The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

by Summerscale, Kate

  'With me!' returned Mrs Kent. 'Certainly not.'

  'He is not in the nursery, ma'am.'

  Mrs Kent went to the nursery to see for herself, and asked Gough if she had left a chair against the crib, by means of which Saville might have climbed out. The nursemaid said not. Mrs Kent asked when she had first noticed that he was gone. At five o'clock, Gough told her. Mrs Kent asked why she had not been roused immediately. Gough replied that she thought Mrs Kent must have heard the child crying in the night, and taken him to her room.

  'How dare you say so?' said the mother. 'You know I could not do it.' The day before, she reminded Gough, she had mentioned that she could no longer carry Saville, he being a 'heavy, strong boy' of nearly four, and she being eight months pregnant.

  Mrs Kent sent the nursemaid upstairs to ask her stepchildren if they knew where Saville was, then told her husband: 'Saville is missing.'

  'You had better see where he is,' replied Samuel, who had, he said, been woken by Gough's knock. Mrs Kent left the room. When she returned with news that Saville had not been found, her husband got up, dressed, and headed downstairs.

  Gough knocked on Mary Ann and Elizabeth's door at 7.20 or so and asked if Saville was with them. They said he wasn't, and asked whether Mrs Kent knew that he was missing. On hearing the commotion, Constance emerged from her room next door. She 'did not make any comment' on the news that her half-brother had disappeared, said Gough. Constance later said that she had been awake for forty-five minutes. 'I was dressing. I heard her knock at the door, and went to my own door to listen to hear what it was.' William, who said he woke at seven, was in a bedroom further along the landing, probably out of earshot.

  Gough went two storeys down to the kitchen and asked Cox and Kerslake if they had seen the boy. Kerslake, who had lit a fire beneath the hotplate to scald milk for breakfast, said she hadn't. Cox said she had not either, but reported that she had found the drawing-room window open. The nursemaid told this to her mistress. By now Mr and Mrs Kent were scouring the house for their son. 'I was here, there and everywhere,' said Mrs Kent, 'looking for him. We were all in a state of bewilderment, going backwards and forwards from room to room.'

  Samuel extended the search to the grounds. At about 7.30, said Holcombe, he told the gardeners that 'young Master Saville was lost, stolen, and carried away. That was all he said, and he ran round the garden . . . We went out directly in search of the child.'

  'I desired the gardeners to search the premises to see if they could find any trace of the child,' explained Samuel. 'I mean to say traces of the child or any one having left the premises.' Gough helped search the gardens and the shrubbery.

  Samuel asked the gardeners if there were any policemen nearby. 'There is Urch,' said Alloway. Alfred Urch was a police constable who had recently moved to Road with his wife and daughter; a month earlier he had been reprimanded for drinking at the George, a pub in Road, while on duty. It was Urch who had heard a dog bark at Road Hill House the previous night. Samuel sent Alloway to the village to fetch him. He also sent William to summon James Morgan, a baker and parish constable who lived in Upper Street. Urch was an officer of the Somersetshire county constabulary, set up in 1856, while Morgan was a member of the older policing system, still being phased out, in which villagers were appointed to serve as unpaid parish constables for a year at a time. The two were neighbours.

  Morgan hurried Urch along. 'Let us make haste,' he urged. They headed for Road Hill House.

  William, on his father's instructions, asked Holcombe to prepare the horse and carriage – Samuel had decided to ride to Trowbridge to fetch John Foley, a police superintendent with whom he was acquainted. When Samuel took leave of his wife, she told him that the blanket was missing from Saville's bed. Gough had noticed its absence, she said. Mrs Kent 'seemed pleased with the idea' that he had been carried off in a blanket, said Samuel, 'as it would keep the child warm'.

  Samuel put on a black overcoat and set out in his phaeton, a dashing, four-wheeled carriage with a skimpy body and high back wheels, pulled by the red mare. 'He went away in a great hurry,' said Holcombe. As Urch and Morgan approached the drive at about 8 a.m., they met him turning left onto the Trowbridge road. Morgan assured Samuel he need go only to Southwick, a mile or so away, from where a Wiltshire police officer could send a message on to the town. But Samuel wished to ride the full five miles to Trowbridge: 'I shall go on,' he said. He asked Urch and Morgan to join the search for his son.

  At Southwick turnpike gate, Samuel pulled up his carriage and, as he was paying the toll (4½d.), asked the keeper of the gate, Ann Hall, to direct him to the local policeman's house.

