The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective (9 page)

A couple of months before he was dispatched to Road Hill, Whicher tracked down the perpetrators of a PS12,000 jewellery heist near the Palais Royal, in Paris. The thieves, Emily Lawrence and James Pearce, used the trappings of gentility to work their cons in jewellers' shops, where Lawrence 'palmed' lockets and bracelets off the counters and into her handmuff (female thieves were well-equipped with places in which to stash their spoils - shawls, stoles, muffs, vast pockets in their crinolines). With his favourite sidekicks, Detective Sergeants 'Dolly' Williamson and 'Dick' Tanner, Whicher gained entry in April to the jewel thieves' house in Stoke Newington, just north of London. When he charged Emily Lawrence, he noticed her shuffle her hands, and asked to see what she was holding. A struggle ensued, during which her boyfriend threatened to smash Whicher's skull with a poker, and Lawrence let three diamond rings fall to the floor.

From his brief appearances in memoirs, newspapers and journals, Jack Whicher emerges as kind, laconic, alert to the comedy in his work. He was 'an excellent officer', said a fellow detective, 'quiet, shrewd and practical, never in a hurry, generally successful, and ready to take on any case'. He had a wry turn of phrase. If Whicher was certain of something, he was 'as sure as I'm alive'. 'That'll do!' he said when he found a clue. He was benevolent to his foes - he agreed to share a drink with one thief before taking him prisoner, and to spare him the handcuffs: 'I'm willing to behave as a man to you,' he said, 'if you are willing to behave as a man to me.' He was not above a practical joke: at Ascot in the late 1850s he and some fellow officers crept up on a sleeping inspector, who was known for the pride he took in his whiskers, and shaved the bushy black growth off his left cheek.

Yet Whicher was a reserved man, private about his past. At least one sadness attended him. On 15 April 1838 a woman who called herself Elizabeth Whicher, formerly Green,
nee
Harding, had given birth in the borough of Lambeth to a boy named Jonathan Whicher. On the birth certificate she recorded the father's name as Jonathan Whicher, his occupation as police constable, their address as 4 Providence Row. She had been about four weeks pregnant when Jack Whicher applied to join the police force - it may have been the prospect of a child that prompted him to enlist.

Three years later, Whicher was living in the Hunter Place station house, Holborn, as a single man. Neither his son nor the child's mother seems to appear on a death register between 1838 and 1851, nor in any census taken that century. The certificate apart, there is no evidence that Jack Whicher ever had a child. Only the record of the boy's birth remains.

CHAPTER FIVE
EVERY CLUE SEEMS CUT OFF

16 July

On the morning of Monday, 16 July, Superintendent Foley drove Whicher to Road in a trap, taking the same lane by which Samuel Kent had returned to the village when he learnt that his son was dead. It was another dry day - no rain had fallen since Saville's murder. As the policemen rode further from the sooty town, the plains began to give way to hills, woods and pastures. There were sheep in the fields, dark birds in the trees: jackdaws, magpies, blackbirds, ravens and carrion crows. Smaller birds nested in the grass and gorse - olive chiffchaffs, chestnut-winged corncrakes - while swallows and swifts sailed overhead.

The village of Road sat smack on the border of two counties: though Road Hill House and the Reverend Peacock's Christ Church were in Wiltshire, most of the several hundred villagers lived down the hill in Somersetshire. In this part of England, people addressed each other as 'thee' and 'thou', and spoke with a guttural burr - a farmer was a 'varmer', the sun was the 'zun', a thread was a 'dread'. The district had a distinctive vocabulary: someone marked with smallpox scars, like Whicher, was 'pock-fredden'; to 'skummer' a piece of cloth was to foul it with dirty liquid; to 'buddle' a creature was to suffocate it in mud.

