down the Closet.
' A correspondent from Mile End took a similar view, as did the chaplain of the Bath Union Workhouse, Bath, the master of the workhouse in Axbridge, Somersetshire, Mr Minot of Southwark and a Mr Dalton, writing from a hotel in Manchester. A tailor from Cheshire wanted Gough 'put under strickt servilance'.

A curate from Lancashire, himself a magistrate, gave the fullest account of the theory:

Though the suspicions I am about to mention have frequently from the commencement of the enquiry been broached in my own family, yet I should have thought it unfair to give them wider range had not the public press (the
Morning Post)
hinted at the individual named - I mean in the matter of the Kent murder.

Is it not possible that the nursemaid may have had a paramour either in the house or so well acquainted with the premises that he could gain ready access in the night . . . Of course, from what we have heard one's thoughts fall at once on Nutt . . . If he be an admirer of the girl, should not medical examination establish whether she was likely to have received nightly visits or not? He had all means at command - knives &c - he had the night to work in. He is a connection of the laundress and if the laundress knew of anything going on between these two a suspicion flashed for a moment upon her mind, especially as he had found the body so easily - may she not have been the one to conceal the night-dress and so immediately changed the direction of anything which might then exist in the form of suspicion and fasten it upon that eccentric Miss Kent who sometime ago had run away in man's attire. All these are of course mere suspicions - but when all seems so wide of the mark so far - it leads one to think that the persons employed have gone to work with an a priori view of the case, and rejected or at any rate neglected what did not tell in favour of their own suspicions . . . having had a little experience on the Bench in rather a wild district I have learned to study people's possible motives more than I should otherwise have done.

In early August Sir George Cornewall Lewis, the Home Secretary, received two letters identifying Elizabeth Gough and a lover as the murderers. One was from a Guildford barrister, who wrote patronisingly of Whicher's efforts: 'A policeman may be a good hand at discovering a
criminal:
but it requires intellect and a mind enlarged by observation to detect a
crime
and unravel a mystery.' The other letter was from Sir John Eardley Wilmot of Bath, a baronet and former barrister, who took such a passionate interest in the case that he persuaded Samuel Kent to let him visit Road Hill House and interview a few of the inmates. Horatio Waddington, the formidable Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office, forwarded the letters to Mayne. 'This is now the favourite theory,' Waddington wrote on one of the envelopes, in a spiky hand. 'I should like to hear Inspector Whicher's remarks upon these two letters, surely if the girl had a lover, somebody must have known or at least suspected it.' Once Whicher had complied, with a report outlining his counter-arguments ('I fear that Sir John has not gone sufficiently into the facts . . .'), Waddington agreed: 'I rather incline to the opinion of the police man.'