  'I have had a child stolen and carried off in a blanket,' Samuel told her.

  'When did you lose it?' asked Mrs Hall.

  'This morning,' replied Samuel.

  She pointed him towards Southwick Street, where Samuel gave a boy a halfpenny to show him the house of PC Henry Heritage. Ann Heritage answered the door and told Samuel that her husband was in bed.

  'You must call him up,' said Samuel, without getting out of his carriage. 'I have had a child stolen out of my house tonight . . . a little boy aged three years and ten months . . . wrapped up in a blanket . . . I am going to Trowbridge to give information to Foley.'

  Mrs Heritage asked him for his name and residence.

  'Kent,' he replied. 'Road Hill House.'

  * * *

  When PC Urch and parish constable Morgan reached Road Hill House, they found Sarah Cox in the kitchen and asked her how the child had been taken away. She showed them the open window in the drawing room. Elizabeth Gough took them into the nursery and turned back the bedclothes in Saville's cot: Morgan noticed 'the mark where the little boy had lain on the bed, and on the pillow'. Gough told the constables that when she joined the Kent house-hold, eight months earlier, the nurse she replaced had mentioned that the boy's mother sometimes fetched him to her room in the night. Morgan asked: 'Have you lost anything from the nursery besides the child?' She hesitated, he said, before replying that 'there was a blanket taken from the cot, or drawn from the cot'.

  Urch and Morgan asked to see the cellar, but found it was locked. One of the elder Misses Kent held the key but the constables chose not to involve the family in their inquiries. They returned to the drawing room to look for 'foot-tracks', as Morgan referred to them – to Urch they were 'footmarks' or 'footprints'; the science of detection was young, and its vocabulary still unsettled. Soon afterwards Elizabeth Gough looked for footmarks there, and found the imprints of two large hobnailed boots on the white drugget, a coarse woollen rug that lay over the carpet by the window. It turned out that these had been made by PC Urch.

  Mrs Kent sent her stepdaughter Constance to ask the Reverend Peacock to come to Road Hill House. Edward Peacock lived in a three-storey gothic parsonage next to Christ Church with his wife, their two daughters, two sons and five servants. He and Samuel were friends, and the parsonage was only a few minutes' walk from the Kents' house. The vicar agreed to help with the search.

  William Nutt, a shoemaker with six children who lived in the tumbledown cottages by the house, was at work in his shop when he overheard Joseph Greenhill, an innkeeper, talking about Master Saville's disappearance. Nutt headed for Road Hill House: 'Having an affection like for the father, I said, "I must go and hear further about this." ' Nutt was 'a strange-looking person', reported the Western Daily Press: 'sallow, thin, and bony, with prominent cheek bones, pointed nose, receding forehead, and a cast in one eye; while he is what is called "bumble-footed", and has a habit of placing his attenuated arms in front of his chest, with his hands drooping'. Just outside the gates, Nutt came across Thomas Benger, a farmer, driving his cows. Benger suggested to Nutt that they join the search. Nutt hesitated to go on the lawn without permission, and told Benger he 'did not like to go on a gentleman's premises'. Benger, who had heard Samuel Kent offer Urch and Morgan a £10 reward if they found his son, persuaded Nutt that no one could reprima
nd them for looking for a lost child.

  As they searched the thick shrubbery to the left of the front drive, Nutt remarked that they would find a dead child if the living one was not found. He then struck off to the right, towards a servants' privy hidden in the bushes, and Benger followed. They came to the privy and looked in: a small pool of clotted blood lay on the floor.

  'See, William,' said Benger, 'what we have got to see.'

  'Oh, Benger,' said Nutt. 'It is as I predicted.'

  'Get a light, William,' said Benger.

  Nutt went to the back door of the house and along the passage to the scullery. There he found Mary Holcombe, the gardener's mother. She was employed by the Kents as a charwoman for two days or so each week. Nutt asked for a candle, and she looked at him.

  'For God's sake, what's the matter, William?'

  'Don't alarm yourself, Mary,' he said. 'I only want a candle for a minute to see what we can see.'

  While Nutt was gone, Benger lifted the lavatory lid and peered in until his eyes adjusted to the darkness. 'By steadily looking down, I could see better, and saw a something like clothing below; I put my hand down and raised the blanket.' The blanket was soaked with blood. About two feet under the seat, on the wooden 'splashboard' that partly blocked the descent to the pit beneath, was the boy's body. Saville was lying on his side, one arm and one leg slightly drawn up.