Road was a picturesque village, its cottages built of limestone cobbles or flat blocks of sandstone punched through with square windows. There were at least four pubs (the Red Lion, the George, the Cross Keys, the Bell), a brewery, two Anglican churches, a Baptist chapel, a school, a post office, bakers, grocers, butchers, blacksmiths, shoemakers, tailors, dressmakers, saddlers and so on. Trowbridge lay five miles north-east, and Frome, a Somersetshire wool town, the same distance south-west. A few of the villagers wove on handlooms in their cottages. Most worked in the fields or at one of the several mills in the neighbourhood. Shawford Mill was a specialist wool-dyeing works, with a water-wheel driven by the river Frome - among the local dyes were dark green, from privet; brown, from yew; and indigo, from woad. Next to Road Bridge was a mill devoted to 'fulling', a process of hammering wet wool until the individual threads vanished and the cloth became dense, tight, impossible to unravel.

The village was alight with speculation about Saville's death. His murder had aroused 'a spirit' among the people, said Joseph Stapleton in his book about the case, 'which it might be difficult to govern or suppress'. In the words of the
Bath Chronicle:

There is a very strong feeling amongst the lower class of inhabitants in the village against Mr Kent's family, as well as against himself, and none of them can scarcely walk in the village without being insulted. The poor little innocent, the victim of this dark assassination, is spoken of generally throughout the village in terms of much endearment. He is represented as having been a sturdy, handsome little fellow, with a merry, laughing face, and curly, flaxen hair. The women speak of him with tears in their eyes, and . . . call to remembrance his many little engaging ways and innocent prattling.

The villagers remembered Saville as a sweet cherub, and reviled his family as fiends.

Samuel Kent was disliked in the district anyway. In part this was because of his job - he was responsible for enforcing the Factory Act of 1833, devised principally to protect children from overwork and injury, which was resented by mill-owners and workers alike. Factory inspectors, like police inspectors, were agents of surveillance. When Samuel moved into Road Hill House in 1855, reported the
Frome Times
, many locals said, 'We don't want him here; we want someone who will give us bread, and not someone who will take it from us.' He had recently turned more than twenty boys and girls under the age of thirteen out of a Trowbridge mill, depriving them of their earnings of three or four shillings a week.

Samuel did nothing to better relations with his neighbours. According to Stapleton, he built an 'impervious fence' 'against the oversight and intrusion' of the inhabitants of the cottages lining the lane next to Road Hill House. He put up 'No Trespassing' signs by the river in his grounds, where the cottagers had been accustomed to fish for trout. The villagers took their revenge on Samuel's servants and family. 'His children were called after,' wrote Stapleton, 'in their walks and on their way to church, by the cottagers' children.' Since Saville's death, Samuel had repeatedly voiced his suspicion that these cottagers had something to do with the murder.

At eleven o'clock Whicher and Foley joined the secret proceedings in the Temperance Hall. Whicher watched as the magistrates re-examined Samuel Kent, the Reverend Peacock and then the local police's chief suspect, Elizabeth Gough. At one o'clock she was set free. The reporters who had gathered outside saw her emerge from the building. 'She appeared to have been suffering from severe mental anguish since she had been in custody,' wrote the man from the
Bath Chronicle
, 'as her face, which was bright and cheerful previously, now wore a very dejected and careworn appearance; in fact, we were astonished at the great change her features had undergone only during this slight detention.' The nursemaid told the reporters that she was returning to Road Hill House to help Mrs Kent during her confinement - the baby was due in a few weeks.

The reporters were then let into the hall, where they were addressed by one of the magistrates. He told them that the investigation was now in the hands of Detective-Inspector Whicher, and that there was a PS200 reward for any person giving information that would lead to the conviction of Saville's murderer: PS100 had been put up by the government and PS100 by Samuel Kent. If an accomplice turned in the killer, he or she would be given a free pardon. The inquiry was adjourned until Friday.

Whicher was joining the murder investigation two weeks late. The victim's body had been boxed up and buried, the testimony of the witnesses had been rehearsed, the evidence had been collected, or destroyed. He would have to reopen the wounds, unseal the scene. Superintendents Foley and Wolfe, both of the Wiltshire constabulary, led him up the hill to the house.

