The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

CHAPTER FIVE

EVERY CLUE SEEMS CUT OFF

16 July

On the morning of Monday, 16 July, Superintendent Foley drove Whicher to Road in a trap, taking the same lane by which Samuel Kent had returned to the village when he learnt that his son was dead. It was another dry day – no rain had fallen since Saville's murder. As the policemen rode further from the sooty town, the plains began to give way to hills, woods and pastures. There were sheep in the fields, dark birds in the trees: jackdaws, magpies, blackbirds, ravens and carrion crows. Smaller birds nested in the grass and gorse – olive chiffchaffs, chestnut-winged corncrakes – while swallows and swifts sailed overhead.

The village of Road sat smack on the border of two counties: though Road Hill House and the Reverend Peacock's Christ Church were in Wiltshire, most of the several hundred villagers lived down the hill in Somersetshire. In this part of England, people addressed each other as 'thee' and 'thou', and spoke with a guttural burr – a farmer was a 'varmer', the sun was the 'zun', a thread was a 'dread'. The district had a distinctive vocabulary: someone marked with smallpox scars, like Whicher, was 'pock-fredden'; to 'skummer' a piece of cloth was to foul it with dirty liquid; to 'buddle' a creature was to suffocate it in mud.

Road was a picturesque village, its cottages built of limestone cobbles or flat blocks of sandstone punched through with square windows. There were at least four pubs (the Red Lion, the George, the Cross Keys, the Bell), a brewery, two Anglican churches, a Baptist chapel, a school, a post office, bakers, grocers, butchers, blacksmiths, shoemakers, tailors, dressmakers, saddlers and so on. Trowbridge lay five miles north-east, and Frome, a Somersetshire wool town, the same distance south-west. A few of the villagers wove on handlooms in their cottages. Most worked in the fields or at one of the several mills in the neighbourhood. Shawford Mill was a specialist wool-dyeing works, with a water-wheel driven by the river Frome – among the local dyes were dark green, from privet; brown, from yew; and indigo, from woad. Next to Road Bridge was a mill devoted to 'fulling', a process of hammering wet wool until the individual threads vanished and the cloth became dense, tight, impossible to unravel.

The village was alight with speculation about Saville's death. His murder had aroused 'a spirit' among the people, said Joseph Stapleton in his book about the case, 'which it might be difficult to govern or suppress'. In the words of the Bath Chronicle:

There is a very strong feeling amongst the lower class of inhabitants in the village against Mr Kent's family, as well as against himself, and none of them can scarcely walk in the village without being insulted. The poor little innocent, the victim of this dark assassination, is spoken of generally throughout the village in terms of much endearment. He is represented as having been a sturdy, handsome little fellow, with a merry, laughing face, and curly, flaxen hair. The women speak of him with tears in their eyes, and . . . call to remembrance his many little engaging ways and innocent prattling.

The villagers remembered Saville as a sweet cherub, and reviled his family as fiends.

Samuel Kent was disliked in the district anyway. In part this was because of his job – he was responsible for enforcing the Factory Act of 1833, devised principally to protect children from overwork and injury, which was resented by mill-owners and workers alike. Factory inspectors, like police inspectors, were agents of surveillance. When Samuel moved into Road Hill House in 1855, reported the Frome Times, many locals said, 'We don't want him here; we want someone who will give us bread, and not someone who will take it from us.' He had recently turned more than twenty boys and girls under the age of thirteen out of a Trowbridge mill, depriving them of their earnings of three or four shillings a week.

Samuel did nothing to better relations with his neighbours. According to Stapleton, he built an 'impervious fence' 'against the oversight and intrusion' of the inhabitants of the cottages lining the lane next to Road Hill House. He put up 'No Trespassing' signs by the river in his grounds, where the cottagers had been accustomed to fish for trout. The villagers took their revenge on Samuel's servants and family. 'His children were called after,' wrote Stapleton, 'in their walks and on their way to church, by the cottagers' children.' Since Saville's death, Samuel had repeatedly voiced his suspicion that these cottagers had something to do with the murder.

