The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective (10 page)

In the drawing room, Whicher saw that the window could have been unfastened only from the inside. 'This window which is about ten feet high, comes down within a few inches of the ground,' he reported to Sir Richard Mayne, 'and faces the lawn at the back of the house, and opens by lifting up the bottom sash, which was found up about six inches at the bottom. These shutters were fastened with a Bar inside, consequently no entry could be made from the outside.' Even if someone had broken into the house by this window, he pointed out, they could have got no further, since the drawing-room door was locked from the other side. 'Therefore it is quite certain,' he wrote, 'that no person came in by that window.' He was also sure that no one had fled the premises by that window, since Sarah Cox told him that the folding shutters were partly closed from within. This, he said, confirmed his conviction that an inmate of the house had killed the boy.

The only indication that an intruder might have been at the crime scene was the scrap of bloodied newspaper discovered next to the privy. Whicher found, though, that this had not been torn from the
Morning Star
, as suggested at the inquest, but from
The Times
, the paper Samuel Kent took every day.

Whicher explained in his reports that he thought that the murderer had not taken Saville out through the drawing-room window, but by another route altogether: down the back stairs, along the passage past the kitchen, out of the kitchen door to the courtyard, and through a further door from the yard to the privy in the shrubbery. The murderer would have had to unlock, unchain and unbolt the kitchen door and unbolt the yard door, then secure both doors again on returning to the house, but this was perfectly practicable, and worth the effort. The kitchen door was only twenty paces, or yards, from the privy, Whicher pointed out, whereas the distance from the drawing-room window to the privy was seventy-nine paces. To walk from the drawing room to the privy also meant passing round the front of the building, immediately under the windows where the rest of the family and servants had been sleeping. Anyone who lived in the house would have known that the kitchen passage offered a much more direct and discreet route - in Whicher's words, 'the shortest and most secret way'. It meant passing the guard dog, but then the dog might not have barked at a familiar face. 'The Dog,' wrote Whicher, 'is perfectly harmless.' Even when the detective, a perfect stranger, approached the animal in daylight, it did not bark or bite.
*

'I therefore feel quite convinced,' Whicher concluded, 'that the window shutters were merely opened by one of the inmates, to lead to the supposition that the child had been stolen.'

Whicher was familiar with this kind of feint, the false trail laid in an attempt to fox the police. In 1850 he had described to a journalist the methods of the 'Dancing School' of London cat burglars. They would watch a house for days, and find out at what time its inhabitants dined; this was the ideal moment for a burglary, since dinner tied up servants and employers alike. At the appointed hour, a gang member crept noiselessly, or 'danced', into the garret and plundered the upper storeys of small valuables, typically jewels. Before he made off across the rooftops with his spoils, the burglar would 'sell' (frame) a maid by hiding one of the jewels under her mattress. The planted jewel, like the open window in Road Hill House, was a 'blind', designed to point the detectives the wrong way.

Perhaps the killer did not only plan to mislead the police about how Saville had been removed, Whicher reasoned, but about where he had been taken - the open window faced the gardens and fields behind the house. The murderer might have hoped that the police would not find the body in the privy, which lay in the opposite direction. Whicher speculated that the killer's 'original intention was to have thrown the child down the privy . . . thinking it would sink into the soil out of sight'. The privy 'has a large cesspool about ten feet deep and seven feet square', he reported, 'and at the time contained several feet of water and soft soil'. Whicher believed that the assailant intended the child to drown or suffocate in the excrement, and then to disappear in it. If this plan had worked, there would have been no marks of blood to identify either the murder scene or the murderer. But the slanting splashboard, recently installed on the orders of Samuel Kent, left an opening of only a few inches between the lavatory seat and the wall, so that it blocked the body's descent into the vault. The killer, said Whicher, 'being thus foiled, resorted to the knife', snatching a weapon from the basket just inside the kitchen passage, and stabbing the boy in the throat and chest to make certain of his death. At least three of the knives in the basket, he said to the
Somerset and Wilts Journal,
would have served.

That afternoon Whicher searched Constance's bedroom. In her chest of drawers he found a list of the linen she had brought back from school, which included three nightdresses. He had already been told that one of these had vanished. He sent for Constance.