Road Hill House sat hidden above the village, a smooth block of creamy Bath limestone shielded from the road by trees and walls. A cloth merchant, Thomas Ledyard, had built the property in about 1800, when he ran the Road Bridge fulling mill. It was one of the finest houses in the area. A driveway curved beneath the yews and elms to a shallow entrance porch, which nudged out like a sentry box from the building's flat face. Concealed in the shrubbery to the right of the front lawn was the privy in which Saville had been found - a lavatory in a shed built over a pit in the earth.

Through the front door of the house a large hall led to the main staircase. To the right of the hall was the dining room - an elegant rectangle that stretched out of the side of the building - and to the left was the snug square of the library, its tall arched windows overlooking the lawns. Behind the library was the drawing room, which ended in a crescent of bay windows leading on to the back gardens - it was one of these that had been found open by Sarah Cox on 30 June.

The stairs, laid with thick carpet, ran up to the first and second storeys. Between floors were landings with views across the grounds to the rear - a flower garden, a kitchen garden, an orchard, a greenhouse, and beyond them cows, sheep, a field of grass, a seam of trees along the river Frome.

On the first floor, behind the master bedroom and the nursery, were three spare rooms and a water closet. On the top floor, along with the four occupied bedrooms, were two spare rooms and a ladder to the attic. This floor was darker than those below, with lower ceilings and squatter windows. Most of the bedrooms in the house shared a view south over the drive and lawn and down to the village, though William's room looked east to the neighbouring cottages and the gothic twin turrets and spires of Christ Church.

Behind William's room the back stairs twisted steeply down to the first and ground floors. At their foot was the kitchen passage, busy with doors onto the scullery, kitchen, laundry, pantry, and the steps to the cellars. A door at the end of the passage led to a paved courtyard hemmed in by the carriage house, stable and outhouses. The privy lay just to the right, through a door by the knife-house. A ten-foot-high stone wall, with a gate for tradesmen, ran along the right-hand side of the property, by the cottage corner.

Stapleton gave a highly coloured sketch of this group of cottages, where the Holcombes, the Nutts and the Holleys had their homes: 'A beer-house obtrudes itself in the centre, flanked by a cottage kept from falling down only by the precarious support of wooden stakes stuck into the ground. The windows are crushed or thrust outwards by the tumbling walls, from the occupation of which the tenants had already fled. Several other cottages are grouped around, and some of them overlook Mr Kent's premises. It is indeed a "rookery" - a bit of St Giles's gone out of town to rusticate. It might be mistaken for a haunt of outcasts and a den of thieves.'

Since the murder, Road Hill House had become a puzzle, a riddle in three dimensions, its floor plans and furnishings an esoteric code. Whicher's task was to decipher the house - as a crime scene, and as a guide to the character of the family.

The walls and fences that Samuel had erected around his grounds indicated a liking for privacy. Within the house, though, children and adults, servants and employers were strangely entangled. Affluent mid-Victorians usually preferred to keep the servants apart from the family, and the children in their own quarters. Here, the nursemaid slept feet away from the master bedroom, and the five-year-old slept with her parents. The other servants and the stepchildren were thrown together on the top floor like so much lumber in an attic. The arrangement marked out the lower status of the children of the first Mrs Kent.

In his reports to Scotland Yard
*
Whicher noted that Constance and William were the only members of the house-hold with rooms of their own. This was not indicative of status, only of the fact that neither had a sibling of the same sex and a similar age with whom they might share. Its significance was logistical: either child could have slipped out at night unnoticed.

In the nursery, Whicher was shown how the blanket had been drawn from between Saville's bedclothes on the night of his death, and the sheet and quilt 'folded neatly back' to the foot of the cot - which, he said, 'it can hardly be supposed a man would have done'. With Foley and Wolfe, he then conducted an experiment to see whether it was possible to take a three-year-old child from the cot without waking it or anyone else in the room. The newspapers did not divulge which three-year-old was used in the experiment, nor how it was induced to fall asleep repeatedly, but they claimed that the police officers accomplished the task three times.