The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective (14 page)

The police rooted in the flowerbeds and gardens around the house. They combed the field beyond the lawns. Samuel Kent described the grounds behind his property: 'At the back of the house is a large garden, and a field in which was standing grass; that field is about seven acres in extent . . . The place is much exposed; the premises are large and very accessible.' His description of a home that was helplessly open, as if backing onto a plain, captured his feeling of defencelessness after Saville's death. The family's privacy was destroyed, its secrets uncovered, the house and grounds and the lives of everyone within exposed to all.

At first Samuel did his best to point the police away from the rooms of his family and servants. Like Elizabeth Gough, he insisted that a stranger had killed Saville. Perhaps the murderer was a disgruntled former servant, he suggested, taking revenge on the family. Before Whicher's arrival, Samuel showed Superintendent Wolfe the places in which an intruder could have hidden. 'Here is a room which is not often occupied,' he said, indicating a furnished spare room. Wolfe pointed out that a stranger could not have known that the room was rarely entered. Kent took him to a lumber room in which toys were stored. No one would hide here, Wolfe said, because they would have feared someone coming in to fetch a toy. As for the cockloft beneath the roof, said Wolfe, 'There was a considerable quantity of dust . . . and I think that if a person had been there I must have seen traces.'

A few newspapers speculated that a stranger had committed the crime. 'A intimate personal knowledge of every room in Road Hill House . . . convinces us that it would have been perfectly possible not only for one but for half-a-dozen persons to have been secreted on the premises, without risk of detection, on that night,' reported the
Somerset and Wilts Journal later
, in an astonishingly detailed exposure of the building's private places:

In no house of nineteen rooms that we know do we remember greater facilities for concealment. A cellar, divided into six large and small compartments, is entered by two several doorways and sets of steps. Midway up the back staircase is a large empty cupboard. A spare bedroom over the drawing-room contains a bedstead with valances, a dressing-table with a covering reaching to the ground, and two large and lofty closets, one of which are nearly always empty, and can be locked both inside and out. On this floor also are two small rooms, opening out of one another, each partly filled with lumber. On the floor above is a second spare bedroom, the bedstead having valances, a table, screen, and closets as in the room below . . . two small rooms, one almost empty, and the other containing Mr Kent's travelling apparatus; a large long closet, in which a dozen men might stand side by side; and a small room, without windows, containing two water tanks, and a ladder which communicates with the loft and the roof. . . All these we have ourselves seen.

Any number of villagers were already familiar with the nooks and crannies of Road Hill House, said the
Journal
's reporter, 'they having had the run of the house in a singular manner during the two years that it was void, previous to Mr Kent's occupation . . . this was so marked that, when the house was being prepared for him, six several times the stairs had to be painted, owing to the mischievous intrusion of village boys'. The building 'had almost been considered as public property', said the
Frome Times
, 'for those who chose to do so rambled over it without let or hindrance'.

The Kents kept indoors during Whicher's first week in Road, though the groom, Holcombe, took Mary Ann and Elizabeth by carriage to the shops in the town of Frome two or three times. In Frome, unlike Road or Trowbridge, members of the Kent family could usually pass an afternoon unmolested by hoots and hisses.

We have no physical descriptions of Elizabeth or of Mary Ann. They seem to move as one. Only in glimpses - Elizabeth standing alone as she scanned the night sky, or clutching the baby Eveline when Saville's corpse was brought into the kitchen - do they fleetingly acquire separate selves. They were intensely private young women. Mary Ann became hysterical when summoned to court. Elizabeth would not let the servants touch her clothes, either before or after they were washed: 'Miss Elizabeth makes up her own bundle herself,' said Cox, 'and I never meddle with it.' Since Mary Ann and Elizabeth were nearly thirty, neither was now likely to marry. The older sisters - like Constance and William - kept their own counsel, their bond with one another freeing them of the need to say much to anyone else.

