The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective (34 page)

In his new role Whicher took part in the longest and most famous court battle of the late nineteenth century: the case of the Tichborne Claimant. At the end of 1866 a plump, jowly fellow turned up in London declaring himself to be Sir Roger Tichborne, a Roman Catholic baronet and heir to his family's fortune. Sir Roger had been lost in a shipwreck in 1854, his body never found; the Claimant said that he had been rescued and taken to Chile, from where he made his way to Australia. He had been living in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, under the assumed name Thomas Castro until he learnt that the Dowager Lady Tichborne, an eccentric Frenchwoman who persisted in believing her son was alive, had placed in the Australian press a plea for news of his whereabouts.

The Dowager Lady Tichborne greeted the Claimant as her son; friends, acquaintances, former servants also signed documents testifying to his identity. Even the family doctor insisted that this was the man he had attended since boyhood, right down to his peculiar genitals (when flaccid, the penis withdrew into the body, like that of a horse). Yet many others who had known Sir Roger derided the Claimant as an inept impostor. In some respects his knowledge was remarkable - he noticed that a painting at the Tichborne estate had been cleaned during his absence, for instance - but he made elementary errors, too, and had somehow forgotten every word of his first language, French.

One of the sceptics, Lord Arundel of Windsor, who was related to the Tichbornes, hired Whicher to unmask the Claimant. The detective was told that he would be paid handsomely if he gave the matter his unceasing attention. Over the next seven years the case claimed not only Whicher's unceasing attention but the attention of the whole country. It was a puzzle so confounding that it brought on a kind of national paralysis. 'It has weighed upon the public mind like an incubus,' wrote a barrister in 1872; 'no subject whatever occupied so large a space of the human mind', reported the
Observer
in 1874.

Whicher had two decades of experience in this kind of investigative work: shadowing, tailing, rustling up witnesses, fathoming lies and half-truths, coaxing information out of unwilling participants, using photographs to secure identifications, appraising personalities. Acting on a tip-off from an Australian detective, he began by making inquiries in Wapping, a poor district by the east London docks. He discovered that on Christmas Day 1866, within hours of reaching England, the Claimant had visited the Globe public house on Wapping High Street, ordered a sherry and a cigar, and asked after the Orton family. He claimed to be enquiring on behalf of an Arthur Orton, a butcher he had known in Australia. Whicher suspected that the Claimant was the Wap-ping butcher himself.

For months Whicher prowled the streets of Wapping. He invited a stream of locals who had known Orton - victuallers, confectioners, sailmakers and so on - to accompany him to the Claimant's lodgings in Croydon, south of London. One by one they met the detective at London Bridge station, took the train to Croydon and waited outside the Claimant's house until he emerged, or could be glimpsed through a window. Most, but not all, said they recognised the Claimant as Arthur Orton. Whicher would hide if the Claimant stepped out of the house. According to one witness, 'He said it would not do for him to be seen there - it would raise suspicion probably, and stop him coming out.' Whicher tracked down Orton's former girlfriend, Mary Ann Loder, who swore that the Claimant was the man who had deserted her in 1852 to seek his fortune overseas. She proved an important witness - amazingly, she even testified that Arthur Orton had a regressive penis.

Whicher's brief was wide. He not only sought evidence against the Claimant, but also tried to persuade his supporters to defect. In October 1868 he visited a Mr Rous, the landlord of the Swan in Alresford, Hampshire, and one of the Claimant's chief advisers. After ordering a glass of grog (rum and water) and a cigar, the detective asked him: 'You believe in him being the man?'

'Most certainly,' said Rous. 'I have no doubt he is the right man but foolish.'

'Mr Rous, don't you believe anything of the kind. You may depend upon it, he is no such person. What I shall tell you will make you very uncomfortable.' Whicher proceeded to unpick the Claimant's story.

The Claimant - who weighed twenty stone when he reached England - was growing fatter and fatter. His working-class supporters hailed him as a hero who was being punished by the aristocracy and the Catholic Church for the vulgarities he had adopted in the Australian bush. Once again Whicher was working for the establishment, and against the class from which he came - he was the turncoat, the archetypal policeman.

