The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective (48 page)
Authors: Kate Summerscale
Tags: #Detectives, #Fiction, #Great Britain, #Murder - General, #Espionage, #Europe, #Murder - England - Wiltshire - History - 19th century, #Murder, #Mystery & Detective Fiction, #True Crime, #Case studies, #History: World, #Wiltshire, #Law Enforcement, #Whicher; Jonathan, #19th century, #History, #England, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Europe - Great Britain - General, #Detectives - England - London, #Literary Criticism, #London, #Biography & Autobiography, #Expeditions & Discoveries, #Biography
Richard Mayne, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, in the 1840s
A view of Trowbridge, Wiltshire, in the mid-nineteenth century
The centre of Trowbridge in the late nineteenth century
Gravestone in East Coulston churchyard, Wiltshire
*
That month, according to the
News of the World
, a worker at a crinoline steel factory in Sheffield was killed by her crinoline when it caught in the revolving shaft of a machine and pulled her to her death.
*
Though his name did not appear on the census of 1861, there are indications that Whicher was living in this house by 1860. In a police circular of 1858 he asked fellow officers to inform him, at Scotland Yard, if they saw a twenty-four-year-old gentleman who had gone missing, 'mind supposed affected'; two weeks afterwards a private advertisement appeared in
The Times
requesting news of this same young man, with his 'rather pale full face', and offering a PS10 reward - it was presumably placed by Whicher, but it asked that information be passed to 'Mr Wilson' of 31 Holywell Street. The pseudonym concealed the fact that the police were looking for the wan gentleman. 'The tricks of detective police officers are infinite,' observes the narrator of
The Female Detective.
'I am afraid many a kindly-disposed advertisement hides the hoof of detection.' A year later, in 1859, the Commissioner's office put out a request for information about a white, wolf-breed dog that had gone missing from 31 Holywell Street. A lost dog was not usually a matter for Scotland Yard - maybe the white wolfhound belonged to Whicher's landlady (Charlotte Piper, a widow of forty-eight with a private income) or to the detective himself.
*
In the next decade Road Hill House was renamed Langham House (after the neighbouring farm). By 1871 the head of the house-hold was Sarah Ann Turberwell, a widow of sixty-six, who employed six staff: a butler, a lady's maid, a housekeeper, a housemaid, a kitchen maid and a footman. In the twentieth century the county boundaries were altered, so that the house now falls within Somerset, like the rest of the village, and the name of the village itself was changed, from Road to Rode.
*
To demonstrate the weird logic of homicidal monomania, Stapleton recounted a horrible story about a mild-mannered young man who was so obsessed with windmills that he would gaze at them for days on end. In 1843 friends tried to distract him from his fixation by moving him to an area with no mills. There the windmill man lured a boy into a wood, then killed and mutilated him. His motive, he explained, was the hope that as punishment he would be taken to a place where there just might be a mill.
*
James Willes separated from his wife in 1865 and moved to a house on the banks of the Colne, in Essex. Over the next few years, according to the
Dictionary of National Biography
, he walked his three dogs by the river and fed the trout. Though he had been a keen fisherman in his youth, he developed such a fondness for the fish that he banned the sport in his waters. In 1872, on becoming sleepless, forgetful and depressed, he shot himself in the heart with a revolver.
*
In the event, Madame Tussaud's did not put the Constance Kent waxwork on show until after Samuel Kent's death - perhaps out of respect for his feelings. According to the museum catalogues, it was displayed from 1873 to 1877.
*
Six years later, in 1887, Arthur Conan Doyle created the first of his hugely successful Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Unlike Jack Whicher, Conan Doyle's fantasy detective is an amateur and a gentleman, and he is always right - 'the most perfect reasoning and observing machine the world has seen', says his sidekick Dr Watson in 'A Scandal in Bohemia'.
*
Mary Amelia had married an orchard-keeper in Sydney in 1899, and given birth to Olive, her only child, the next year. Eveline, known as Lena, married a doctor in 1888 and had a son and a daughter. Florence never married, and spent her last years living with her niece Olive.
*
Henry James's novella was published in 1898, the heyday of the Sherlock Holmes series.
The Turn of the Screw
runs the detective story backwards, unravelling all its comforts: it refuses to dissolve the mystery of the children's silence; it implicates the detective-narrator in the nameless crime; and it ends, rather than begins, with the death of a child.