'Is this a list of your linen?'

'Yes.'

'In whose writing is it?'

'It is my own writing.'

He pointed to the list. 'Here are three nightdresses; where are they?'

'I have two; the other was lost at the wash the week after the murder.'

She showed him the two still in her possession - plain, roughly woven garments. Whicher noticed another nightdress and a nightcap lying on the bed. He asked Constance whose they were.

'They are my sister's,' she replied. Since Mrs Holley was still refusing to take in the family's laundry, Constance's two nightdresses were now dirty, and she had borrowed a clean one on Saturday from Mary Ann or Elizabeth. Whicher told Constance he must confiscate her linen list and remaining nightclothes. The missing nightdress was his first clue.

The word 'clue' derives from 'clew', meaning a ball of thread or yarn. It had come to mean 'that which points the way' because of the Greek myth in which Theseus uses a ball of yarn, given to him by Ariadne, to find his way out of the Minotaur's labyrinth. The writers of the mid-nineteenth century still had this image in mind when they used the word. 'There is always a pleasure in unravelling a mystery, in catching at the gossamer clue which will guide to certainty,' observed Elizabeth Gaskell in 1848. 'I thought I saw the end of a good clew,' said the narrator of Andrew Forrester's
The Female Detective
(1864). William Wills, Dickens' deputy, paid tribute in 1850 to Whicher's brilliance by observing that the detective found the way even when 'every clue seems cut off'. 'I thought I had my hand on the clue,' declared the narrator of
The Woman in White
in an instalment published in June 1860. 'How little I knew, then, of the windings of the labyrinth which were still to mislead me!' A plot was a knot, and a story ended in a 'denouement', an unknotting.

Then as now, many clues were literally made of cloth - criminals could be identified by pieces of fabric. One case that turned on such evidence was very close to home for Jack Whicher.

In 1837, a notorious murderer was traced to Wyndham Road, Whicher's own street in Camberwell. James Greenacre, a cabinetmaker who owned eight cottages in the road, killed and dismembered his fiancee, Hannah Brown, in his lodgings there in December 1836. He wrapped her head in a sack and carried it by omnibus to Stepney, east London, where he threw it in a canal. He dumped her torso on the Edgware Road, in the north-west of the city, and her legs in a ditch in Camberwell. The star of the police investigation was PC Pegler of the S (Hampstead) division, who found Hannah Brown's torso. He traced Greenacre through a piece of cloth - the sacking in which the body parts were wrapped - and secured his confession through another: a snippet of thick nankeen cotton found on the Edgware Road, which matched a patch on the frock of his girlfriend's baby. The unravelling of the crime was reported with fascination in the press. Greenacre was hanged in May 1837. Whicher joined the police force four months later.

In 1849 the London detectives, Whicher, Thornton and Field among them, found the Bermondsey murderess Maria Manning by way of a bloodstained dress she had stashed in a railway-station locker. Manning and her husband had murdered her former lover and buried him beneath their kitchen floor. The detectives tracked down the couple with the aid of telegraph messages, express trains and steamships. Whicher checked the hotels and railway stations in Paris, and then the ships sailing from Southampton and Plymouth. He used his experience in tracing banknotes to help shore up the evidence against the killers. Eventually, Manning was caught in Edinburgh, her husband in Jersey. Each accused the other of the crime, and both were sentenced to death. The executions drew tens of thousands of spectators, while the 'broadside' ballads about the case sold two and a half million copies. A series of woodcuts printed that year showed the investigators as dashing action heroes, and the Commissioner praised his men for the 'extraordinary skill and exertion' with which they had worked on the case. He awarded Whicher and Thornton a bonus of PS10 each; Field, as an inspector, was given PS15.

The next year Whicher told William Wills a more commonplace story of how clothes could help capture a criminal. A detective sergeant - probably Whicher himself - was called in by a smart London hotel to find a man who the previous night had ransacked a guest's portmanteau. On the carpet of the room in which the trunk had been looted, the detective noticed a button. He watched the hotel guests and staff all day, closely scanning their clothes - at the risk, said Whicher, of being 'set down for an eccentric critic of linen'. Eventually he spotted a man with a button missing from his shirt, the thread dangling; the remaining buttons matched the 'little tell-tale' that the detective had found.