When the Claimant sued for control of the family estates in 1871, the Tichbornes hired Sir John Duke Coleridge, who had defended Constance, to represent their interests. In the course of the trial, as at Road Hill, the other side sought to discredit Whicher and his discoveries. The Claimant's lawyers complained that their client had been 'haunted' by detectives, and by one in particular. 'I believe that the story of Arthur Orton has emanated from the brain of one of them,' said his barrister, 'and I think we shall yet learn how it has been concocted. I am not fond of people of this description. They are totally irresponsible, they belong to no known body, they are not called upon to account for their conduct. They don't belong to the recognised police, they are amateurs, and many of them superannuated officers who gain an honest livelihood by private enquiries. Without imputing to the honourable body that they invent evidence, I may say there is such a thing as torturing evidence so as to make it look uncommonly different from what it is.'

In 1872 the Claimant lost his case, and the Crown promptly sued him for perjury. Again the Claimant's lawyers - by then led by the Irish barrister Edward Kenealy - tried to demean Whicher, with accusations that he had bribed and coached his witnesses. Kenealy made snide comments to the prosecution witnesses when they took the stand: 'I suppose you and Whicher have had many a little drop of drink over this case?'

Since Road Hill, Whicher had learnt to shrug at vilification, to take a longer view. He had regained his old assurance. In 1873 he wrote in a letter to a friend: 'I daresay you hear me frequently abused in reference to the Tichborne case, but whether I shall live (as in the Road murder case) to outlive the innuendoes and slanders of - Kenealy I know not, but that the Claimant is Arthur Orton is as certain as that I am - Your Old Friend, Jack Whicher'.

In 1874, the Claimant was found guilty, and sentenced to fourteen years of penal servitude. He was sent to Millbank. Though the Tichbornes' solicitor urged the family to pay Whicher a bonus of a hundred guineas for his outstanding work on the case, there is no record of whether they did so.

Jack Whicher was still living with Charlotte at 63 Page Street, off Millbank Row - formerly 31 Holywell Street, but now renamed and renumbered. His niece Sarah had moved out in 1862, when she married Charlotte's nephew, James Holliwell, who had been awarded one of the first Victoria Crosses for his part in the Indian Mutiny of 1857: while under siege in a house in Lucknow, according to the citation, he had behaved 'in a most admirable manner, encouraging the other nine men, who were in low spirits, to keep going . . . His cheerful persuasion prevailed and they made a successful defence in a burning house with the enemy firing through four windows.' James and Sarah now lived in Whitechapel, east London, with their three sons. Jack and Charlotte, though childless, looked after children too - Amy Gray, born in Camberwell in about 1856, was a regular visitor from the age of five, and Emma Sangways, born in Camberwell in about 1863, was recorded as the Whichers' ward in 1871. The nature of the couple's connection with these girls is a mystery, but the bonds between them lasted until death.

In January 1868, while Whicher was hunting down witnesses in Wapping, the first instalment of Wilkie Collins'
The Moonstone
appeared in
All the Year Round
. It was an immediate bestseller. 'It is a very curious story,' observed Dickens, 'wild and yet domestic.'
The Moonstone
, a founding fable of detective fiction, adopted many of the characteristics of the real investigation at Road: the country-house crime in which the criminal must be one of the inmates of the house; the secret lives led behind a veneer of propriety; the bumbling, pompous local policeman; the behaviour that seems to point to one thing yet turns out to point to another; the way that the innocent and the guilty alike act suspiciously, because all have something to hide; the scattering of 'real clues and pseudo clues', as a reviewer described them (the term 'red herring' - something that puts bloodhounds off the scent - was not used to mean 'pseudo clue' until 1884). In
The Moonstone
, as at Road Hill, the original source of the crime was a wrong done in a previous generation: the sins of the father were visited on the children, like a curse. These ideas were taken up by many of the detective novelists who succeeded Collins, as was the novel's air of uncertainty, what one of its characters calls 'the atmosphere of mystery and suspicion in which we are all living now'.

The story diluted the horror of Road Hill: instead of a child-murder, there was a jewel theft; instead of bloodstains, splashes of paint. Yet the plot borrowed many specifics from the Road case: the stained and missing nightdress; the laundry book that proves its loss; the renowned detective policeman summoned to the countryside from London; a house-hold that shudders at his invasion; the indelicacy of a lower-class man accusing a middle-class girl. Most significantly, it translated Whicher into the prototypical detective hero, 'the celebrated Cuff'. ('To cuff', in contemporary slang, was to handcuff.) The seventeen-year-old Robert Louis Stevenson, when he read the novel that year, wrote to his mother: 'Isn't the detective prime?'

