The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective (25 page)

The local police continued to hound Elizabeth Gough. At the end of October Superintendent Wolfe passed on to Scotland Yard a rumour that she had once been dismissed from service in Knightsbridge for 'harbouring soldiers'. Whicher tersely reported back that Wolfe's information 'appears incorrect' - there was no evidence of the nursemaid ever having been employed in that part of London. A few weeks later it emerged that a servant called Elizabeth Gough, with a missing front tooth, had once been dismissed for 'misconduct' from a house-hold in Eton, Berkshire. The Eton employer went to the Gough family bakery in Isleworth to identify her, Whicher reported, but discovered that she was not his former maid.

When Gough was accused in the Wiltshire magistrates' court, Samuel Kent was indirectly accused too: 'If Mr Kent has not yet been put formally upon his trial,' noted Joseph Stapleton, 'he has not the less been subjected to its infamy by the convenient proxy of Elizabeth Gough.' After the nursemaid's release, both Joshua Parsons and Mrs Kent - sensing that the feeling against Samuel was running higher than ever - made statements to the press in his defence. Mrs Kent said that Samuel had not left her side on the night of Saville's death; she could be sure of this because her advanced pregnancy made her sleep very lightly. Parsons said that Samuel's 'mind was so affected by intense excitement, and by the persecution he had undergone, that no amount of reliance ought to be placed in any statements which under such circumstances he might make'. He thought his mental state 'very precarious'. Stapleton made similar excuses for his friend: Samuel was 'stupefied and confused' by his son's death, the surgeon argued, so that 'his mind seemed to wander irregularly, discursively, and unsteadily over a large field'.

Dickens thought that Gough and her employer were the killers. The novelist had lost faith in the detectives' powers of deduction. In a letter to Wilkie Collins on 24 October he sketched his theory: 'Mr Kent, intriguing with the nursemaid, poor little child wakes in Crib, and sits up, contemplating blissful proceedings. Nursemaid strangles him then and there. Mr Kent gashes body, to mystify discoverers, and disposes of same.'

The press was disillusioned with detection. The
Saturday Review
in September dismissed even Poe's stories as 'delusions' of cleverness, 'playing chess with the right hand against the left'. As for live detectives, 'they are very ordinary people, who are worth nothing when they are taken beyond their routine'. The consensus in Road, according to the
Western Daily Press,
was that only a confession would put an end to the uncertainty, and the confession might be a long time coming: 'Ay,' the villagers predicted, 'this'll be a deathbed job.'

The idea took hold that England had become prey to outbreaks of weird violence. Some blamed the weather. 'How is it that the daily newspapers are stuffed so full of horrors just now?' asked the magazine
Once a Week.
The broadsheets, it estimated, were devoting sixteen to twenty columns a day to murder. 'People . . . have said . . . that the long continuance of bad weather - the eternal gloom - the perennial rain of the last twelvemonth, has inspired a certain degree of moroseness and acrimony into the minds of our countrymen.'

A freak storm had hit Wiltshire as the year dawned. On 30 December 1859 a hurricane descended on Calne, twenty miles or so north-east of Road, and stripped a six-mile swathe of land in five minutes: the tornado ripped trees out of the earth and snapped them like matchsticks, upending their trunks and ramming the limbs into the ground; it tore the roofs off cottages and hurled them aside; it threw a wagon over a hedge. Giant hailstones fell from the sky and slashed the hands of those who tried to catch them; the chunks of ice were shaped like crosses, cogs and spears, according to a local woman, and one took the form of a small child. In January tourists came to look on the scene of the storm, as they came towards the close of the year to look at the place in which Saville Kent had died.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WOMEN! HOLD YOUR TONGUES!

November-December 1860

In the first, cold days of November, the strangest inquiry yet opened at the Temperance Hall. Thomas Saunders, a barrister and magistrate of Bradford-upon-Avon, Wiltshire, had become convinced that the villagers of Road were in possession of important information about the murder, and he took it upon himself to elicit it from them. Though he was acting entirely on his own initiative, his status as a Wiltshire magistrate gave him an apparent authority, and no one at first challenged his right to investigate the case.

