The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective (15 page)

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In the middle of the week Whicher accompanied the magistrates to Road Hill House to conduct a further interview with Constance. In answer to their questions, she described her relations with some of the house-hold: 'I was very fond of Saville . . . He used to be not very fond of me; he appeared fonder these holidays. The little boy was not fond of me because I teased him. I never struck him or pinched him . . . William is my favourite of my brothers and sisters. We write to each other when I am at school . . . The dog wouldn't fly at me if he recognised me. He would bite me if he didn't know me . . . I have a cat but I don't care anything for it . . . I like the cook best of the servants. I like the nurse very well.'

On being questioned about her own qualities, she replied: 'I am not considered very timid. I don't like being out in the dark . . . I could carry the deceased the length of this room easily. I was generally considered pretty strong at school.' She denied telling her schoolfriends that she didn't want to go home for the holidays. She was asked about the Madeleine Smith trial and agreed that she may have inadvertently taken a newspaper that reported it: 'I heard Madeleine Smith's friend was poisoned. I used to hear Papa talk about it.' She gave an account of her flight to Bath four years earlier: 'I once did cut off my hair and fling it down the same place where my little brother was found. I cut part of my hair and my brother cut the rest. I thought of the place to put it in. I and my brother William went to Bath by an indirect road . . . I went off because I was cross at being punished. I persuaded my brother William to go with me.'

As the week wore on, rumours began to emerge of the full extent of the county constabulary's incompetence, and of Samuel Kent's obstructions. In particular, a story took shape about what happened on the night after Saville's body was found.

In the evening of Saturday, 30 June, Superintendent Foley directed PC Heritage, of the Wiltshire police, and PC Urch, of the Somersetshire police, to stay overnight at Road Hill House. 'Mr Kent will tell you what to do,' said Foley. 'Come quietly, because Mr Kent does not want the servants to know you are there.' Only Mrs Kent was told that the officers were on the premises. Already it was pretty clear that Saville had been killed by one of the inhabitants of Road Hill House but, astonishingly, Foley none the less handed over charge of the night's police operation to Samuel Kent.

At about eleven o'clock, when everyone but Samuel had gone to bed, Heritage and Urch knocked at a library window to be admitted to the house. Samuel let them in and led them to the kitchen, where he told them to remain. Their task, he informed them, was to watch out for anyone trying to destroy evidence in the kitchen fire. He gave the policemen bread, cheese and beer and then bolted the door after them. The two policemen were ignorant of their imprisonment until, soon after two in the morning, Heritage tried to get out. On discovering that the door was locked, he knocked for Mr Kent. When he got no reply he rapped on the door with a stick.

'You are making enough noise to wake all the people in the house,' warned Urch.

'I am locked in and must get out,' replied Heritage.

When Samuel released him, about twenty minutes later, Heritage told him they hadn't known they were locked in. 'I have been walking about,' Samuel replied, ignoring the complaint. Urch stayed in the kitchen for the rest of the night, with the door bolted. Samuel looked in on him two or three times, and the constable left at five in the morning. 'I was in the library during a portion of the night,' Samuel said later, 'but left the house once or twice. I went out to see if the lights were out. I went out several times for the same object.' He circled the house, he claimed, to see if the candles were burning and if their wicks needed trimming.

Until now the police had kept quiet the fact that they had let themselves be locked in Samuel Kent's kitchen on the night after the murder. This 'extraordinary occurrence', in the words of the
Somerset and Wilts Journal
, had left anyone in the building free to destroy evidence. Samuel's actions smacked of contempt for the police, and a determination that his house escape their scrutiny. Or his behaviour could be seen as exemplary: the first duty of a father was to protect his family.

When asked by the police for floor plans of Road Hill House in the days and weeks after his son's murder, Samuel reacted as defensively as if someone were trying to take the roof off the place. He refused to supply a plan or to let anyone measure up the rooms. 'It is a sufficient explanation to say that Mr Kent simply resented an uncourteous intrusion,' said Rowland Rodway.

