The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective (24 page)

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 general 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 PS100 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 shouted, '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.'