The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

PROLOGUE

Paddington Railway Station,

15 July 1860

On Sunday, 15 July 1860, Detective-Inspector Jonathan Whicher of Scotland Yard paid two shillings for a hansom cab to take him from Millbank, just west of Westminster, to Paddington station, the London terminus of the Great Western Railway. There he bought two rail tickets: one to Chippenham, Wiltshire, ninety-four miles away, for 7s.10d., another from Chippenham to Trowbridge, about twenty miles on, for 1s.6d. The day was warm: for the first time that summer, the temperature in London had nudged into the seventies.

Paddington station was a shining vault of iron and glass, built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel six years earlier, its interior hot with smoke and sun. Jack Whicher knew the place well – the thieves of London thrived on the surging, anonymous crowds in the new railway stations, the swift comings and goings, the thrilling muddle of types and classes. This was the essence of the city that the detectives had been created to police. William Frith's The Railway Station, a panoramic painting of Paddington in 1860, shows a thief apprehended by two whiskered plain-clothes officers in black suits and top hats, quiet men able to steady the turmoil of the metropolis.

At this terminus in 1856 Whicher arrested the flashily dressed George Williams for stealing a purse containing £5 from the pocket of Lady Glamis – the detective told the magistrates' court that he had 'known the prisoner for years past as a member, and a first-rate one, of the swell mob'. At the same station in 1858 he apprehended a stout, blotchy woman of about forty in the second-class compartment of a Great Western train, with the words: 'Your name, I think, is Moutot.' Louisa Moutot was a notorious fraudster. She had used an alias – Constance Brown – to hire a brougham carriage, a page and a furnished house in Hyde Park. She then arranged for an assistant of the jewellers Messrs Hunt and Roskell to call round with bracelets and necklaces for the inspection of a Lady Campbell. Moutot asked to take the jewels upstairs to her mistress, who she claimed was sick in bed. The jeweller handed over a diamond bracelet, worth £325, with which Moutot left the room. After waiting for fifteen minutes he tried the door, to find he had been locked in.

When Whicher captured Moutot at Paddington station ten days later, he noticed that she was busying her arms beneath her cloak. He seized her wrists and turned up the stolen bracelet. Also on her person were a man's wig, a set of false whiskers and a false moustache. She was an up-to-the-minute urban criminal, a mistress of the twisty deceits that Whicher excelled in untangling.

Jack Whicher was one of the original eight Scotland Yard officers. In the eighteen years since the detective force had been formed, these men had become figures of mystery and glamour, the surreptitious, all-seeing little gods of London. Charles Dickens held them up as models of modernity. They were as magical and scientific as the other marvels of the 1840s and 1850s – the camera, the electric telegraph and the railway train. Like the telegraph and the train, a detective seemed able to jump time and place; like the camera, he seemed able to freeze them – Dickens reported that 'in a glance' a detective 'immediately takes an inventory of the furniture' in a room and makes 'an accurate sketch' of its inhabitants. A detective's investigations, wrote the novelist, were 'games of chess, played with live pieces' and 'chronicled nowhere'.

Whicher, at forty-five, was the doyen of the Metropolitan force – 'the prince of detectives', said a colleague. He was a stout, scuffed man with a delicate manner, 'shorter and thicker-set' than his fellow officers, Dickens observed, and possessed of 'a reserved and thoughtful air, as if he were engaged in deep arithmetical calculations'. His face was pitted with smallpox scars. William Henry Wills, Dickens' deputy at his magazine House-hold Words, saw Whicher in action in 1850. His account of what he witnessed was the first published description of Whicher, indeed of any English detective.

