The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

by Summerscale, Kate

  Whicher unearthed a peculiar incident that had taken place at Road Hill House in the spring of 1859, when Saville was two. One evening Saville's then nursemaid, Emma Sparks, put the boy to bed, as usual, in a pair of knitted socks. The next morning, wrote Whicher, the nursemaid found 'the clothes had been stripped from off the child, and both his socks taken off'. The socks were discovered later: one on the nursery table, the other in Mrs Kent's bedroom. Whicher suspected that Constance was responsible, 'as she was the only grown up member of the family except Mrs Kent who was at home at the time, Mr Kent being from home on business and the two elder sisters away on a visit'. He didn't mention the whereabouts of William – perhaps he was at boarding school. The incident, a piece of faintly malicious mischief, could in retrospect be understood as a rehearsal for a more savage interference. It echoed the terrible congruence of the tender and the stealthy in Saville's murder: the sleeping boy lifted gently from his bed, carried carefully downstairs, taken out of the house and killed. We don't know whether Whicher was tipped off about the matter of the missing socks by Emma Sparks or by Mr and Mrs Kent – he interviewed all three on the subject.

  The bedsocks incident had no value at all as evidence: 'I can put no construction on this,' Whicher said of the story. Yet he took it as a psychological clue. In Waters' Experiences of a Real Detective (1862), Inspector 'F' explains: 'I contrived to elicit certain facts, which, though not worth twopence as legal evidence, were morally very suggestive.'

  In 1906 Sigmund Freud was to compare detection to psychoanalysis:

  In both we are concerned with a secret, with something hidden . . . In the case of the criminal it is a secret which he knows and hides from you, whereas in the case of the hysteric it is a secret which he himself does not know either, which is hidden even from himself. . . In this one respect, therefore, the difference between the criminal and the hysteric is fundamental. The task of the therapist, however, is the same as that of the examining magistrate. We have to uncover the hidden psychic material; and in order to do this we have invented a number of detective devices.

  In effect, Whicher was gathering clues to Constance's inner life, her hidden psychic material, as well as the concealed facts of the crime. This murder was so dense with symbolism that it almost outdid interpretation. The child was thrust down a servants' lavatory, as if he were excrement. His attacker had tried to kill him, frantically or ritualistically, not once but four times: by suffocation, by slashing the throat, by stabbing the heart, by submersion in faeces.

  Samuel informed Whicher of another morally suggestive fact – his daughter's fascination in the summer of 1857 with the Madeleine Smith murder trial.

  Smith was a Glasgow architect's daughter of twenty-one who was charged with murdering her lover, a French clerk, by slipping arsenic into his hot chocolate. Her motive, allegedly, was to dispense with him in order to marry a richer suitor. After a sensational and widely reported court case, the jury declared the case against her 'not proven', a verdict available only in the Scottish courts. Smith was generally believed to be guilty, but the fact that she had outfaced the justice system with such breathtaking nerve only increased her allure. Henry James, for one, was an admirer – her crime was a 'rare work of art', he wrote. He hungered to have set eyes on her: 'I would give so much for a veracious portrait of her then face.'

  Samuel told Whicher that the second Mrs Kent had taken the precaution of hiding from Constance the copies of The Times in which the trial was reported – this suggested that the girl was known to take an unusual interest in lurid crime, even at the age of thirteen. 'Owing to the peculiarity of the case the papers containing the account of the trial were studiously kept away from Miss Constance,' reported Whicher, 'and after her Trial they were concealed, locked up in a drawer by Mrs Kent.' When Mrs Kent checked the drawer a few days later she found the papers had vanished. 'Miss Constance was suspected and questioned but denied all knowledge of them, but on her bed room being searched they were found secreted between her bedstead and mattress.'

  Perhaps reading the reports of Madeleine Smith's trial and acquittal had given Constance ideas about murder, as it had John Thomson, a man who in December 1857 said the case had inspired him to administer prussic acid to a woman who had spurned him. Though Saville was not killed with poison, his murder was well-plotted, silent, homespun: a blanket was a murder weapon as bland and comforting as a cup of chocolate. Madeleine Smith had shown that by being cunning and immovable a middle-class murderess could become a figure of glamour and mystery, a kind of heroine (Thomas Carlyle had used the phrase to describe the Bermondsey murderess Maria Manning). And if she kept her nerve she might never be caught.