At eleven o'clock Whicher and Foley joined the secret proceedings in the Temperance Hall. Whicher watched as the magistrates re-examined Samuel Kent, the Reverend Peacock and then the local police's chief suspect, Elizabeth Gough. At one o'clock she was set free. The reporters who had gathered outside saw her emerge from the building. 'She appeared to have been suffering from severe mental anguish since she had been in custody,' wrote the man from the Bath Chronicle, 'as her face, which was bright and cheerful previously, now wore a very dejected and careworn appearance; in fact, we were astonished at the great change her features had undergone only during this slight detention.' The nursemaid told the reporters that she was returning to Road Hill House to help Mrs Kent during her confinement – the baby was due in a few weeks.

The reporters were then let into the hall, where they were addressed by one of the magistrates. He told them that the investigation was now in the hands of Detective-Inspector Whicher, and that there was a £200 reward for any person giving information that would lead to the conviction of Saville's murderer: £100 had been put up by the government and £100 by Samuel Kent. If an accomplice turned in the killer, he or she would be given a free pardon. The inquiry was adjourned until Friday.

Whicher was joining the murder investigation two weeks late. The victim's body had been boxed up and buried, the testimony of the witnesses had been rehearsed, the evidence had been collected, or destroyed. He would have to reopen the wounds, unseal the scene. Superintendents Foley and Wolfe, both of the Wiltshire constabulary, led him up the hill to the house.

Road Hill House sat hidden above the village, a smooth block of creamy Bath limestone shielded from the road by trees and walls. A cloth merchant, Thomas Ledyard, had built the property in about 1800, when he ran the Road Bridge fulling mill. It was one of the finest houses in the area. A driveway curved beneath the yews and elms to a shallow entrance porch, which nudged out like a sentry box from the building's flat face. Concealed in the shrubbery to the right of the front lawn was the privy in which Saville had been found – a lavatory in a shed built over a pit in the earth.

Through the front door of the house a large hall led to the main staircase. To the right of the hall was the dining room – an elegant rectangle that stretched out of the side of the building – and to the left was the snug square of the library, its tall arched windows overlooking the lawns. Behind the library was the drawing room, which ended in a crescent of bay windows leading on to the back gardens – it was one of these that had been found open by Sarah Cox on 30 June.

The stairs, laid with thick carpet, ran up to the first and second storeys. Between floors were landings with views across the grounds to the rear – a flower garden, a kitchen garden, an orchard, a greenhouse, and beyond them cows, sheep, a field of grass, a seam of trees along the river Frome.

On the first floor, behind the master bedroom and the nursery, were three spare rooms and a water closet. On the top floor, along with the four occupied bedrooms, were two spare rooms and a ladder to the attic. This floor was darker than those below, with lower ceilings and squatter windows. Most of the bedrooms in the house shared a view south over the drive and lawn and down to the village, though William's room looked east to the neighbouring cottages and the gothic twin turrets and spires of Christ Church.

Behind William's room the back stairs twisted steeply down to the first and ground floors. At their foot was the kitchen passage, busy with doors onto the scullery, kitchen, laundry, pantry, and the steps to the cellars. A door at the end of the passage led to a paved courtyard hemmed in by the carriage house, stable and outhouses. The privy lay just to the right, through a door by the knife-house. A ten-foot-high stone wall, with a gate for tradesmen, ran along the right-hand side of the property, by the cottage corner.

Stapleton gave a highly coloured sketch of this group of cottages, where the Holcombes, the Nutts and the Holleys had their homes: 'A beer-house obtrudes itself in the centre, flanked by a cottage kept from falling down only by the precarious support of wooden stakes stuck into the ground. The windows are crushed or thrust outwards by the tumbling walls, from the occupation of which the tenants had already fled. Several other cottages are grouped around, and some of them overlook Mr Kent's premises. It is indeed a "rookery" – a bit of St Giles's gone out of town to rusticate. It might be mistaken for a haunt of outcasts and a den of thieves.'

Since the murder, Road Hill House had become a puzzle, a riddle in three dimensions, its floor plans and furnishings an esoteric code. Whicher's task was to decipher the house – as a crime scene, and as a guide to the character of the family.

The walls and fences that Samuel had erected around his grounds indicated a liking for privacy. Within the house, though, children and adults, servants and employers were strangely entangled. Affluent mid-Victorians usually preferred to keep the servants apart from the family, and the children in their own quarters. Here, the nursemaid slept feet away from the master bedroom, and the five-year-old slept with her parents. The other servants and the stepchildren were thrown together on the top floor like so much lumber in an attic. The arrangement marked out the lower status of the children of the first Mrs Kent.

