The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective (6 page)

Joshua Parsons was the next witness. He reported his summons to the house and the conclusions of his post-mortem: Saville had been killed before three in the morning; his throat had been cut and his chest punctured, and he also showed signs of suffocation. Three pints of blood should have come out of the body 'at a gush', he said, but much less had been found.

After Parsons' evidence, the coroner tried to bring the inquest to a close, but the Reverend Peacock, as foreman of the jury, said that his fellow jurors wanted to examine Constance and William Kent. Peacock himself dissented - he felt the family should be left alone - but he was obliged to report that the others were insistent. Some jurors were demanding to interview everyone in the Kent family: 'Try them all; show no respect to one more than to another,' 'Give us the whole.' The villagers, said Stapleton, suspected the coroner of protecting the Kents: 'One law for the rich and another for the poor.' Unwillingly, the coroner agreed that Constance and William be interviewed, but on condition that the examination take place at their home, so as not to 'expose those children to insult'. He was disturbed by the way the pair were 'spoken of loudly in terms of execration, as being the murderers'. The jury returned to the house.

The interviews, which took place in the kitchen, were brief - three or four minutes each.

'I knew nothing whatever of his death, until he was found,' said Constance. 'I know nothing whatever of the murder . . . Everyone was kind to the child.' When asked about Elizabeth Gough, she said, 'I have found the nursemaid generally quiet and attentive, and perform her duties in every respect as could be wished.' According to the
Somerset and Wilts Journal
, she 'gave evidence in a subdued and audible tone, without betraying any special emotion, her eyes fixed on the ground'.

William's evidence was virtually identical, but expressed with greater warmth: 'I know nothing nor heard anything of this circumstance till the morning - I wish I had. Saville was a great favourite with all. I have always found the nursemaid very kind and attentive. I know nothing whatever of the murder.' His manner was more engaging than that of his sister: 'he gave his evidence clearly and well, his eyes being fixed on the coroner throughout'. By comparison, Constance was muted, shuttered.

Back at the Temperance Hall, the coroner told the jurors that it was their job to find out how Saville had met his death, not who had killed him. With reluctance, they signed a sheet blaming a 'person or persons unknown' for the murder. 'It is unknown,' said one, 'but there is a very strong suspicion which don't at all settle on my stomach.' 'So with me,' said another man. 'The same here,' said another. A shoemaker stood up to say that most of his fellow jurors believed that the murderer was an inmate of Road Hill House. He accused Parsons, the Reverend Peacock and the coroner of trying to hush the matter up.

The coroner ignored their disquiet. He comforted the jury with the thought that 'although the action was concealed from the eyes of men, yet it was seen and recorded by One above', and at 3.30 in the afternoon he declared the inquest closed. 'I say, gentlemen, it is the most extraordinary and mysterious murder that has ever been committed, to my knowledge.'

In Road Hill House after the inquest Foley handed the key to the laundry room to Mrs Silcox, who had laid Saville out. She finished arranging the body for burial. Elizabeth Gough and Sarah Cox then took it upstairs in a 'shell', the thin interior case of a coffin. Mrs Kent instructed Gough to 'screw down' the case.

Saville's mother was later asked if the nursemaid had kissed the corpse when she closed the coffin. 'It was then very much changed,' Mrs Kent said, 'and I do not think she could have kissed it at that time.'

On Monday night Constance asked Gough to share her bed.

At about eleven the next morning, Hester Holley returned the laundry book to Sarah Cox and collected her weekly payment of seven or eight shillings. She did not mention the missing nightdress. 'I never said anything to her about anything missing,' she later admitted. 'That's where my mistake was. I was in a hurry, like, but I knew it was missing.'

In the afternoon James Morgan, the parish constable, and four police constables called at Mrs Holley's cottage to question her about the breast flannel: they wanted to know if she had ever seen it among the clothes sent by the Kents. She said she had not, and when asked whether this week's laundry was all in order, said that 'the clothes were all right by the book'.

Straight afterwards she sent Martha to Road Hill House to tell the Kents that one of their nightdresses was missing, and that she had concealed this from the police. Mrs Kent called Sarah Cox and Mary Ann Kent to the library. They insisted they had packed three nightdresses, while Martha Holley swore that only two had been in the baskets.