  There seemed to be a new breed of chilly female criminal whose concealed passions had twisted into violence. Usually the passions were sexual. Maria Manning and Madeleine Smith were apparently respectable women whose first sin was an illicit liaison, their second the murder of a former lover, a kind of violent extinction of their own lust. Madame Fosco in The Woman in White is sucked into crime by her passion for the dominating Count, and 'her present state of suppression may have sealed up something dangerous in her nature, which used to evaporate harmlessly in the freedom of her former life'. The murderess Madame Hortense in Bleak House, who was based on Maria Manning, was 'long accustomed to suppress emotion, and keep down reality'. She was 'schooled for her own purposes, in that destructive school which shuts up the natural feelings of the heart, like flies in amber'.

  * * *

  The dizzying expansion of the press in the 1850s prompted worries that readers might be corrupted, infected, inspired by the sex and violence in newspaper articles. The new journalists shared much with the detectives: they were seen alternately as crusaders for truth and as sleazy voyeurs. There were seven hundred newspaper titles published in Britain in 1855, and 1,100 by 1860 – of the papers printed closest to Road, the Trowbridge and North Wilts Advertiser was established in 1855, as was the Somerset and Wilts Journal, while the Frome Times, which the Kents took, was founded in 1859. There was a huge rise in crime reporting, aided by the speed with which news could be transmitted by the electric telegraph, and newspaper readers came across accounts of violent death every week. When Mr Wopsle in Dickens' Great Expectations (1861) reads the news, he becomes 'imbrued with blood to the eyebrows'.

  At least three cut-throat domestic killings were reported in newspapers all over the country in the month before Saville Kent's death. In Shoreditch, east London, a pipemaker murdered his common-law wife: 'Her throat was cut so extensively that the head was nearly severed from the body,' according to the Annual Register. 'She must have died instantaneously without struggle or noise.' At Sandown Fort on the Isle of Wight, Sergeant William Whitworth of the Royal Artillery killed his wife and six children with a razor, leaving their throats 'gashed in so horrible a manner as to show the vertebrae of the neck'. Above a confectioner's shop in Oxford Street, London, a French tailor decapitated his wife with a saw, then went to Hyde Park and shot himself. 'His brother stated that he was in the habit of going to Dr Kahn's Museum, and studying the arteries about the neck and throat, and especially familiarising himself with the position of the jugular vein.' The tailor had educated himself in how to kill, and any newspaper reader could do the same.

  * * *

  In the middle of the week Whicher accompanied the magistrates to Road Hill House to conduct a further interview with Constance. In answer to their questions, she described her relations with some of the house-hold: 'I was very fond of Saville . . . He used to be not very fond of me; he appeared fonder these holidays. The little boy was not fond of me because I teased him. I never struck him or pinched him . . . William is my favourite of my brothers and sisters. We write to each other when I am at school . . . The dog wouldn't fly at me if he recognised me. He would bite me if he didn't know me . . . I have a cat but I don't care anything for it . . . I like the cook best of the servants. I like the nurse very well.'

  On being que
stioned about her own qualities, she replied: 'I am not considered very timid. I don't like being out in the dark . . . I could carry the deceased the length of this room easily. I was generally considered pretty strong at school.' She denied telling her schoolfriends that she didn't want to go home for the holidays. She was asked about the Madeleine Smith trial and agreed that she may have inadvertently taken a newspaper that reported it: 'I heard Madeleine Smith's friend was poisoned. I used to hear Papa talk about it.' She gave an account of her flight to Bath four years earlier: 'I once did cut off my hair and fling it down the same place where my little brother was found. I cut part of my hair and my brother cut the rest. I thought of the place to put it in. I and my brother William went to Bath by an indirect road . . . I went off because I was cross at being punished. I persuaded my brother William to go with me.'