By the end of the week Samuel had started to brief the police about Constance's insanity. Having denied the possibility of his daughter's guilt, he now seemed to be advancing it. 'Mr Kent,' said the
Devizes and Wilts Gazette
on 19 July, 'has not hesitated to intimate - and that in the plainest manner - that his
own daughter
committed the murder! and it has been alleged as a reason . . . that she has been guilty of freaks during childhood.' Was he incriminating her to protect himself? Was he shielding someone else in the family? Or was he trying to save Constance from the death penalty by advertising her instability? Dark rumours about Samuel were in circulation: some said that he and Mary Pratt had poisoned his first wife, even that he had killed the four Kent infants who died in Devonshire. Perhaps the first Mrs Kent had not been a raging lunatic, like the wife locked in Mr Rochester's attic in
Jane Eyre
, but an innocent, like the heroine of
The Woman in White
, sealed up in a wing of the house to seal her lips.

Publicly, Samuel still avoided any direct comment on his late wife's mental health: 'As to whether insanity had previously run in either branch of the family,' said the
Bath Chronicle
on Thursday, 'Mr Kent has been closely interrogated on that point; and he avers that he has never made an application to a medical man respecting anything of the kind.' This contradicted what he told Stapleton - that an Exeter doctor had diagnosed his late wife's madness - but it stopped short of denying that she had been insane. Parsons and Stapleton, both friends of Samuel, were on hand to insist on Constance's volatile nature: 'The two medical men . . . who have been privately examined, give it as their opinion that the young lady Constance possesses a temperament of mind likely to be influenced by sudden fits of passion.' To Whicher, Samuel openly stated that his former wife's family was riddled with madness: 'the Father . . . informed me that [Miss Constance's] Mother and Grandmother were of unsound mind', the detective wrote, 'and that her Uncle also on the Mother's side had been twice confined in a Lunatic Asylum'.

Whicher unearthed a peculiar incident that had taken place at Road Hill House in the spring of 1859, when Saville was two. One evening Saville's then nursemaid, Emma Sparks, put the boy to bed, as usual, in a pair of knitted socks. The next morning, wrote Whicher, the nursemaid found
'the clothes had been stripped from off the child, and both his socks taken off'
. The socks were discovered later: one on the nursery table, the other in Mrs Kent's bedroom. Whicher suspected that Constance was responsible,
'as she was the only grown up member of the family except Mrs Kent who was at home at the time
, Mr Kent being from home on business and the two elder sisters away on a visit'. He didn't mention the whereabouts of William - perhaps he was at boarding school. The incident, a piece of faintly malicious mischief, could in retrospect be understood as a rehearsal for a more savage interference. It echoed the terrible congruence of the tender and the stealthy in Saville's murder: the sleeping boy lifted gently from his bed, carried carefully downstairs, taken out of the house and killed. We don't know whether Whicher was tipped off about the matter of the missing socks by Emma Sparks or by Mr and Mrs Kent - he interviewed all three on the subject.

The bedsocks incident had no value at all as evidence: 'I can put no construction on this,' Whicher said of the story. Yet he took it as a psychological clue. In Waters'
Experiences of a Real Detective (1862)
, Inspector 'F' explains: 'I contrived to elicit certain facts, which, though not worth twopence as legal evidence, were morally very suggestive.'

In 1906 Sigmund Freud was to compare detection to psychoanalysis:

In both we are concerned with a secret, with something hidden . . . In the case of the criminal it is a secret which he knows and hides from you, whereas in the case of the hysteric it is a secret which he himself does not know either, which is hidden even from himself. . . In this one respect, therefore, the difference between the criminal and the hysteric is fundamental. The task of the therapist, however, is the same as that of the examining magistrate. We have to uncover the hidden psychic material; and in order to do this we have invented a number of detective devices.

In effect, Whicher was gathering clues to Constance's inner life, her hidden psychic material, as well as the concealed facts of the crime. This murder was so dense with symbolism that it almost outdid interpretation. The child was thrust down a servants' lavatory, as if he were excrement. His attacker had tried to kill him, frantically or ritualistically, not once but four times: by suffocation, by slashing the throat, by stabbing the heart, by submersion in faeces.

Samuel informed Whicher of another morally suggestive fact - his daughter's fascination in the summer of 1857 with the Madeleine Smith murder trial.