  'Look here,' said Benger as Nutt appeared with the candle. 'Oh, William, here it is.'

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE HORROR AND AMAZEMENT

  30 June – 1 July

  As Thomas Benger lifted Saville's body from the privy, the boy's head tipped back to expose the clean cut through his neck.

  'Its little head fell off almost,' said William Nutt, when he gave his account of the day's events in the Wiltshire magistrates' court.

  'His throat was cut,' said Benger, 'and blood was splashed over his face . . . he was a little dark about the mouth and eyes, but he looked quite pleasant, and his little eyes were shut.' Pleasant, here, meant peaceful.

  Nutt spread the blanket on the privy floor and Benger placed the body upon it. They wrapped the corpse together, Benger at the head, Nutt at the feet, and Benger, as the stronger of the two, took it in his arms and carried it to the house. Urch and Morgan watched him walk through the yard. The farmer bore the boy's body along the passage and into the kitchen.

  Saville's corpse, already stiff, was laid on a table beneath the kitchen window; upstairs the shape of his sleeping self was still indented on the sheets and pillow of the cot. Mary Ann and Elizabeth Kent, the two older sisters, entered the kitchen, Elizabeth holding the one-year-old Eveline in her arms. 'I can't describe the horror and amazement they seemed to be in,' said Nutt. 'I thought they would fall and I took them both round the waist. I went through with them into the passage.'

  The nursemaid was also in the kitchen. Nutt said to her 'that she must have slept very soundly to have admitted of any one taking the child from her room. She answered me, I thought rather harshly, by telling me I knew nothing of the matter.' Gough claimed that it was only now, when she saw the blanket wrapping Saville's corpse, that she realised it had been taken from his bed. Yet PC Urch, James Morgan and Mrs Kent all claimed that Gough had told them of the blanket's loss before Saville's body was found. The nursemaid's contradictory statements about the blanket were to make her a suspect.

  Outside, the servants and a growing gaggle of villagers began to search for traces of the murderer and the weapon. Daniel Oliver, the jobbing gardener, showed Urch some footmarks on the lawn near the drawing-room windows: 'There's been someone here.' But Alloway said he had made the footprints the previous evening: 'I had been using the wheelbarrow.'

  By the privy door Alloway found a piece of bloody newspaper, five or six inches square, folded and still moist. It looked as though a knife or razor might have been wiped upon it. The date of the newspaper was legible – 9 June – but not its title. Edward West, a farmer, advised Alloway: 'Don't destroy the paper; pick it up; take care of it – it will be the means of bringing about a discovery.' Alloway handed it to Stephen Millet, a butcher and parish constable, who was inspecting the privy. Millet estimated that there were two tablespoons of blood on the floor, and a pint and a half had soaked in to the blanket. West described the blood on the floor as 'about the size of a man's hand. I saw it in quite a coagulated state.'

  Upstairs, Elizabeth Gough was arranging Mrs Kent's hair – her last position had been as a lady's maid, and in Road Hill House she tended to her mistress as well as to the children. Samuel had left orders that his wife be given no news of the boy, so Gough did not mention that Saville had now been found dead, but when Mrs Kent wondered aloud where her son could be, she said, 'Oh, ma'am, it's revenge.'

  As soon as the Reverend Peacock reached Road Hill House he was told that Saville had been found, and was shown the body in the kitchen. He went home, saddled his horse and set off after Samuel. He passed through Ann Hall's turnpike at Southwick.

  'Sir,' she said to the vicar, 'this is a sad affair at Road.'

  'But the child is found,' he replied.

  'Where, sir?'

  'In the garden.' Peacock did not explain that he was dead.

  Peacock caught up with Kent. 'I am sorry to tell you I have had bad news for you,' he said. 'The little boy has been found murdered.'

  Samuel Kent headed home: 'I was not long; I went as fast as I could.' When he passed the turnpike gate, Ann Hall asked after Saville.

  'Then, sir, the child is found?'

  'Yes, and murdered.' He did not stop.

  Since his father was away it fell to William Kent to fetch Joshua Parsons, the family physician. The boy hurried down the narrow lane to the village of Beckington and found the doctor at his home in Goose Street. He told him that Saville had been discovered in the privy, his throat cut, and Parsons set off for Road Hill House, taking William with him in his carriage. When they arrived, the doctor recalled, 'I was taken round the back way by Master William, because he was not aware whether his mother knew what had occurred, so I went into the library.'