In his reports to Scotland Yard^* Whicher noted that Constance and William were the only members of the house-hold with rooms of their own. This was not indicative of status, only of the fact that neither had a sibling of the same sex and a similar age with whom they might share. Its significance was logistical: either child could have slipped out at night unnoticed.

In the nursery, Whicher was shown how the blanket had been drawn from between Saville's bedclothes on the night of his death, and the sheet and quilt 'folded neatly back' to the foot of the cot – which, he said, 'it can hardly be supposed a man would have done'. With Foley and Wolfe, he then conducted an experiment to see whether it was possible to take a three-year-old child from the cot without waking it or anyone else in the room. The newspapers did not divulge which three-year-old was used in the experiment, nor how it was induced to fall asleep repeatedly, but they claimed that the police officers accomplished the task three times.

In the drawing room, Whicher saw that the window could have been unfastened only from the inside. 'This window which is about ten feet high, comes down within a few inches of the ground,' he reported to Sir Richard Mayne, 'and faces the lawn at the back of the house, and opens by lifting up the bottom sash, which was found up about six inches at the bottom. These shutters were fastened with a Bar inside, consequently no entry could be made from the outside.' Even if someone had broken into the house by this window, he pointed out, they could have got no further, since the drawing-room door was locked from the other side. 'Therefore it is quite certain,' he wrote, 'that no person came in by that window.' He was also sure that no one had fled the premises by that window, since Sarah Cox told him that the folding shutters were partly closed from within. This, he said, confirmed his conviction that an inmate of the house had killed the boy.

The only indication that an intruder might have been at the crime scene was the scrap of bloodied newspaper discovered next to the privy. Whicher found, though, that this had not been torn from the Morning Star, as suggested at the inquest, but from The Times, the paper Samuel Kent took every day.

Whicher explained in his reports that he thought that the murderer had not taken Saville out through the drawing-room window, but by another route altogether: down the back stairs, along the passage past the kitchen, out of the kitchen door to the courtyard, and through a further door from the yard to the privy in the shrubbery. The murderer would have had to unlock, unchain and unbolt the kitchen door and unbolt the yard door, then secure both doors again on returning to the house, but this was perfectly practicable, and worth the effort. The kitchen door was only twenty paces, or yards, from the privy, Whicher pointed out, whereas the distance from the drawing-room window to the privy was seventy-nine paces. To walk from the drawing room to the privy also meant passing round the front of the building, immediately under the windows where the rest of the family and servants had been sleeping. Anyone who lived in the house would have known that the kitchen passage offered a much more direct and discreet route – in Whicher's words, 'the shortest and most secret way'. It meant passing the guard dog, but then the dog might not have barked at a familiar face. 'The Dog,' wrote Whicher, 'is perfectly harmless.' Even when the detective, a perfect stranger, approached the animal in daylight, it did not bark or bite.^*

'I therefore feel quite convinced,' Whicher concluded, 'that the window shutters were merely opened by one of the inmates, to lead to the supposition that the child had been stolen.'

Whicher was familiar with this kind of feint, the false trail laid in an attempt to fox the police. In 1850 he had described to a journalist the methods of the 'Dancing School' of London cat burglars. They would watch a house for days, and find out at what time its inhabitants dined; this was the ideal moment for a burglary, since dinner tied up servants and employers alike. At the appointed hour, a gang member crept noiselessly, or 'danced', into the garret and plundered the upper storeys of small valuables, typically jewels. Before he made off across the rooftops with his spoils, the burglar would 'sell' (frame) a maid by hiding one of the jewels under her mattress. The planted jewel, like the open window in Road Hill House, was a 'blind', designed to point the detectives the wrong way.

Perhaps the killer did not only plan to mislead the police about how Saville had been removed, Whicher reasoned, but about where he had been taken – the open window faced the gardens and fields behind the house. The murderer might have hoped that the police would not find the body in the privy, which lay in the opposite direction. Whicher speculated that the killer's 'original intention was to have thrown the child down the privy . . . thinking it would sink into the soil out of sight'. The privy 'has a large cesspool about ten feet deep and seven feet square', he reported, 'and at the time contained several feet of water and soft soil'. Whicher believed that the assailant intended the child to drown or suffocate in the excrement, and then to disappear in it. If this plan had worked, there would have been no marks of blood to identify either the murder scene or the murderer. But the slanting splashboard, recently installed on the orders of Samuel Kent, left an opening of only a few inches between the lavatory seat and the wall, so that it blocked the body's descent into the vault. The killer, said Whicher, 'being thus foiled, resorted to the knife', snatching a weapon from the basket just inside the kitchen passage, and stabbing the boy in the throat and chest to make certain of his death. At least three of the knives in the basket, he said to the Somerset and Wilts Journal, would have served.