Smith was a Glasgow architect's daughter of twenty-one who was charged with murdering her lover, a French clerk, by slipping arsenic into his hot chocolate. Her motive, allegedly, was to dispense with him in order to marry a richer suitor. After a sensational and widely reported court case, the jury declared the case against her 'not proven', a verdict available only in the Scottish courts. Smith was generally believed to be guilty, but the fact that she had outfaced the justice system with such breathtaking nerve only increased her allure. Henry James, for one, was an admirer - her crime was a 'rare work of art', he wrote. He hungered to have set eyes on her: 'I would give so much for a veracious portrait of her
then
face.'

Samuel told Whicher that the second Mrs Kent had taken the precaution of hiding from Constance the copies of
The Times
in which the trial was reported - this suggested that the girl was known to take an unusual interest in lurid crime, even at the age of thirteen. 'Owing to the peculiarity of the case the papers containing the account of the trial were studiously kept away from Miss Constance,' reported Whicher, 'and after her Trial they were concealed, locked up in a drawer by Mrs Kent.' When Mrs Kent checked the drawer a few days later she found the papers had vanished. 'Miss Constance was suspected and questioned but denied all knowledge of them, but on her bed room being searched they were found secreted between her bedstead and mattress.'

Perhaps reading the reports of Madeleine Smith's trial and acquittal had given Constance ideas about murder, as it had John Thomson, a man who in December 1857 said the case had inspired him to administer prussic acid to a woman who had spurned him. Though Saville was not killed with poison, his murder was well-plotted, silent, homespun: a blanket was a murder weapon as bland and comforting as a cup of chocolate. Madeleine Smith had shown that by being cunning and immovable a middle-class murderess could become a figure of glamour and mystery, a kind of heroine (Thomas Carlyle had used the phrase to describe the Bermondsey murderess Maria Manning). And if she kept her nerve she might never be caught.

There seemed to be a new breed of chilly female criminal whose concealed passions had twisted into violence. Usually the passions were sexual. Maria Manning and Madeleine Smith were apparently respectable women whose first sin was an illicit liaison, their second the murder of a former lover, a kind of violent extinction of their own lust. Madame Fosco in
The Woman in White
is sucked into crime by her passion for the dominating Count, and 'her present state of suppression may have sealed up something dangerous in her nature, which used to evaporate harmlessly in the freedom of her former life'. The murderess Madame Hortense in
Bleak House
, who was based on Maria Manning, was 'long accustomed to suppress emotion, and keep down reality'. She was 'schooled for her own purposes, in that destructive school which shuts up the natural feelings of the heart, like flies in amber'.

* * *

The dizzying expansion of the press in the 1850s prompted worries that readers might be corrupted, infected, inspired by the sex and violence in newspaper articles. The new journalists shared much with the detectives: they were seen alternately as crusaders for truth and as sleazy voyeurs. There were seven hundred newspaper titles published in Britain in 1855, and 1,100 by 1860 - of the papers printed closest to Road, the
Trowbridge and North Wilts Advertiser
was established in 1855, as was the
Somerset and Wilts Journal
, while the
Frome Times
, which the Kents took, was founded in 1859. There was a huge rise in crime reporting, aided by the speed with which news could be transmitted by the electric telegraph, and newspaper readers came across accounts of violent death every week. When Mr Wopsle in Dickens'
Great Expectations
(1861) reads the news, he becomes 'imbrued with blood to the eyebrows'.

At least three cut-throat domestic killings were reported in newspapers all over the country in the month before Saville Kent's death. In Shoreditch, east London, a pipemaker murdered his common-law wife: 'Her throat was cut so extensively that the head was nearly severed from the body,' according to the
Annual Register
. 'She must have died instantaneously without struggle or noise.' At Sandown Fort on the Isle of Wight, Sergeant William Whitworth of the Royal Artillery killed his wife and six children with a razor, leaving their throats 'gashed in so horrible a manner as to show the vertebrae of the neck'. Above a confectioner's shop in Oxford Street, London, a French tailor decapitated his wife with a saw, then went to Hyde Park and shot himself. 'His brother stated that he was in the habit of going to Dr Kahn's Museum, and studying the arteries about the neck and throat, and especially familiarising himself with the position of the jugular vein.' The tailor had educated himself in how to kill, and any newspaper reader could do the same.