The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective (8 page)

At about eight in the evening Whicher ate supper in the station house - roast mutton, perhaps, with cabbage, potatoes and dumplings. When assigned the night shift, he took his place in the yard before nine, carrying a lantern, or 'bull's-eye', as well as a truncheon and a rattle. On this unbroken eight-hour stint he tested the locks on windows and doors, watched for fires, took the destitute into shelters, checked that public houses were closed on time. The circuit was much shorter at night - two miles - and Whicher was expected to pass each point on his beat every hour. If he needed help, he swung his rattle; a constable from a neighbouring beat should always be within earshot. Though this shift could be miserable in winter, it had its perks: tips for waking up market traders or labourers before dawn, and sometimes a 'toothful' of beer or brandy from each publican on the route.

Whicher patrolled Holborn in the years that the district was dominated by the great, eight-acre slum of St Giles. This dark complication of streets and alleys was laced with hidden passages through courtyards, attics, cellars. Hustlers and thieves spilled out to coax, hoax or steal cash from prosperous passers-by - around St Giles lay the law courts, the university, the British Museum, the fine squares of Bloomsbury and the posh shops of High Holborn. If spotted by the police, the criminals slipped back into their labyrinth.

Holborn teemed with tricksters, and the police of E division had to be expert in identifying them. A new vocabulary evolved to catalogue the various deceits. The police watched out for 'magsmen' (conmen, such as card sharps) who 'gammoned' (fooled) 'flats' (dupes) with the help of 'buttoners' or 'bonnets' (accomplices who drew people in by seeming to win money from the magsmen). A 'screever' (drafter of documents) might sell a 'fakement' to a vagrant 'on the blob' (telling hard-luck stories) - in 1837, fifty Londoners were arrested for producing such documents and eighty-six for bearing them. To 'work the kinchin lay' was to trick children out of their cash or clothing. To 'work the shallow' was to excite compassion by begging half-naked. To 'shake lurk' was to beg in the guise of a shipwrecked sailor. In November 1837 a magistrate noted that some thieves in the Holborn area were acting as decoys, feigning drunkenness in order to distract police constables while their friends burgled houses.

On occasion the officers of E division left their district. The entire police force was deployed to line the route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey when Victoria was crowned in June 1838. Already the police were familiar with lunatics who were fixated by the new queen. An inmate of a workhouse in St Giles, for instance, was taken before the magistrates because he had become convinced that Victoria was in love with him. He said they had 'exchanged looks' in Kensington Gardens. The magistrates recommended that he be committed to an asylum.

Jack Whicher's first reported arrest was in December 1840. In a brothel on the Gray's Inn Road, near King's Cross, he noticed a seventeen-year-old girl giddy with drink and flaunting a set of improbably fine clothes. A feather boa hung from her neck. Whicher remembered that a boa was among the items stolen from a house in Bloomsbury a fortnight earlier, and that a maid had absconded on the night of the burglary. He approached the girl with the boa and charged her with theft. Louisa Weller was convicted later that month of robbing Sarah Taylor of Gloucester Street. The story of her capture outlined in miniature Whicher's detective qualities: an excellent memory, an eye for the incongruous, psychological acuity, and confidence.

Straight afterwards, his name vanished from the newspapers for two years. This was probably because he had been recruited by the Metropolitan Police Commissioners - Colonel Charles Rowan, an army man, and Sir Richard Mayne, a lawyer - to a small band of plainclothes 'active officers', proto-detectives whose existence was a secret. The English public had a horror of surveillance. There had been outrage in the early 1830s when it came to light that a plainclothes policeman had infiltrated a political gathering. In this climate, the detectives had to be introduced by stealth.

Magistrates' court records indicate that Whicher was working undercover in April 1842, when he noticed a trio of crooks in Regent Street. He followed them until he saw one of them stand in the path of Sir Roger Palmer, an Anglo-Irish baronet who owned a house in Park Lane, while another gently lifted Sir Roger's coat tails and the last picked a purse from his pocket. Professional pickpockets such as these typically worked in teams of three or four, shielding and easing one another's work. Many were extraordinarily adroit, having been trained since childhood in the art of 'dipping' or 'diving'. Though one of the three escaped, Whicher spotted him in another part of town a fortnight later and hauled him into a police court, reporting that the fellow had compounded his offence by trying to buy him off with silver.