*
Whicher's unfolding analysis of the murder was laid out in three reports to Sir Richard Mayne, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner: the first is missing; Whicher wrote the second on 22 July; and he started the third just over a week later. The surviving reports are in the Metropolitan Police file on the Road Hill murder at the National Archives - MEPO 3/61.
*
Thirty-two years later, in the Sherlock Holmes short story 'Silver Blaze' (1892), Arthur Conan Doyle referred to 'the curious incident of the dog in the night-time', the curious incident being that the dog did not bark when he encountered an intruder, and the solution to the riddle being that the intruder was known to the dog. But the Road Hill murder, being fact rather than fiction, had messier, more ambiguous clues: the dog did bark on the night of the murder, but not a lot.
*
There are many possible causes for this condition, including tumours, hernias, the use of narcotics (such as opium), metabolic imbalance and kidney disease.
*
The press reported that Samuel Kent was paid PS800 a year, a figure he did not correct; but the Home Office archives show that his salary was actually only PS350 in 1860. He may also have had a small private income. In
The Book of House-hold Management
(1861) Mrs Beeton calculated that an income of PS500 per annum was required to fund a three-servant house-hold (the average wage for a cook, according to the same book, was PS20, for a housemaid PS12 and for a nursemaid PS10).
*
In his reports to Mayne, Whicher underlined those phrases and sentences that he wished to emphasise. His underlined words are rendered here as italics.
*
The abbreviation 'sleuth' was first used as a synonym for 'detective' in the 1870s.
*
The biblical text runs: 'And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper? And He said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.'
*
According to one implausible rumour, the Kents were illegitimate descendants of the royal family. Reporters occasionally remarked on Constance's resemblance to Queen Victoria.
*
A defendant was not allowed to give evidence at his or her own trial until 1898.
*
If Eugenia was lying, one wonders about the role played in her life by the family doctor, Mr Gay, to whom she was - at eleven - already betrothed. The surgeon referred to her as his 'little wife', and it was he who examined her body for signs of sexual molestation. Gay observed 'slight marks of violence', he said.
INDEX
Adams, John Couch,
142
Adelphi theatre,
84
Albert, Prince,
217
All the Year Round
,
xxii
,
125
,
159
,
267
Alresford,
265
Annual Register
,
106
aquaria,
273
-4
Arabia,
96
Arundel, Lord,
264
Ascot,
56
Asmodeus,
158
William Kent in,
283
-9
Constance Kent in,
288
-90
Avon, river,
44
Axbridge,
164
Baily, Mr and Mrs,
151
-2
Balaklava,
73
Baldwin, Mary,
122
banknotes,
69
baobab trees,
286
Barnes, Constance Amelia,
288
Barry, Sir Charles,
162
Bath,
137
,
164
,
167
,
182
,
198
,
203
,
207
Constance and William Kent's flight,
91
-3,
95
,
107
,
143
,
300
-1
Greyhound Hotel,
91
-2
police,
207
-8
Bath Chronicle
,
110
accounts of Road Hill case,
27
-8,
34
,
37
,
60
-1,
95
,
97
,
102
,
111
-12,
127
,
130
,
143
,
159
and suspicion of Samuel Kent,
169
-70
Bath Express
,
93
,
110
,
116
,
149
,
169
,
182
Battersea,
275
Baudelaire, Charles,
296
Baxter, Richard,
294
Beckington,
4
-5,
9
,
19
,
77
-9,
137
,
182
,
236
Methodist chapel,
210
Beethoven, Ludwig van,
296
Belgravia,
120
Benger, Thomas,
15
-17,
22
,
24
,
29
,
128
,
237
Bennett, John,
52
Bennett, Thomas,
279
Bentham, Jeremy,
216
Bethlehem asylum,
80
Bird, J.J.,
137
Biss, river,
44
Blackall, Dr,
72
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
,
123
Blandford,
166
Bloemfontein, Bishop of,
280
Bloomsbury,
48
-9
Bonwell, Rev. James,
55
,
133
,
181
Booth, John Wilkes,
253
-4
Bow Street magistrates' court,
227
-8,
234
,
241
,
254
Bowyer, Sir George,
173
-4
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth,
Lady Audley's Secret
,
217
-18,
222
,
225
,
238
,
243
Aurora Floyd,
222