Martha reported back to her mother, who at about six that evening went in person to the house: 'I saw Mrs Kent, the two Miss Kents, the housemaid, and cook; and Mr Kent spoke to me from his room door, and told me, not as a gentleman would speak, that if I did not produce the nightdress within eight and forty hours he would have me taken up by a special warrant . . . He spoke to me very gruff.'

On Friday, 6 July, Saville's remains were taken away for burial. The
Western Daily Press
reported that as the coffin was being carried across the grounds of Road Hill House, 'the list bands by which the bearers carried it snapped asunder, just after the group passed the water-closet [the privy], and before they reached the lawn gate, and the coffin fell down upon the gravel, where it remained until fresh bands were brought from the house'. A crowd of villagers watched as a coach bore away the coffin and the two family mourners, Samuel and William Kent. (Women did not usually attend funerals, though they adopted their mourning clothes on the burial day.)

Saville's funeral procession passed through Trowbridge at 9.30 a.m., reaching the village of East Coulston half an hour or so later. The boy's body was buried in the family vault alongside the remains of Samuel's first wife. The inscription on his gravestone closed with the words, '
SHALL NOT GOD SEARCH THIS OUT? FOR HE KNOWETH THE SECRETS OF THE HEART
.' One newspaper report described the 'intense grief' displayed by both Samuel and William; another attributed 'intense emotion' only to Samuel. He had to be helped by a friend from the churchyard to his coach.

Four friends of the family - three doctors and a lawyer - attended the funeral: Benjamin Mallam, Saville's godfather, who practised as a surgeon in Frome; Joshua Parsons; Joseph Stapleton; and Rowland Rodway. They shared a coach back to Road, and discussed the murder. Parsons told the others that Mrs Kent had asked him to certify Constance as a lunatic.

Superintendent Foley continued to lead the investigation, though several other senior officers visited Road that week. The police looked in the spare rooms of Road Hill House and searched some uninhabited buildings at the bottom of the lawn. They tried to drag the river near the house, but found the water was too high - the Frome had flooded its banks only a few weeks earlier. They seemed to be getting no closer to clearing up the mystery, and even before the week was out the Wiltshire magistrates had applied to the Home Office to send a Scotland Yard detective. The request was refused. 'Now that the County Police is established,' pointed out the Permanent Under-Secretary, Horatio Waddington, 'the assistance of London officers is seldom resorted to.' The magistrates announced that they would open their own inquiry on Monday.

Since the dispute about the nightdress was unresolved, Mrs Holley refused to take in the family's washing on Monday, 9 July. That morning Foley sent Eliza Dallimore to Road Hill House with the breast flannel he had found in the privy. 'Mrs Dallimore,' said Foley, 'you must try this piece of flannel on them girls, and on the nurse.' Its stains were now washed away, the stench of blood and dirt having become overpowering.

Dallimore took Cox and Kerslake up to their room on the second floor and told them to undress. She asked them to try on the flannel, and found it was not wide enough for either. Next she told Elizabeth Gough to undress in the nursery. Gough complained: 'It's of no use. If the flannel fits me, that's no reason that I should have done the murder.' She took off her stays and tried on the flannel. It fitted.

'Well, it might fit a great many,' Mrs Dallimore conceded. 'It fits me. But there's no one in the house I have fitted it on to but you.' Foley had not instructed her to try the flannel on Mrs Kent or her three stepdaughters.

The same Monday, a week after the inquest, the five Wiltshire magistrates opened what the
Somerset and Wilts Journal
described as a 'profoundly secret' inquiry at the Temperance Hall, to which they summoned several of the inhabitants of Road Hill House. Mrs Kent told them that she believed the murderer was an inmate of the house, 'some one who knew the premises'. 'I have no reason to blame nurse,' she added. 'The only thing I blame her for is not telling me the instant she missed the child.'