  As the week wore on, rumours began to emerge of the full extent of the county constabulary's incompetence, and of Samuel Kent's obstructions. In particular, a story took shape about what happened on the night after Saville's body was found.

  In the evening of Saturday, 30 June, Superintendent Foley directed PC Heritage, of the Wiltshire police, and PC Urch, of the Somersetshire police, to stay overnight at Road Hill House. 'Mr Kent will tell you what to do,' said Foley. 'Come quietly, because Mr Kent does not want the servants to know you are there.' Only Mrs Kent was told that the officers were on the premises. Already it was pretty clear that Saville had been killed by one of the inhabitants of Road Hill House but, astonishingly, Foley none the less handed over charge of the night's police operation to Samuel Kent.

  At about eleven o'clock, when everyone but Samuel had gone to bed, Heritage and Urch knocked at a library window to be admitted to the house. Samuel let them in and led them to the kitchen, where he told them to remain. Their task, he informed them, was to watch out for anyone trying to destroy evidence in the kitchen fire. He gave the policemen bread, cheese and beer and then bolted the door after them. The two policemen were ignorant of their imprisonment until, soon after two in the morning, Heritage tried to get out. On discovering that the door was locked, he knocked for Mr Kent. When he got no reply he rapped on the door with a stick.

  'You are making enough noise to wake all the people in the house,' warned Urch.

  'I am locked in and must get out,' replied Heritage.

  When Samuel released him, about twenty minutes later, Heritage told him they hadn't known they were locked in. 'I have been walking about,' Samuel replied, ignoring the complaint. Urch stayed in the kitchen for the rest of the night, with the door bolted. Samuel looked in on him two or three times, and the constable left at five in the morning. 'I was in the library during a portion of the night,' Samuel said later, 'but left the house once or twice. I went out to see if the lights were out. I went out several times for the same object.' He circled the house, he claimed, to see if the candles were burning and if their wicks needed trimming.

  Until now the police had kept quiet the fact that they had let themselves be locked in Samuel Kent's kitchen on the night after the murder. This 'extraordinary occurrence', in the words of the Somerset and Wilts Journal, had left anyone in the building free to destroy evidence. Samuel's actions smacked of contempt for the police, and a determination that his house escape their scrutiny. Or his behaviour could be seen as exemplary: the first duty of a father was to protect his family.

  When asked by the police for floor plans of Road Hill House in the days and weeks after his son's murder, Samuel reacted as defensively as if someone were trying to take the roof off the place. He refused to supply a plan or to let anyone measure up the rooms. 'It is a sufficient explanation to say that Mr Kent simply resented an uncourteous intrusion,' said Rowland Rodway.

  English family life had changed since the beginning of the century. The house, once a workplace as well as a home, had become a self-contained, private, exclusively domestic space. In the eighteenth century 'family' had meant 'kin', those related by blood; now its primary meaning was the inhabitants of a house-hold, barring the servants – that is, the nuclear family. Though the 1850s had been christened with a great glasshouse – the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851 – the English home closed up and darkened over the decade, the cult of domesticity matched by a cult of privacy. 'Every Englishman . . . imagines a "home", with the woman of his choice, the pair of them alone with their children,' wrote the French scholar Hippolyte Taine after a visit to England in 1858. 'That is his own little universe, closed to the world.' Privacy had become the essential attribute of the middle-class Victorian family, and the bourgeoisie acquired an expertise in secrecy (the word 'secretive' was first recorded in 1853). They walled themselves in against strangers, the interiors of their homes almost invisible, except when opened by invitation to selected visitors for a staged show of family life – a dinner party, for instance, or a tea.

  Yet this age of domesticity was also an age of information, of a prolific and ravenous press. On 7 July a reporter from the Bath Chronicle had sneaked into Road Hill House in the guise of a detective, and made notes on the layout. An inaccurate floor plan was published in the paper five days later. Whether Samuel Kent liked it or not, the house was dissected for all to see, carved up clumsily to expose each floor to scrutiny. The public seized on the information the diagrams provided. The landscape of the house took on emotional inflections: the locked cellar, the dusty attic, the lumber rooms furnished with unused beds and closets, the twisting back stairs. 'The whole moral interior of the house ought to be laid bare to the public gaze,' argued the Bath Express.