  Samuel was now home. He greeted Parsons and gave him a key to the laundry room, opposite the kitchen, to which Saville's body had been moved. 'I went in by myself,' said Parsons. The corpse was entirely rigid, he noted, which indicated that the boy had been killed at least five hours earlier – that is, before three o'clock that morning. 'The blanket and the nightdress [were] stained with marks of blood and soil,' he reported – by 'soil', he meant excrement. 'The throat was cut to the bone by some sharp instrument, from left to right; it completely divided all the membranes, blood vessels, nerve vessels, and air tubes.' Parsons also noticed a stab to the chest, which had cut through the clothes and the cartilage of two ribs, but had produced little blood.

  'The mouth of the child had a blackened appearance, with the tongue protruded between the teeth,' he said. 'My impression was that the blackened appearance had been produced by forcible pressure on it during life.'

  Mrs Kent was sitting downstairs at the breakfast table when her husband came in to tell her that their son was dead.

  'Someone in the house has done it,' she said.

  Cox, the maid, overheard her. 'I have not done it,' Cox said. 'I have not done it.'

  At nine, as usual, Kerslake put out the fire beneath the kitchen hotplate.

  Superintendent John Foley reached Road Hill House from Trow-bridge between 9 and 10 a.m. He was taken to the library and then the kitchen. Cox showed him the open window in the drawing room; Gough showed him the empty crib in the nursery. The nurse told him, he said, that 'she never missed the blanket till the child was brought in wrapped up in it'. Foley said that he asked Samuel Kent whether he had known that the blanket was missing before he set out for Trowbridge. 'Certainly not,' Samuel replied. Either Foley's recollection was at fault ('My memory is not as good as some persons',' he admitted), or Samuel was lying or seriously confused: his wife, the turnpike keeper and the wi
fe of PC Heritage all testified that he knew of the blanket's loss before he left for Trowbridge, as did Samuel himself when asked about it by others.

  Foley looked over the premises with the help of Parsons, who had finished his preliminary examination of the corpse. They inspected the house-hold's clothing, including a nightgown on Constance's bed – 'It had not stains on it,' said Parsons. 'It was very clean.' The bedclothes on Saville's cot, he noted, were 'very neatly folded, as if by a practised hand'. In the kitchen the doctor examined the knives, and found no traces of blood. In any case, he said, he did not believe that any of those knives could have inflicted the injuries he had seen.

  John Foley went to the laundry room to study Saville's body, taking with him Henry Heritage, the constable whom Kent had roused at Southwick and who had reached Road Hill House at ten. These two then examined the privy in which the body had been found. When Foley looked down into the vault beneath the privy seat, he thought he could see 'some linen substance' lying in the dirt. 'I sent for a crook, which I attached to a stick, and pulled up a piece of flannel.' The cloth was ten or twelve inches square, its edges neatly bound with narrow tape. At first Foley thought it a man's chest flannel, but it was then identified as a woman's 'breast or bosom flannel', a pad tied inside a corset to cushion the chest. The strings to this one seemed to have been cut off, and the flannel was sticky with thickening blood. 'There was blood upon it, which appeared to be recently there,' Foley said. 'It was still fluid . . . The blood had penetrated the flannel, but it appeared to have dropped so gently that it had congealed drop by drop as it fell.'

  Late in the morning two professional men, acquaintances of Samuel Kent, arrived from Trowbridge to offer their services: Joseph Stapleton, a surgeon, and Rowland Rodway, a solicitor. Stapleton, who lived in the centre of Trowbridge with his wife and brother, was a certifying surgeon to several of the factories that Kent supervised. He assessed whether workers, particularly children, were fit enough to work in the mills, and reported on any injuries that befell them. (The following year Stapleton was to publish the first book about the murder at Road Hill House, which became the principal source for many accounts of the case.) Rodway was a widower with a son of twenty-one. He said he found Samuel in a 'state of grief and horror . . . agitation and distress', insisting that he wanted to telegraph at once for a London detective, 'before any traces of the crime could disappear or be removed'. Superintendent Foley resisted the suggestion – it could cause difficulty and disappointment, he said – and instead sent to Trowbridge for a woman to search the female servants. He expressed 'some hesitation in intruding on the family privacy', according to Rodway, 'and in adopting those measures of surveillance which the case required'. Samuel told Rodway to tell Foley that he must 'not feel under the slightest restraint'.