From 3 November onwards, Saunders summoned an array of local people to offer their thoughts and observations, some of it illuminating about the life of the village and of Road Hill House, but nearly all of it utterly irrelevant to the murder. This was the stuff that Whicher had sifted through during his fortnight in Road, the huge bank of rumour and peripheral detail that a police investigation threw up, and that usually never reached the public. Saunders aired these bits and bobs in a distinctly haphazard fashion: 'evidence, if evidence it may be called, was adduced in a most singular and undignified manner', said the
Bristol Daily Post.
'On several occasions those present were at no pains to conceal the laughter which the proceedings were calculated to give rise to, and all throughout they seemed to consider that the whole affair was got up for their special amusement, rather than for the elucidation of a mysterious and terrible crime.'

The next two weeks in Road resembled a comic interlude in a tragic play, with Saunders as the buffoon who stumbled onstage to mangle and misunderstand all that had preceded him. He opened and closed the proceedings at whim, forgot the witnesses' names and puffed himself up with mysterious allusions to 'the secrets within my breast', while wandering in and out of the Temperance Hall with a bottle of liquid that according to the
Bristol Daily Post
'had very much the appearance of brandy'. Saunders said it was medicine to treat a cold he had caught from a window draught on the premises (he castigated the hall's caretaker, Charles Stokes, for the poor insulation). The magistrate gulped at his potion during the proceedings, and nibbled on biscuits. He frequently interrupted his witnesses by issuing demands that squalling babies be removed from the hall or women silenced: 'Women! Hold your tongues!'

A typical witness was Mrs Quance, an old lady who lived in the cottages by Road Hill House. On Tuesday Saunders examined her about a rumour that she had said that her husband, who worked in the mill at Tellisford, saw Samuel Kent in a field at 5 a.m. on 30 June. She flatly denied it, complaining that the police had already questioned her on the matter.

'I think it is done too clever to be found out,' she added, 'except one of the party "peaches" [informs on another].'

'What has been too cleverly done?' asked Saunders.

'The child-murder.' Then Mrs Quance abruptly rose, shuffled about, said, 'Oh, Lord, I can't stay yer, my boiler's a-goin all the while,' and scampered out, to appreciative hoots from the onlookers.

James Fricker, the plumber and glazier, testified to having been pestered to fix Samuel Kent's lantern in the last week of June: 'It did not strike me at first that there was anything singular in this particular hurry for the lamp in the summer time, but it has since.'

Before Saunders opened his inquiry he had snooped around Road for a few days, and he now reported his observations to the court. One evening, he said, he and a police officer saw a young lady dressed in black, with a white petticoat, heading for Road Hill House. She paused at the gate, walked past it a little way, turned back and went in. A few minutes later Saunders saw a young lady, possibly the same one, combing her hair at an upstairs window. His account of this unremarkable incident drew complaints from the Kent family, and later in the week he apologised, acknowledging that the 'slight trepidation' the lady had shown may have been prompted by her awareness of the 'two strange persons who were watching her movements'. Someone in the audience called out that the young woman was Mary Ann.

The last witness examined by Saunders was Charles Lansdowne, a labourer, 'the pith of whose statement', observed the
Frome Times,
drily, 'was that he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, and knew nothing, about what had been done at Road Hill House, on the night of 29th June'.

The newspapermen who had been covering the case since July were flabbergasted by Saunders' inquiry. The reporter from the
Morning Star
, astounded at the 'absurd proceedings' of the 'crackbrained boggler', said he was caught between 'wonder at [Saunders'] audacity and contempt for his folly'. The
Bristol Mercury
described the magistrate as 'monomaniacal'. Saunders was an unintentional satirist, a caricature of the amateur detective who saw meaning in every banality, every trivial circumstance, who believed that he alone could unravel a mystery that had foxed the professionals. He felt a right to spy, a duty to speculate. He had a keen 'sense of the profound importance of immaterial statements', noticed the
Somerset and Wilts Journal
, and paid great respect to the letters he received from the public: 'each contains hints of great importance'. He read out several of these letters in court, including one from a fellow barrister who observed: 'You are an ill-conditioned meddling vain old idiot.'