Physically, Sergeant Cuff is a papery, hawkish old thing, quite unlike Whicher. In character, though, they are akin. Cuff is melancholy, sharp-witted, enigmatic, oblique - he has 'round-about' and 'underground' ways of working, by which he lures his sources into disclosing more than they intend. His eyes 'had a very disconcerting trick, when they encountered your eyes, of looking as if they expected something more from you than you were aware of yourself'. Cuff is after unconscious secrets as well as facts that are deliberately withheld. He acts as a foil to the novel's sensation, a thinking machine to interpret the palpitations and pulsings of the other characters. By identifying with Cuff, readers could shield themselves from the thrills they sought - the story's untrammelled emotion, the tremble of danger. The fever of feeling was transmuted into the 'detective-fever' that burnt in the novel's characters and its readers, a compulsion to solve the riddle. In this way the detective novel tamed the sensation novel, caging the emotional wildness in an elegant, formulaic structure. There was madness, but it was mastered by method. It was Detective Sergeant Cuff who made
The Moonstone
a new kind of book.

Yet Cuff, unlike the detectives he inspired, gets the solution wrong: 'I own that I made a mess of it,' he says. He is mistaken in believing that the criminal is the daughter of the house - the secretive, 'devilish self-willed', 'odd and wild' Miss Rachel. She turns out to be more noble than his policeman's nature can understand. In so far as it reflected the events at Road Hill, the novel ignored the official solution - Constance Kent's guilt - and instead gave voice to the unease that still surrounded the story. It aired the notions of somnambulism, unconscious deeds, double selves that the Road case had aroused, the dizzying whirl of perspectives that had been brought to bear upon the investigation. The solution Collins gave to the mystery of the moonstone was that the odd and wild Miss Rachel had drawn suspicion to herself in order to protect someone else.

In 1927 T.S. Eliot compared
The Moonstone
, favourably, to the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle:

The detective story, as created by Poe, is something as specialised and as intellectual as a chess problem, whereas the best English detective fiction has relied less on the beauty of the mathematical problem and much more on the intangible human element . . . the best heroes of English detective fiction have been, like Sergeant Cuff, fallible.

In his lifetime, Collins was often dismissed as a master of plot with little aptitude for depicting his characters' interior lives. By comparison with novelists such as George Eliot, he built his stories from the outside rather than from within. Henry James characterised them as 'monuments of mosaic art', then amended this: 'They are not so much works of art,' he said, 'as works of science.'

In May 1866 Samuel Kent renewed his plea to the Home Office to retire on his full salary, which had risen to PS500 when he completed thirty years' service that April. Since Saville's death, he explained in his letter, the family had experienced 'indescribable pain and anguish greatly aggravated by the disclosures which the penitence of his daughter Constance ultimately constrained her to make'. His attempts to find the murderer and shield his family, he said, had left him in debt. The health of his second wife was 'entirely shattered' - Mrs Kent was losing her sight and had fallen prey to a 'hopeless and helpless paralysis', so he had to nurse her and tend to their four young children.

In August, to his dismay, the Home Office granted Samuel a pension of PS250, half of what he had requested but the maximum the rules allowed. He desperately backtracked, begging to withdraw his resignation - he would continue working, he said; he had not intended to resign, only to enquire into the possibility; he could not manage on so little money. The Home Office questioned whether he was fit to discharge his duties. Yes, he replied at the end of August: he no longer needed to nurse his wife - Mary Kent,
nee
Pratt, had died earlier in the month aged forty-six, of congestion of the lungs.

The Home Office allowed Samuel to continue as a sub-inspector. That summer he was awarded PS350 damages by the Edinburgh
Daily News
for an article that had portrayed his second wife as common and cruel. With the four surviving children of his second marriage - Mary Amelia, Eveline, Acland,Florence - Samuel went north to the small Welsh town of Denbigh, where he employed an Australian governess and two other servants. His eldest daughters, Mary Ann and Elizabeth, moved to London together. William also headed for the capital city, with the PS1,000 inheritance he had secured on his twenty-first birthday in July.