The Metropolitan Police files show that Whicher was again operating incognito later that month, when he took part in the hunt for Daniel Good, a Putney coachman who had killed and dismembered his lover. Whicher and his Holborn colleague Sergeant Stephen Thornton kept watch on the house of a female friend of Good's in Spitalfields, east London (Dickens later described Thornton, who was eleven years older than Whicher, as having 'a ruddy face and a high sunburnt forehead . . . He is famous for steadily pursuing the inductive process and, from small beginnings, working on from clue to clue until he bags his man'). Daniel Good was eventually caught in Kent, but by good luck rather than deft police work.

In June 1842 the commissioners asked the Home Office for permission to set up a small detective division: they argued that they needed a centralised, elite force to coordinate murder hunts - such as the search for Good - and other serious crimes that crossed different police districts. If these officers could wear plain clothes, they said, the force would be all the more efficient. The Home Office agreed. That August, Whicher, Thornton and the other six men picked as detectives formally abandoned their beats, shed their uniforms, became as anonymous and ubiquitous as the villains they sought. Jack Whicher and Charles Goff of L (Lambeth) division were the most junior, but both were made sergeants within weeks (Whicher was only a month short of having served five years as a constable, usually the minimum required for promotion). This brought the number of sergeants in the division to six, serving under two inspectors. Whicher was given a pay rise of almost 50 per cent, from about PS50 to PS73 a year - PS10 more than a regular sergeant's salary. As before, his wages were supplemented with bonuses and rewards.

'Intelligent men have been recently selected to form a body called the "detective police",' reported
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal
in 1843. 'At times the detective policeman attires himself in the dress of ordinary individuals.' The public wariness persisted - a
Times
editorial of 1845 warned of the dangers of detective police, explaining that there 'always will be, something repugnant in the bare idea of espionage'.

The detectives' headquarters were a room alongside the commissioners' offices in Great Scotland Yard, by Trafalgar Square. The men technically became part of the A, or Whitehall, division. Whicher was designated A27. His job, now, was to disappear, to slip noiselessly between the classes - the detectives were to blend, eavesdrop, merge into 'flash-houses' (pubs frequented by criminals) and into crowds threaded with thieves. They were untethered. While an ordinary policeman circled his beat like the arm of a compass, passing each point every hour, the detectives crisscrossed the city and the country at will. In the London underworld they were known as 'Jacks', which captured their classless anonymity.

The first English detective story, by the journalist William Russell, writing as 'Waters', appeared in
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal
in July 1849. The next year Whicher and his colleagues were eulogised by Charles Dickens in several magazine articles: 'They are, one and all, respectable-looking men,' Dickens reported, 'of perfectly good deportment and unusual intelligence; with nothing lounging or slinking in their manners; with an air of keen observation and quick perception when addressed; and generally presenting in their faces, traces more or less marked of habitually leading lives of strong mental excitement. They have all good eyes; and they all can, and they all do, look full at whomsoever they speak to.' George Augustus Sala, a fellow journalist, found Dickens' enthusiasm cloying - he disliked the novelist's 'curious and almost morbid partiality for communing with and entertaining police officers . . . He seemed always at his ease with these personages, and never tired of questioning them.' The detectives, like Dickens, were working-class boys made good, thrilled to find themselves with the run of the city. In
Tom Fox; Or, the Revelations of a Detective
, a mock-memoir of 1860, John Bennett noted that the detective was socially superior to 'the common peeler', because he was better educated and 'of far higher intelligence'. He sought the secrets of the establishment and of the underworld alike, and since he had few precedents he made up his methods on the hoof.

These methods were sometimes criticised. In 1851 Whicher was accused of spying and entrapment when he caught two bank robbers in The Mall. While walking across Trafalgar Square in May that year, Whicher spotted 'an old acquaintance', an ex-convict who was back in town after a stint in the penal colonies of Australia. He saw him join another old lag on a bench in The Mall, opposite the London and Westminster Bank. Over the next few weeks Whicher and a colleague watched the pair size up the bank. The policemen lay in wait until, on 28 June, they caught the crooks red-handed, fleeing the bank with their loot. Correspondents to
The Times
censured the officers for letting the crime take place rather than nipping it in the bud. 'The credit for skill and ingenuity gained by the detectives is probably what greatly inclines them to detection rather than prevention,' complained one letter-writer, implying that they had become puffed up by the attentions of Dickens and the like.