That afternoon Whicher searched Constance's bedroom. In her chest of drawers he found a list of the linen she had brought back from school, which included three nightdresses. He had already been told that one of these had vanished. He sent for Constance.

'Is this a list of your linen?'

'Yes.'

'In whose writing is it?'

'It is my own writing.'

He pointed to the list. 'Here are three nightdresses; where are they?'

'I have two; the other was lost at the wash the week after the murder.'

She showed him the two still in her possession – plain, roughly woven garments. Whicher noticed another nightdress and a nightcap lying on the bed. He asked Constance whose they were.

'They are my sister's,' she replied. Since Mrs Holley was still refusing to take in the family's laundry, Constance's two nightdresses were now dirty, and she had borrowed a clean one on Saturday from Mary Ann or Elizabeth. Whicher told Constance he must confiscate her linen list and remaining nightclothes. The missing nightdress was his first clue.

The word 'clue' derives from 'clew', meaning a ball of thread or yarn. It had come to mean 'that which points the way' because of the Greek myth in which Theseus uses a ball of yarn, given to him by Ariadne, to find his way out of the Minotaur's labyrinth. The writers of the mid-nineteenth century still had this image in mind when they used the word. 'There is always a pleasure in unravelling a mystery, in catching at the gossamer clue which will guide to certainty,' observed Elizabeth Gaskell in 1848. 'I thought I saw the end of a good clew,' said the narrator of Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective (1864). William Wills, Dickens' deputy, paid tribute in 1850 to Whicher's brilliance by observing that the detective found the way even when 'every clue seems cut off'. 'I thought I had my hand on the clue,' declared the narrator of The Woman in White in an instalment published in June 1860. 'How little I knew, then, of the windings of the labyrinth which were still to mislead me!' A plot was a knot, and a story ended in a 'denouement', an unknotting.

Then as now, many clues were literally made of cloth – criminals could be identified by pieces of fabric. One case that turned on such evidence was very close to home for Jack Whicher.

In 1837, a notorious murderer was traced to Wyndham Road, Whicher's own street in Camberwell. James Greenacre, a cabinetmaker who owned eight cottages in the road, killed and dismembered his fiancée, Hannah Brown, in his lodgings there in December 1836. He wrapped her head in a sack and carried it by omnibus to Stepney, east London, where he threw it in a canal. He dumped her torso on the Edgware Road, in the north-west of the city, and her legs in a ditch in Camberwell. The star of the police investigation was PC Pegler of the S (Hampstead) division, who found Hannah Brown's torso. He traced Greenacre through a piece of cloth – the sacking in which the body parts were wrapped – and secured his confession through another: a snippet of thick nankeen cotton found on the Edgware Road, which matched a patch on the frock of his girlfriend's baby. The unravelling of the crime was reported with fascination in the press. Greenacre was hanged in May 1837. Whicher joined the police force four months later.

In 1849 the London detectives, Whicher, Thornton and Field among them, found the Bermondsey murderess Maria Manning by way of a bloodstained dress she had stashed in a railway-station locker. Manning and her husband had murdered her former lover and buried him beneath their kitchen floor. The detectives tracked down the couple with the aid of telegraph messages, express trains and steamships. Whicher checked the hotels and railway stations in Paris, and then the ships sailing from Southampton and Plymouth. He used his experience in tracing banknotes to help shore up the evidence against the killers. Eventually, Manning was caught in Edinburgh, her husband in Jersey. Each accused the other of the crime, and both were sentenced to death. The executions drew tens of thousands of spectators, while the 'broadside' ballads about the case sold two and a half million copies. A series of woodcuts printed that year showed the investigators as dashing action heroes, and the Commissioner praised his men for the 'extraordinary skill and exertion' with which they had worked on the case. He awarded Whicher and Thornton a bonus of £10 each; Field, as an inspector, was given £15.