  A murder like this could reveal what had been unfolding within the shuttered middle-class house. It seemed that the cloistered family, so honoured by Victorian society, might harbour a suppression of emotion that was noxious, toxic, a sexual and emotional miasma. Perhaps privacy was a source of sin, the condition that enabled the sweet domestic scene to rot from its core. The closer the house was kept, the more polluted its inner world might become.

  Something had festered in Road Hill House, the emotional counterpart to the airborne infections that terrified the Victorians. A month before the murder, the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette reported on a new edition of Florence Nightingale's Notes on Nursing, first published in 1859, quoting a passage about how disease and degeneration could be bred in sealed, respectable homes. Nightingale had known severe cases of 'pyaemia', or blood poisoning, in 'handsome private houses', she wrote, and the cause was 'foul air . . . it was that the uninhabited rooms were never sunned, or cleaned, or aired; – it was that the cupboards were always reservoirs of foul air; – it was that the windows were always tight shut up at night . . . you may often find a race thus degenerating and, still oftener, a family'.

  On Thursday, 19 July, the Bath Chronicle published an editorial on the Road Hill murder:

  No assassination within our recollection has caused so singular, and so painful a sensation in the homes of the country. It is not the mere mystery which at present enshrouds the deed that gives it this terrible interest. It is the strange character of the deed, and the helpless innocence of the victim that touch respectively the imagination and the heart . . . The mothers of England, thinking of their own little ones sleeping in peace and purity, shudder at the tale of a child, as gentle and innocent as their own, being dragged in the still morning from its slumbers, and cruelly sacrificed, and it is the mothers of England who write most earnestly, most indignantly, to the conductors of the journals, and almost clamour for the most unsparing search and the most untiring test . . . in many a home where intense affection is combined with much nervousness on the part of the most valuable member of the family, her peace will for many a day be broken, her dreams disturbed, by the recollection of the dreadful story from Road. Strange doubts, vague distrusts will arise in her mind . . . A deed that sends a shudder through every English home, acquires a social importance which justifies any amount of attention to the subject.

  Usually in an unsolved murder
case the public feared that the killer might strike again. Here, though, the fear was that he or she could be duplicated in any home. The case undermined the very idea that a locked house-hold was safe. Until it was solved, an English mother would sleep uneasily, haunted with the idea that her house harboured a child-killer – it could be her husband, her nanny, her daughter.

  Though it would be an assault on the middle-class ideal if the master of the house, the protector, had destroyed his own son in order to disguise his depravity, the press and the public were surprisingly quick to believe in Samuel's guilt. Almost as horrible – and apparently equally believable – was the idea that the nursemaid had helped him to kill the boy she was hired to tend. The alternative was that this crime harked back to the original biblical murder, Cain's killing of Abel. On 19 July the Devizes Gazette implied that one of Saville's siblings was responsible for his death: 'The voice of the blood of one as innocent as Abel will be made to cry from the very ground in testimony against the murderer.'*

  On the same day the Bristol Daily Post (founded that year) printed a letter from a man who believed that an examination of Saville's eyes might reveal the image of the killer. The correspondent based his suggestion on some inconclusive experiments conducted in the United States in 1857. 'The image of the last object seen in life remains printed, as it were, on the retina of the eye,' he explained, 'and can be traced after death.' According to this hypothesis, the eye was a kind of daguerreotype plate, registering impressions that could be exposed like a photograph in a darkroom – even the secrets locked up in a dead eye might be within the reach of the new technologies. This took to an extreme the way the eye had been turned into the symbol of detection: it was not only the 'great detector' but also the great giveaway, the telltale organ. The letter was reprinted in newspapers all over England. Few treated it with scepticism. The Bath Chronicle, though, dismissed its usefulness to the case on the grounds that Saville was asleep when the killer struck, so there could be no image of the murderer on his retina.