English family life had changed since the beginning of the century. The house, once a workplace as well as a home, had become a self-contained, private, exclusively domestic space. In the eighteenth century 'family' had meant 'kin', those related by blood; now its primary meaning was the inhabitants of a house-hold, barring the servants - that is, the nuclear family. Though the 1850s had been christened with a great glasshouse - the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851 - the English home closed up and darkened over the decade, the cult of domesticity matched by a cult of privacy. 'Every Englishman . . . imagines a "home", with the woman of his choice, the pair of them alone with their children,' wrote the French scholar Hippolyte Taine after a visit to England in 1858. 'That is his own little universe, closed to the world.' Privacy had become the essential attribute of the middle-class Victorian family, and the bourgeoisie acquired an expertise in secrecy (the word 'secretive' was first recorded in 1853). They walled themselves in against strangers, the interiors of their homes almost invisible, except when opened by invitation to selected visitors for a staged show of family life - a dinner party, for instance, or a tea.

Yet this age of domesticity was also an age of information, of a prolific and ravenous press. On 7 July a reporter from the
Bath Chronicle
had sneaked into Road Hill House in the guise of a detective, and made notes on the layout. An inaccurate floor plan was published in the paper five days later. Whether Samuel Kent liked it or not, the house was dissected for all to see, carved up clumsily to expose each floor to scrutiny. The public seized on the information the diagrams provided. The landscape of the house took on emotional inflections: the locked cellar, the dusty attic, the lumber rooms furnished with unused beds and closets, the twisting back stairs. 'The whole moral interior of the house ought to be laid bare to the public gaze,' argued the
Bath Express
.

A murder like this could reveal what had been unfolding within the shuttered middle-class house. It seemed that the cloistered family, so honoured by Victorian society, might harbour a suppression of emotion that was noxious, toxic, a sexual and emotional miasma. Perhaps privacy was a source of sin, the condition that enabled the sweet domestic scene to rot from its core. The closer the house was kept, the more polluted its inner world might become.

Something had festered in Road Hill House, the emotional counterpart to the airborne infections that terrified the Victorians. A month before the murder, the
Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette
reported on a new edition of Florence Nightingale's
Notes on Nursing
, first published in 1859, quoting a passage about how disease and degeneration could be bred in sealed, respectable homes. Nightingale had known severe cases of 'pyaemia', or blood poisoning, in 'handsome private houses', she wrote, and the cause was 'foul air . . . it was that the uninhabited rooms were never sunned, or cleaned, or aired; - it was that the cupboards were always reservoirs of foul air; - it was that the windows were always tight shut up at night . . . you may often find a race thus degenerating and, still oftener, a family'.

On Thursday, 19 July, the
Bath Chronicle
published an editorial on the Road Hill murder:

No assassination within our recollection has caused so singular, and so painful a sensation in the homes of the country. It is not the mere mystery which at present enshrouds the deed that gives it this terrible interest. It is the strange character of the deed, and the helpless innocence of the victim that touch respectively the imagination and the heart . . . The mothers of England, thinking of their own little ones sleeping in peace and purity, shudder at the tale of a child, as gentle and innocent as their own, being dragged in the still morning from its slumbers, and cruelly sacrificed, and it is the mothers of England who write most earnestly, most indignantly, to the conductors of the journals, and almost clamour for the most unsparing search and the most untiring test . . . in many a home where intense affection is combined with much nervousness on the part of the most valuable member of the family, her peace will for many a day be broken, her dreams disturbed, by the recollection of the dreadful story from Road. Strange doubts, vague distrusts will arise in her mind . . . A deed that sends a shudder through every English home, acquires a social importance which justifies any amount of attention to the subject.

Usually in an unsolved murder case the public feared that the killer might strike again. Here, though, the fear was that he or she could be duplicated in any home. The case undermined the very idea that a locked house-hold was safe. Until it was solved, an English mother would sleep uneasily, haunted with the idea that her house harboured a child-killer - it could be her husband, her nanny, her daughter.