The next year Whicher told William Wills a more commonplace story of how clothes could help capture a criminal. A detective sergeant – probably Whicher himself – was called in by a smart London hotel to find a man who the previous night had ransacked a guest's portmanteau. On the carpet of the room in which the trunk had been looted, the detective noticed a button. He watched the hotel guests and staff all day, closely scanning their clothes – at the risk, said Whicher, of being 'set down for an eccentric critic of linen'. Eventually he spotted a man with a button missing from his shirt, the thread dangling; the remaining buttons matched the 'little tell-tale' that the detective had found.

The Road Hill case was dense with fabric. The setting of the murder happened to be clothmaking country, a land of sheep and wool mills. The family's dirty laundry lay at the heart of the investigation, their washerwoman was a key witness, and the investigation threw up three clues of cloth: a flannel, a blanket and a missing nightdress. Whicher closed in on the last of these, much as the narrator of Wilkie Collins' 'The Diary of Anne Rodway', a short story of 1856, closed in on a torn cravat: 'A kind of fever got possession of me – a vehement yearning to go on from this first discovery and find out more, no matter what the risk might be. The cravat now really became . . . the clue that I was resolved to follow.'

The thread that led Theseus out of the maze was true to another principle of Whicher's investigation: the progress of a detective was backwards. To find his way out of danger and confusion, Theseus had to retrace his steps, return to the origin. The solution to a crime was the beginning as well as the end of the story.

Through his interviews with the Kents and those who knew them, Whicher tracked the family back in time. Though there were gaps, contradictions, indications of further secrets, he pieced together a narrative that he believed provided an explanation for murder. Much of it was chronicled in the book about the case that Joseph Stapleton published in 1861; the surgeon's account was heavily biased towards Samuel Kent, but it was scrupulous – and scurrilous – enough to hint at the many fissures in the family story.

In east London in 1829 Samuel Kent, the twenty-eight-year-old son of a carpetmaker from the north-eastern suburb of Clapton, married Mary Ann Windus, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a prosperous coachmaker from the neighbouring district of Stamford Hill. In a miniature painted the year before the marriage, Mary Ann was shown with curly brown hair, dark eyes, bright, pursed lips in a pale face, and a wary, guarded cast to her features. Her father was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries and an expert on the Portland Vase; the family home was crammed with paintings and curios.

The newlywed couple moved into a house near Finsbury Square, in the centre of London. Though their first child, Thomas, died of convulsions in 1831, they had a second – Mary Ann – before the year was out, and a third – Elizabeth – the year after that. Samuel worked as a partner in a firm of dry-salters, dealers in preserved meats and pickles, but in 1833 he resigned on account of an unspecified illness. 'The health of Mr Kent became so precarious,' said Stapleton, 'that he was compelled to relinquish his share of the business.' He took his family to Sidmouth on the Devonshire coast. There he secured a position as sub-inspector of factories for the west of England, the hub of the wool trade.

Mrs Kent first showed signs of madness in 1836, according to Samuel, a year after the birth of another son, Edward. She suffered from 'weakness and bewilderment of intellect' and 'various though harmless delusions'. Samuel later gave three examples of his wife's mental disturbance: she once got lost while out walking with her children near their home; on a Sunday, while he was at church, she tore the pictures out of one of his books and burnt them; and a knife was found hidden under her bed. Samuel consulted physicians about Mrs Kent's condition, and a Dr Blackall of Exeter confirmed that she was weak-minded. Her physical health was also poor.

Samuel continued nevertheless to impregnate her, and the couple saw four babies die in succession: Henry Saville in 1838, at fifteen months; Ellen in 1839, at three months; John Saville in 1841, at five months; and Julia in 1842, also at five months. ('Saville' – spelt sometimes with one '1', sometimes without an 'e' – was the maiden name of Samuel's mother, who came from a well-to-do Essex family.) The cause of several of their deaths was given as 'atrophy', or wasting away. All were buried in the Sidmouth graveyard.

Constance Emily was born on 6 February 1844. Samuel gave the care of his new child to Mary Drewe Pratt, a twenty-three-year-old farmer's daughter who had joined the house-hold the previous year as governess to the older girls. She was a short, attractive, self-assured young woman who had previously been employed as a live-out governess by the families of a solicitor and of a clergyman; she came recommended by a Sidmouth doctor. Miss Pratt was granted complete control of Constance, and she devoted herself to her charge. She fattened the frail baby into a sleek, powerful little girl. Constance was the first of the Kents' children to survive in nearly a decade.

