The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

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 wife 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'.

Foley then put on his spectacles, got down on his hands and knees, and, he said, looked 'minutely at every step and every spot' between the nursery and the front and back doors. 'I viewed the posts, the sides of the stairs and passage, and even the grass minutely, the gravel and steps in front of the door, and the matting in the hall, and I could see nothing.'

In the afternoon Foley interviewed Gough in the dining room, in the presence of Stapleton and Rodway. She appeared tired, Stapleton said, but her answers were simple and consistent. She seemed 'a person of considerable intelligence'. Rodway, too, found that she answered questions 'frankly and fully, and without embarrassment'. When Foley asked her if she had any suspicions about who had killed Saville, she said she had not.

Samuel Kent asked Rodway whether he would represent him at the inquest. The solicitor replied that it might look bad, because it could suggest that Samuel was himself a suspect. Samuel later said he was prompted to ask for Rodway's help not on his own account, but to protect William, about whom rumours were circulating in the village: 'I did not know what might transpire there, as it was reported my son William had committed the murder.'

Benger and a group of other men emptied the ten-foot vault beneath the privy. When only six or eight inches of water remained they felt carefully with their hands all along the bottom, but found nothing. Fricker, the plumber and glazier, offered to examine the pipes, and went to the kitchen to fetch a candle. He met Elizabeth Gough, who asked him why he wanted a light. To check the cistern, he explained. She said she was sure he would find nothing there.

Several more police officers turned up at Road Hill House in the course of the day, as well as Eliza Dallimore, the 'searcher' employed by the police to examine the bodies and belongings of female suspects. Mrs Dallimore was married to William, one of the constables already on the premises. She took Gough to the nursery.

'What do you want with me?' Gough asked her.

'You must undress yourself,' Mrs Dallimore replied.

'I cannot,' said the nursemaid. Mrs Dallimore insisted that she must, and led her to the adjacent dressing room.

'Well, nurse,' said the searcher as Gough took off her clothes, 'this is a very shocking thing about the murder.'

'Yes, it is.'

'Can you give any account of it, do you think?'

Gough reiterated that at five in the morning she had woken and seen that Saville was missing. 'I thought he was with his mamma, because he generally goes in there of a morning.' According to Mrs Dallimore, she added: 'This is done through jealousy. The little boy goes into his mamma's room and tells everything.'

'No one would murder a child for doing such a thing as that,' said Mrs Dallimore. The nurse's characterisation of Saville as a tell-tale became, for many, the clue to the crime.

Eliza Dallimore and Elizabeth Gough went down to the kitchen. 'This is a shocking thing,' Mrs Dallimore told the servants, 'and I think the whole house is responsible for the child.'

When Fricker, the plumber, came in from the garden with his assistant, Gough asked, 'What have you been doing, Fricker?'

'I've been opening the water closet,' he said.

'And you haven't found anything?'

'No.'

'Then you won't.' Her remarks to the plumber, before and after his examination of the pipes, were later taken as indications that she knew more than she admitted about the crime.

Mrs Dallimore strip-searched the female servants but, on Foley's instructions, did not ask the women of the Kent family to disrobe. Instead, she examined their nightdresses. She found bloodstains on the nightdress of Mary Ann, the eldest daughter, so she passed it on to the police. They showed the garment to Parsons, who attributed the stains to 'natural causes'. Stapleton agreed that the blood was menstrual. The nightgown was none the less given to Mrs Dallimore for safekeeping.

At about four o'clock PC Urch asked two village women – Mary Holcombe and Anna Silcox – to wash and lay out the dead child. Mary Holcombe was the charwoman who had been cleaning the kitchen when Nutt and Benger found Saville's body. Silcox was a widow who used to work as a 'monthly nurse', tending a mother and her baby in the first weeks after a birth; she lived with her grandson, a carpenter, next to Road Hill House. Parsons told the women to 'do what was right to the poor boy'.