The Road Hill case was dense with fabric. The setting of the murder happened to be clothmaking country, a land of sheep and wool mills. The family's dirty laundry lay at the heart of the investigation, their washerwoman was a key witness, and the investigation threw up three clues of cloth: a flannel, a blanket and a missing nightdress. Whicher closed in on the last of these, much as the narrator of Wilkie Collins' 'The Diary of Anne Rodway', a short story of 1856, closed in on a torn cravat: 'A kind of fever got possession of me - a vehement yearning to go on from this first discovery and find out more, no matter what the risk might be. The cravat now really became . . . the clue that I was resolved to follow.'

The thread that led Theseus out of the maze was true to another principle of Whicher's investigation: the progress of a detective was backwards. To find his way out of danger and confusion, Theseus had to retrace his steps, return to the origin. The solution to a crime was the beginning as well as the end of the story.

Through his interviews with the Kents and those who knew them, Whicher tracked the family back in time. Though there were gaps, contradictions, indications of further secrets, he pieced together a narrative that he believed provided an explanation for murder. Much of it was chronicled in the book about the case that Joseph Stapleton published in 1861; the surgeon's account was heavily biased towards Samuel Kent, but it was scrupulous - and scurrilous - enough to hint at the many fissures in the family story.

In east London in 1829 Samuel Kent, the twenty-eight-year-old son of a carpetmaker from the north-eastern suburb of Clapton, married Mary Ann Windus, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a prosperous coachmaker from the neighbouring district of Stamford Hill. In a miniature painted the year before the marriage, Mary Ann was shown with curly brown hair, dark eyes, bright, pursed lips in a pale face, and a wary, guarded cast to her features. Her father was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries and an expert on the Portland Vase; the family home was crammed with paintings and curios.

The newlywed couple moved into a house near Finsbury Square, in the centre of London. Though their first child, Thomas, died of convulsions in 1831, they had a second - Mary Ann - before the year was out, and a third - Elizabeth - the year after that. Samuel worked as a partner in a firm of dry-salters, dealers in preserved meats and pickles, but in 1833 he resigned on account of an unspecified illness. 'The health of Mr Kent became so precarious,' said Stapleton, 'that he was compelled to relinquish his share of the business.' He took his family to Sidmouth on the Devonshire coast. There he secured a position as sub-inspector of factories for the west of England, the hub of the wool trade.

Mrs Kent first showed signs of madness in 1836, according to Samuel, a year after the birth of another son, Edward. She suffered from 'weakness and bewilderment of intellect' and 'various though harmless delusions'. Samuel later gave three examples of his wife's mental disturbance: she once got lost while out walking with her children near their home; on a Sunday, while he was at church, she tore the pictures out of one of his books and burnt them; and a knife was found hidden under her bed. Samuel consulted physicians about Mrs Kent's condition, and a Dr Blackall of Exeter confirmed that she was weak-minded. Her physical health was also poor.

Samuel continued nevertheless to impregnate her, and the couple saw four babies die in succession: Henry Saville in 1838, at fifteen months; Ellen in 1839, at three months; John Saville in 1841, at five months; and Julia in 1842, also at five months. ('Saville' - spelt sometimes with one '1', sometimes without an 'e' - was the maiden name of Samuel's mother, who came from a well-to-do Essex family.) The cause of several of their deaths was given as 'atrophy', or wasting away. All were buried in the Sidmouth graveyard.

Constance Emily was born on 6 February 1844. Samuel gave the care of his new child to Mary Drewe Pratt, a twenty-three-year-old farmer's daughter who had joined the house-hold the previous year as governess to the older girls. She was a short, attractive, self-assured young woman who had previously been employed as a live-out governess by the families of a solicitor and of a clergyman; she came recommended by a Sidmouth doctor. Miss Pratt was granted complete control of Constance, and she devoted herself to her charge. She fattened the frail baby into a sleek, powerful little girl. Constance was the first of the Kents' children to survive in nearly a decade.