The next year, on 10 July 1845, Mary Ann Kent gave birth to her last child, William Saville. During her confinements with Constance and William, Samuel said, her madness intensified. The management of the house-hold was placed entirely in the hands of Miss Pratt.

In 1848 Samuel's boss, one of the four chief factory inspectors, urged him to move house in order to escape gossip about the family: the government inspector with the deranged wife and the favoured governess (the triangle echoed that in Charlotte Bronteë's Jane Eyre, published the previous year). The Kents left their trellised, thatched cottage on the cliff and took up residence at Walton Manor in Walton-in-Gordano, a small Somersetshire village. In 1852 they again moved to avoid the scrutiny of their neighbours, this time to Baynton House in East Coulston, Wiltshire. At Baynton House on 5 May, while Miss Pratt was visiting her parents in Devonshire, Mary Ann Kent died aged forty-four of 'an obstruction of the bowel'.^* She was buried in the neighbouring churchyard.

In August 1853, Samuel Kent married the governess. They travelled to Lewisham, just south of London, for the ceremony. Samuel's three daughters – Mary Ann, Elizabeth and Constance – were bridesmaids. Edward Kent, now a headstrong eighteen-year-old, had joined the merchant navy and was away at sea when his father and Miss Pratt were married. He was horrified upon his return to learn of the marriage, and argued bitterly with his father. A few months later – in 1854, the year Constance turned ten and William nine – the transport ship in which Edward was sailing went down on its way to Balaklava, and all its crew were thought to have drowned. As the Kents were setting out for Bath to buy mourning clothes, the postman arrived with a letter from Edward: he had survived the wreck. 'The father staggered back, almost fainting, into his house,' wrote Stapleton. 'We shall close the door upon the scene which ensued; upon that revulsion of feeling, under the shock of which his heart must have almost stood still with joy.'

That June, in another violent capsizing of emotions, Samuel's new wife was prematurely delivered of her first, and stillborn, child.

The second Mrs Kent was said to be an impatient woman who ran a strict house-hold. Constance became troublesome at home, sometimes insolent. For punishment her former governess boxed her ears or, more usually, banished her from the parlour to the hall.

In 1855 Samuel's boss urged him to find another home, now that his first wife's death had removed the need to hide from the world. Baynton House was too secluded, said the chief inspector; Kent should be nearer to the mills that he supervised and to the railways by which he travelled round his region, an area that stretched hundreds of miles from Reading to Land's End. For the sake of his family – especially Mary Ann and Elizabeth, in their twenties and nowhere near married – he should be living closer to other people of his rank.

The move to Road Hill House, a slightly more modest residence, may also have eased some financial difficulties – Stapleton remarked that Baynton was beyond the means of a government employee with a family of four, being a house suited 'to the wants and pretensions of a country gentleman of considerable and independent fortune'.^*

In June 1855 the second Mrs Kent gave birth to Mary Amelia Saville. In August the next year, she had her first son, Francis Saville, known as Saville. Her second daughter, Eveline, was born in October 1858. Mr and Mrs Kent were besotted with their new children. That year Edward, now twenty-two, sailed to the West Indies with the merchant navy, and in July died suddenly in Havana of yellow fever.

According to a rumour reported by Stapleton, Edward was the father of Saville, his supposed half-brother. If this were so, Edward's anger about his own father's second marriage would have been prompted by sexual rivalry rather than disapproval. But Stapleton insisted that the new Mrs Kent and her stepson were not lovers – the evidence he gave for this, bizarrely, was the stillbirth of her first child. This event indicated that she had been made pregnant at least once by Samuel (Edward was at sea when the baby was conceived), although it suggested nothing about the paternity of her next two children, Saville and Eveline.

The family story that Whicher pieced together at Road Hill House suggested that Saville's death was part of a mesh of deception and concealment. The detective stories that the case engendered, beginning with The Moonstone in 1868, took this lesson. All the suspects in a classic murder mystery have secrets, and to keep them they lie, dissemble, evade the interrogations of the investigator. Everyone seems guilty because everyone has something to hide. For most of them, though, the secret is not murder. This is the trick on which detective fiction turns.

The danger, in a real murder case, was that the detective might fail to solve the crime he had been sent to investigate. He might instead get lost in the tangle of the past, mired in the mess he had dug up.