The police working on the case suspected Elizabeth Gough. They thought it almost impossible that the child had been abducted from the nursery without the nursemaid's knowledge. The scenario that had shaped itself out in their minds was that Saville had woken up and seen a man in Gough's bed. To silence the boy, the lovers stopped his mouth and - by accident or design - suffocated him. Gough herself had depicted Saville as a tell-tale: 'The little boy goes into his mamma's room and tells everything.' The couple then mutilated the body to disguise the cause of death, the police surmised. If the lover was Samuel Kent, he could have disposed of the evidence when he rode off to Trowbridge. In the fuss and hurry, and because the pair had to be careful not to be seen conferring, their stories had clashed and changed: notably, their accounts of when they missed the blanket. This scenario also accounted for Gough's inadequate explanation of why she failed to rouse her mistress when she noticed that Saville was missing.

At eight o'clock in the evening of Tuesday, 10 July - William Kent's fifteenth birthday - the magistrates directed the police to apprehend Elizabeth Gough.

'Previous to being informed of the decision of the magistrates,' reported the
Bath Chronicle
, 'the girl was apparently in the highest spirits, at the house where the several witnesses stopped, and talked in a very off-handed manner of how she should have enjoyed herself at the haymaking, had not this "business" occurred. She said she was so conscious of her innocence in the matter, that she should not be afraid to go before a hundred judges and be examined.'

Her bravado swiftly fell away. 'On being told that she would be detained for the present, she fell senseless to the ground.' The
Somerset and Wilts Journal
described her as having succumbed to a 'fit of hysterics'. She was 'unconscious for a few minutes'. When she had regained her senses Foley took her in a trap, a two-wheeled pony cart, to the police station in Stallard Street, Trow-bridge. The superintendent lived in the station house with his wife, his son (a lawyer's clerk) and a servant. The Dallimores - William, the constable, Eliza, the searcher, and their three children - also lived on the premises, and they were given custody of Gough. The nursemaid and the searcher shared a bed.

During her stay at the police station Gough told Foley and his wife that she was sure Constance was not the murderer.

'Was it you?' Foley asked.

'No,' she said.

She remarked to another policeman that she had decided 'never to love another child'. He asked her why. Because, she said, 'this is the second time that something has occurred to a child to which I was attached. In a former place where I lived two years there was a child I was very fond of, and it died.'

A rumour spread that she had confessed, naming Samuel as the murderer and herself as accessory. Several other rumours came into circulation during the week, all of them implicating Samuel: people said that Saville's life was insured, that the body of the first Mrs Kent was being exhumed for a post-mortem, that Samuel was seen in the grounds of his house at three o'clock on the morning of the murder.

On Friday Elizabeth Gough was taken back to Road to be examined. She waited at the house of Charles Stokes, a saddler who lived next to the Temperance Hall, while the magistrates went to Road Hill House. After a while the saddler's sister Ann, a maker of corsets and dresses, remarked on how long the magistrates had been gone: 'I suspect something has been found out,' she said. Gough 'manifested some alarm' and paced the room restlessly. 'I hope I shall not be called in today, for I feel I shall be as bad as I was on Tuesday,' she said, alluding to her bout of hysteria.

'Pressing her hands to her side,' reported Ann Stokes, 'she said she felt as if the blood had gone from one side to the other. She also said that she could not hold out much longer, and that she could not have held out so long but that Mrs Kent had begged of her to do so.' Gough claimed that Mrs Kent had urged her on: 'You must hold up a little longer, Elizabeth; do for my sake.' Afterwards, said Ann Stokes, Gough 'remarked that she had since the murder pulled some grey hairs from her head, which she had never done before, that no one knew how she suffered, and that if anything else occurred she thought she should die'.

In Road Hill House the magistrates interviewed Mrs Kent and Mary Ann Kent. Neither had been able to come to the Temperance Hall, the former because her pregnancy was so advanced, the latter because she was 'seized with violent hysterical fits, on hearing that her presence would be required'.

When the magistrates returned to the hall they summoned Gough. Eight reporters had turned up, but none was admitted - the proceedings were strictly private, they were told. A policeman stood outside to make sure no one got close enough to the doors to eavesdrop.

At about seven o'clock that evening, the magistrates adjourned the inquiry and told Gough she was free to spend the weekend with her father and cousin, who had arrived that afternoon from Isleworth, near London, as long as she returned to the Temperance Hall on Monday. She said she would remain at the police station in Trowbridge. The magistrates probably reassured her before releasing her, for when she reached the town she 'appeared quite cheerful', reported the
Bath Chronicle
, 'and jumped from the trap in a lively manner'.