Though it would be an assault on the middle-class ideal if the master of the house, the protector, had destroyed his own son in order to disguise his depravity, the press and the public were surprisingly quick to believe in Samuel's guilt. Almost as horrible - and apparently equally believable - was the idea that the nursemaid had helped him to kill the boy she was hired to tend. The alternative was that this crime harked back to the original biblical murder, Cain's killing of Abel. On 19 July the
Devizes Gazette
implied that one of Saville's siblings was responsible for his death: 'The voice of the blood of one as innocent as Abel will be made to cry from the very ground in testimony against the murderer.'
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On the same day the
Bristol Daily Post
(founded that year) printed a letter from a man who believed that an examination of Saville's eyes might reveal the image of the killer. The correspondent based his suggestion on some inconclusive experiments conducted in the United States in 1857. 'The image of the last object seen in life remains printed, as it were, on the retina of the eye,' he explained, 'and can be traced after death.' According to this hypothesis, the eye was a kind of daguerreotype plate, registering impressions that could be exposed like a photograph in a darkroom - even the secrets locked up in a dead eye might be within the reach of the new technologies. This took to an extreme the way the eye had been turned into the symbol of detection: it was not only the 'great detector' but also the great giveaway, the telltale organ. The letter was reprinted in newspapers all over England. Few treated it with scepticism. The
Bath Chronicle
, though, dismissed its usefulness to the case on the grounds that Saville was asleep when the killer struck, so there could be no image of the murderer on his retina.

In the evening of 19 July a tremendous downpour over Somersetshire and Wiltshire brought the brief summer of 1860 to an end. The haystacks had not yet dried, and most were spoiled. The fields of corn and wheat, not having had time to ripen in the sun, were still green.

CHAPTER NINE
I KNOW YOU

20-22 July

At eleven on the morning of Friday, 20 July, Whicher reported to the magistrates at the Temperance Hall on his investigation so far. He told them that he suspected Constance Kent of the murder.

The magistrates conferred, and then told Whicher that they wished him to arrest Constance. He hesitated. 'I pointed out to them the unpleasant position such a course would place me in with the County Police,' he explained in his report to Mayne, 'especially as they held opinions opposed to mine, as to who was the guilty party, but they (the magistrates) declined to alter their determination, stating that they considered and wished the enquiries to be entirely in my hands.' The chairman of the magistrates was Henry Gaisford Gibbs Ludlow, commanding officer of the 13th Rifle Corps, Deputy Lieutenant of Somersetshire and a rich landowner who lived in Heywood House, Westbury, five miles east of Road, with his wife and eleven servants. Of the other magistrates, the most prominent were William and John Stancomb, mill-owners who had built themselves villas on opposite sides of the Hilperton Road, an exclusive new district of Trowbridge. It was William who had lobbied the Home Secretary for the services of a detective.

Shortly before three o'clock in the afternoon Whicher called at Road Hill House and sent for Constance. She came to him in the drawing room.

'I am a police officer,' he said, 'and I hold a warrant for your apprehension, charging you with the murder of your brother Francis Saville Kent, which I will read to you.'

Whicher read her the warrant and she began to cry.

'I am innocent,' she said. 'I am innocent.'

Constance said she wanted to collect a mourning bonnet and mantle from her bedroom. Whicher followed her and watched as she put them on. They rode to the Temperance Hall in a trap, in silence. 'She made no further remark to me,' said Whicher.

A large group of villagers had collected outside the Temperance Hall, having heard a rumour that an arrest was being made at Road Hill House. Most expected to see Samuel Kent brought before the magistrates.

Instead they watched as Elizabeth Gough and William Nutt approached the hall in the early afternoon - they had been called to give evidence - and then, at 3.20, they were startled to see the occupants of the trap that drew up before them: ''Tis Miss Constance!'

She came into the hall on Whicher's arm, with her head bent down, weeping. She was wearing deep mourning, with a veil closely drawn over her face. She 'walked with a firm step but was in tears', reported
The Times
. The crowd pressed in after her.