Dickens recast his new heroes in the figure of Inspector Bucket in
Bleak House
(1853), the supreme fictional detective of the era. Mr Bucket was a 'sparkling stranger' who 'walks in an atmosphere of mysterious greatness'. The first police detective in an English novel, Bucket was a mythological figure for his age. He glided and floated into new zones, like a ghost or a cloud: 'Time and place cannot bind Mr Bucket.' He had 'adaptability to all grades'. He borrowed some of the dazzle of Edgar Allan Poe's amateur detective and intellectual magician Auguste Dupin, who preceded him by twelve years.

Bucket was broadly based on Whicher's friend and boss Charley Field - they shared a fat forefinger, an earthy charm, a relish for the 'beauty' of their work, a blithe assurance. Bucket was reminiscent of Jack Whicher, too. Like Whicher at the grand Oxford hotel, there was 'nothing remarkable about [Bucket] at first sight but his ghostly manner of appearing'. He was 'a stoutly-built, steady-looking, sharp-eyed man in black' who watched and listened with a face 'as unchanging as the great mourning ring on his little finger'.

Through the 1840s and 1850s Whicher worked on sleights of hand and of the mind. He dealt with criminals who slipped away into alternative identities, melted into the streets and alleys. He was set on the trail of men and women who counterfeited coin, signatures on cheques, money orders, who escaped from alias to alias, shuffling off names as snakes shuffle off skins. He was the specialist on the 'swell mob', conmen and pickpockets who dressed as gentlemen and could slit open a pocket with a concealed knife, whip out a tie pin under cover of a flourished handkerchief. They worked their dodges at theatres, shopping galleries, places of amusement such as Madame Tussaud's waxworks museum and the London Zoological Gardens. Their greatest harvests were reaped at big public occasions - race meetings, agricultural shows, political gatherings - to which they would travel by first-class train to insinuate themselves among the men and women they hoped to rob.

In 1850 Charley Field told Dickens of a trick that Whicher had pulled off at the Epsom Derby. Field, Whicher and a friend called Mr Tatt were drinking together at the bar - they were on their third or fourth sherry - when they were rushed by four swell mobsmen. The gangsters knocked them over, and a fierce scuffle broke out - 'There we are, all down together, heads and heels, knocking about on the floor of the bar - perhaps you never see such a scene of confusion!' When the villains tried to flee the bar, Whicher cut them off at the door. All four were taken to the local police station. Mr Tatt discovered that his diamond shirt-pin had been stolen during the fight, but there was no sign of it on any of the swell mobsmen. Field was feeling very 'blank' (dejected) about the thieves' victory, when Whicher opened his hand to reveal the pin in his palm. 'Why, in the name of wonder,' said Field, 'how did you come by that?' 'I'll tell you how I come by it,' said Whicher. 'I saw which of 'em took it; and when we were all down on the floor together, knocking about, I just gave him a little touch on the back of his hand, as I knew his pal would; and he thought it was his pal; and gave it me!'

'One of the most
beautiful
things that ever was done, perhaps,' said Field. 'Beautiful. Beau-ti-ful . . . It was a lovely idea!' The artistry of crime was a familiar conceit, most strikingly advanced in Thomas de Quincey's ironic essay 'On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts' (1827), but the artistry of the law enforcer was something new. In the early nineteenth century, the subject of a crime story was the daring, dashing crook; now he was more often the analytical detective.

Whicher, who was said to be Commissioner Mayne's favourite officer, was made an inspector in 1856, and his salary rose to more than PS100. Charley Field had left the force to become a private investigator, and Whicher and Thornton were now in charge of the department. In 1858 Whicher caught the valet who had stolen Leonardo da Vinci's
Virgin and Child
from the Earl of Suffolk. In the same year he took part in the hunt for the Italian revolutionaries who had tried to assassinate Napoleon III in Paris - the terrorists had hatched their plot and built their bombs in London - and he led a reopened inquiry into the murder of a police constable in an Essex cornfield. In 1859 Whicher investigated whether the Reverend James Bonwell, rector of a church in east London, and his lover, a clergyman's daughter, had killed their illegitimate son. Bonwell had paid an undertaker eighteen shillings to bury the baby secretly by slipping him into someone else's coffin. The coroner's court cleared the couple of murder but censured them for their behaviour, and in July 1860 the Bishop of London sued Bonwell for misconduct.