The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

by Kate Summerscale

  She told me that when the nursemaid was accused she had fully made up her mind to confess if the nurse had been convicted, and that she had also made up her mind to commit suicide if she was herself convicted. She said that she had felt herself under the influence of the devil before she committed the murder, but that she did not believe, and had not believed, that the devil had more to do with her crime than he had with any wicked action. She had not said her prayers for a year before the murder, and not afterwards till she came to reside at Brighton. She said that the circumstance which revived religious feelings in her mind was thinking about receiving sacrament when confirmed.

  Bucknill finished his letter by observing that, though Constance was not in his opinion insane, even as a child she had 'a peculiar disposition' and 'great determination of character', which indicated that 'for good or evil, her future life would be remarkable'. If placed in solitary confinement, he warned, she could succumb to insanity.

  Emotionally, the explanation that Constance gave Bucknill had the eerie detachment that this crime must have required. The methodology of the murder supplanted any feeling about it. At the moment of Saville's death, her focus switched from the failing body to the sputtering candle on the toilet seat: 'The light burnt out.'

  Despite its air of cold precision, though, the account was strangely imprecise. Constance's story of the murder didn't add up - as the press was quick to point out. How did she fold back and smooth the bedclothes in the cot while she was holding in one arm a large, sleeping boy of nearly four? How did she, still holding the boy, bend to the ground to lift up the drawing-room window? How did she manage to then crawl under it, still without waking him, and light a candle in the water closet to which she carried him? Why did she take the facecloth to the privy, and why had no one noticed it in her room before? How was it that she had splashed only a couple of spots of blood onto her nightdress while stabbing repeatedly at the boy? How had those who searched the house after the murder missed the stains on her nightdress, and the loss of Samuel Kent's razor? And how had she managed to make those deep stabs with a razor, a feat the doctors had declared impossible? Yet some of the details, if only because they complicated the picture, were persuasive: for instance, Constance's panic when it seemed that the 'blood would never come' seemed too particular and grisly to be invented.

  The Times observed, with dismay, that the crime 'seems not to diminish in perplexity and strangeness as it is unravelled step by step. It is evident that we have not yet obtained a complete account of all the circumstances.' Even now, after a confession of murder, it seemed that there were secrets still. 'We are but little enlightened,' saisaid the News of the World - Constance's explanation merely added 'a new pang of horror'.

  Forty years later, Freud made a gloriously confident assertion about how helplessly human beings betrayed themselves, how surely their thoughts could be read. 'He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.' Like a sensation novelist or a super-detective, Freud fancied that people's secrets would flood up to the surface, in blushes and blanches, or work their way out to the world in the fingers' twitches. Perhaps somewhere in Constance's confessions and evasions the suppressed story of the crime and its motive lay in hiding, waiting to tell itself.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  SURELY OUR REAL DETECTIVE LIVETH

  1865-1885

  In October 1865, Constance was transferred from Salisbury to Millbank, a thousand-cell holding prison on the Thames - 'a big, dark building with towers', wrote Henry James in The Princess Casamassima, 'lying there and sprawling over the whole neighbourhood, with brown, bare, windowless walls, ugly, truncated pinnacles, and a character unspeakably sad and stern . . . there were walls within walls and galleries on top of galleries; even the daylight lost its colour, and you couldn't imagine what o'clock it was'. The female prisoners occupied a wing known as the Third Pentagon. A visitor to the gaol would see them 'erect themselves, suddenly and spectrally, with dowdy united bonnets, in uncanny corners and recesses of the draughty labyrinth'. The Penny Illustrated Paper sent a reporter to see in what conditions Constance was confined. He found Millbank 'a geometrical puzzle', 'an eccentric maze' with three miles of airless, seemingly subterranean 'twisting passages', 'dark nooks or 'doublings' in the zigzag corridors', 'double-locked doors, opening at all sorts of queer angles, and leading sometimes into blind entries, and frequently to the stone staircases which . . . seem as though they had been cut out of the solid brickwork'.

  Constance was assigned a cell equipped with a gaslight, a washing tub, a slop pan, a shelf, tin mugs, a salt cellar, a plate, a wooden spoon, a Bible, a slate, a pencil, a hammock, bedding, a comb, a towel, a broom and a grated peephole. Like the other inmates, she wore a brown serge dress. Her breakfast was a pint of cocoa and molasses; lunch was beef, potatoes and bread; supper bread and a pint of gruel. For the first few months of her sentence she was forbidden from speaking to other inmates and from receiving visitors - the Reverend Wagner and Miss Gream applied for special permission to see her, but were turned down. Each day she cleaned her cell and went to chapel. Usually she was then set to work, perhaps making clothes, stockings or brushes for fellow prisoners. She had a bath a week, and a library book if she chose. For exercise she walked in single file, six feet behind the preceding convict, around the enclosed marshy waste ground that ringed the prison buildings. She could see Westminster Abbey to the north, smell the river to the east. Jack Whicher's home was a block away, invisible behind Millbank's high walls.

  Whicher, meanwhile, took up his life again. In 1866 he married his landlady, Charlotte Piper, a widow three years his senior. If he had ever been legally married to Elizabeth Green, the mother of his lost son, she must have been dead now. The service took place on 21 August at St Margaret's, an exquisite sixteenth-century church in the grounds of Westminister Abbey, where sheep grazed on the green.

  Elizabeth Gough had also married that year. At the church of St Mary Newington, Southwark, on 24 April 1866, almost a year to the day after Constance Kent's confession, she became the wife of John Cockburn, a wine merchant.

  By the beginning of the next year Whicher was working as a private investigator. He didn't need the money - his pension was adequate, and the new Mrs Whicher had a private income. But now that he had been vindicated, his brain was cleared of congestion and his appetite for detection had returned.

  Private inquiry agents, such as Charley Field and Ignatius Pollaky, were thought to embody the most sinister aspects of detection. Sir Cresswell Cresswell, the judge who presided over the divorce court, fulminated in 1858 against 'such a person as Field': 'of all the people in the world the people of England have the greatest objection to anything like a spy system. To have men running after them wherever they go and making notes of all their actions is what they hold in utter abhorrence. Everything of the kind is held in the greatest detestation in this country.' In Wilkie Collins' Armadale, published in 1866, the private detective is a 'vile creature whom the viler need of Society has fashioned for its own use. There he sat - the Confidential Spy of modern times, whose business is steadily enlarging, whose Private Inquiry Offices are steadily on the increase. There he sat - the necessary Detective . . . a man professionally ready on the merest suspicion (if the merest suspicion paid him) to get under our beds, and to look through gimlet-holes in our doors; a man who . . . would have deservedly forfeited his situation, if, under any circumstances whatever, he had been personally accessible to a sense of pity or a sense of shame.' The work was well-paid, if uncertain: in 1854 Field received fifteen shillings a day, plus expenses, to spy on a Mrs Evans, and an extra six shillings a day if he obtained the evidence of adultery that her husband required in order to divorce her.

  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 Claim
ant. 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.