Wills was standing on the stairs of an Oxford hotel exchanging pleasantries with a Frenchman – he noted 'the jetty gloss of his boots, and the exceeding whiteness of his gloves' – when a stranger appeared in the hall below. 'On the mat at the stair-foot there stands a man. A plain, honest-looking fellow, with nothing formidable in his appearance, or dreadful in his countenance.' This 'apparition' had an extraordinary effect on the Frenchman, who 'raises himself on his toes, as if he had been suddenly overbalanced by a bullet; his cheek pales, and his lip quivers . . . He knows it is too late to turn back (he evidently would, if he could), for the man's eye is upon him.'

The stranger with a gaze like a gun mounted the stairs and instructed the Frenchman to leave Oxford, with the rest of his 'school', on the seven o'clock train. He then made for the hotel dining room, where he approached three men who were carousing over their supper. He put his knuckles on the table and leant forward, fixing the men with a stare, one by one. 'As if by magic', they froze and fell silent. The uncannily powerful stranger ordered the trio to pay their bill and catch the seven o'clock train to London. He followed them to Oxford railway station, and Wills followed him.

At the station, the reporter's curiosity overcame his fear of the man's 'evident omnipotence', and he asked him what was going on.

'The fact is,' the fellow told Wills, 'I am Sergeant Witchem, of the Detective police.'

Whicher was a 'man of mystery', in Wills' phrase, the prototype of the enigmatic, reserved investigator. He appeared from nowhere, and even his unmasking was masked with an alias. 'Witchem', the name given him by Wills, had suggestions of detection – 'which of 'em?' – and of magic – 'bewitch 'em'. He could turn a man to stone or strike him dumb. Many of the traits that Wills saw in Whicher became the stuff of the fictional detective hero: he was ordinary-looking, keen-sighted, sharp-witted, quiet. In accordance with his discretion, and his profession, no pictures of Whicher seem to have survived. The only clues to what he looked like are the descriptions given by Dickens and Wills and the details on the police discharge papers: Whicher was five feet eight inches tall, his hair was brown, his skin was pale, his eyes were blue.

At railway station bookstalls, travellers could buy cheap, paperback detective 'memoirs' (actually collections of short stories) and magazines featuring mysteries by Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins. That weekend's issue of Dickens' new journal All the Year Round ran the thirty-third instalment of Collins' The Woman in White, the first of the 'sensation' novels that were to dominate the 1860s. In the story so far, the villainous Sir Percival Glyde had imprisoned two women in a lunatic asylum in order to conceal a dark episode in his family's past. The instalment of 14 July had the dastardly Glyde burnt to death in the vestry of a church while trying to destroy evidence of his secret. The narrator watched as the church blazed: 'I heard nothing but the quickening crackle of the flames, and the sharp snap of the glass in the skylight above . . . We look for the body. The scorching heat on our faces drives us back: we see nothing – above, below, all through the room, we see nothing but a sheet of living fire.'

The death that Whicher was leaving London to investigate was a brutal, seemingly motiveless murder in a country house near Trowbridge in Wiltshire, which had confounded the local police and the national press. The victim's family, though outwardly respectable, was rumoured to harbour its own secrets, matters of adultery and madness.

A Great Western Railway telegraph had summoned Jack Whicher to Wiltshire, and one of the same company's trains bore him there. At 2 p.m. a huge six-wheeled steam engine pulled his carriage, liveried in chocolate and cream, out of Paddington station along a track that measured seven feet across. The Great Western was the smoothest, steadiest, fastest railway line in England. Even the penny-a-mile train, which Whicher took, seemed to skim across the flat country to Slough and glide over the broad arches of the railway bridge at Maidenhead. In J.M.W. Turner's painting Rain, Steam, and Speed – the Great Western Railway (1844) a locomotive hurtles over this bridge out of the east, a dark bullet casting off glittering sheets of silver, blue and gold.

Whicher's train reached Chippenham at 5.37 p.m., and eight minutes later the detective caught the connecting service to Trowbridge. He would be there in less than an hour. The story that awaited him – the sum of the facts gathered by the Wiltshire police, magistrates and newspaper reporters – began a fortnight earlier, on 29 June.