Yet this inquiry uncovered one significant fact. A letter from James Watts, a police sergeant of Frome, prompted Saunders to examine several officers about a discovery the police had made at Road Hill House on the day of the murder, and then concealed. In the Temperance Hall on Thursday, 8 November, he questioned PC Alfred Urch on the matter, and on Friday he took evidence from Sergeant James Watts and Superintendent Foley.

At about five p.m. on 30 June, the audience heard, Watts had found a woman's shift, wrapped in newspaper, in the kitchen boiler hole, the fire-hole beneath the hotplate. Urch and PC Dallimore saw it too: 'It was dry, sir,' said Urch to Saunders, 'but very dirty . . . as if it had been worn a long time . . . It had some blood about it . . . I did not touch it myself. Sergeant Watts unfolded it, looked at it, and carried it to the coach house.' Was it coarse or fine, Saunders asked. 'I should think, sir, it was one of the servants' . . . We remarked, two or three of us who were there, that it was a small one.'

A shift was a linen garment worn under a dress in the day, or by itself at night. It could fall to the knee, the shin or the ankle; its sleeves were usually short, and its style plain. A nightdress was typically a fuller garment that reached to the floor, with sleeves to the wrists, strips of lace or embroidery at the collar, cuffs or hem. There was a borderland, where a shift and a simple nightdress might be confused. It was at least possible that the item in the boiler hole was the missing nightdress.

'Was it a night-shift or a day-shift?' Saunders asked Urch, to laughter from the audience.

'Well, sir, it was a shift.'

'Have you a sufficient knowledge of shifts?' At this the onlookers howled with merriment. 'Silence!' cried Saunders. 'Silence!'

Watts examined the shift in the coach house. It was 'very bloody', he said. 'It was dry then, but I should not think the stains had been on it a long time . . . Some of the blood was on the front and some on the back. I wrapped up the shift again, and as I was coming out I saw Mr Kent just outside the stable-door in the yard. He asked me what I had found, and said he must have it seen, and that Dr Parsons must see it. I did not let Mr Kent see it, but handed it over to Mr Foley.'

Foley immediately set to concealing the discovery of the shift. He 'shuddered', he explained to the court, 'to think the man who found it was so foolish as to expose it'. He was sure that the stains were innocent, and that the shift had been hidden, in shame, by a servant. A medical man - Stapleton - had confirmed his own view that the stains had 'natural causes' (that is, they were marks of menstrual blood).

Saunders asked Foley: 'Did he [Stapleton] look at it with a microscope?'

Foley replied indignantly: 'No, I should think he did not!'

The Superintendent had then given the garment to PC Dallimore, who took it back to the Stallard Street police station.

In September Watts had run into Dallimore at the Road Hill cheese and cattle fair, and asked what had become of the shift. Dallimore told him that he had returned the 'shimmy' (an Anglicisation of 'chemise') to the kitchen on Monday, the day of the inquest. He planned to put it back in the boiler hole but was surprised by the cook entering the scullery, and so thrust it down the side of the boiler. Straight afterwards the nursemaid, just back from walking the two little girls, suggested he search the roof above the kitchen, and he did so - he had to clamber through a window overgrown with ivy. When he returned to the kitchen half an hour later the shift had vanished, presumably retrieved by its owner.

If the distinction between types of shift was bewildering territory for the police officers, so were the distinctions between types of blood. The ways of identifying menstrual blood and female underwear were hazy, all the more so when the items to be examined were whisked away so quickly. Much of the confusion about the underclothes and their stains was caused by embarrassment.

On the Thursday that the boiler-hole story came out, by strange chance, the private investigator Ignatius Pollaky arrived in Road to sit in on Saunders' proceedings. Pollaky, a Hungarian, was 'superintendent' of an inquiry office run by Charley Field, friend to Charles Dickens and Jack Whicher, who had retired from the Metropolitan Police in 1852. Private inquiry agents, as they were known, were a new breed, some of them retired detective officers such as Field. (Field briefly had his police pension withdrawn in the 1850s for improperly continuing to use his former title, Detective-Inspector, in his private practice.) The agents' main business was the sleazy stuff of the divorce court - divorce had been legalised in 1858, but proof of adultery was required if a man was to rid himself of his wife; a woman needed to prove cruelty to end a marriage.