Parsons was talking to Samuel Kent in the library at about five o'clock when a messenger called at Road Hill House with instructions for the doctor to conduct a post-mortem examination of the body. The coroner, on being informed by the police of the child's murder, had scheduled an inquest for Monday. With Samuel's agreement, Parsons asked Stapleton to help him examine the corpse.

When he saw the body, Stapleton noted the 'expression of repose' on the child's face: 'Its upper lip, retracted slightly by the mortal spasm, had stiffened upon the upper teeth.' The doctors opened the boy's stomach and found the remains of his supper, which had included rice. To check whether he had been drugged, Parsons smelt for traces of laudanum or any other narcotic, but could detect none. The stab to his chest, a bit more than an inch wide, had pushed the heart out of place, punctured the diaphragm and grazed the outer edge of the stomach. 'It would have required very great force,' said Parsons, 'to inflict such a blow through the nightdress and to the depth to which it had penetrated.' This was a child of 'remarkably fine development', the doctor said. From the rips in the boy's clothes and his flesh, Parsons surmised that the weapon was shaped like a dagger. 'It could not have been done by a razor,' he said. 'It must have been, I think, a sharp-pointed, long, wide and strong knife.' He initially believed the cause of death was the cut to the throat.

The post-mortem examination uncovered two oddities. One was the 'blackened appearance round the mouth' that Parsons had noted earlier; the mouth was 'such as we do not usually see in dead bodies, as if something had been pressed tightly against it'. This something, he suggested, might have been 'the violent thrusting of a blanket into the mouth to prevent it crying, or it could have been done with a hand'.

The other mystery was the lack of blood. 'A sufficient quantity of blood . . . has not been accounted for,' reported Parsons, 'as would have flowed from the body, if the throat were cut in the closet, as blood from the arterial vessels would have produced a greater quantity of sparkles on the walls.' If the boy's throat had been cut while he was alive, 'the pulsations would have thrown out jets of blood'. Yet the blood was no longer in his body either: the internal organs, said Parsons, were completely drained.

The two doctors found Samuel Kent in tears when they returned to the library. Stapleton comforted him, assuring him that Saville had died swiftly. Parsons confirmed this: 'The child suffered much less than you will.'

Superintendent Foley watched over the body in the laundry. Towards evening, he reported, Elizabeth Gough came in and kissed her former charge on the hand. Before the superintendent went home he asked for something to eat or drink: 'I scarce wet my lips or ate a mouthful all day.' Samuel poured him a glass of port wine and water.

The life of the house went on. Holcombe cut the grass on the lawn with the mowing machine. Cox and Kerslake made the beds. As was her custom on a Saturday evening, Cox took a clean nightdress from Constance's room to air before the kitchen fire. Constance's linen was easily distinguished from that of her sisters, said Cox, because it was 'of a very coarse texture'. Her nightdresses had 'plain frills', while Mary Ann's had lace and Elizabeth's embroidery.

On Saturday night the older girls slept apart: Elizabeth went downstairs to share her stepmother's bed, 'as papa stayed up' till morning, and Constance joined Mary Ann, 'for the sake of company'. Elizabeth Gough, after helping Mrs Kent and Mary Amelia dress for bed, went upstairs to sleep in Cox and Kerslake's room. Eveline, presumably, was wheeled into her parents' bedroom, leaving the nursery empty; and only William went to bed alone.

Foley watched over Saville's corpse again the next day. All the Misses Kent came to kiss the boy's body, as did Elizabeth Gough. Afterwards the nursemaid told Mrs Kent that she had kissed 'the poor little child'. According to one report, Mrs Kent said that Gough 'appeared very sorry and cried because he was dead'; but according to another, she said that Gough 'frequently spoke of him with sorrow and affection, but I did not see her cry'. The female suspects in the case were constantly scrutinised for kisses and tears, the tokens of innocence.

On Sunday night Constance slept alone. William locked his door 'from fear'.