The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

CHAPTER NINE

I KNOW YOU

20–22 July

At eleven on the morning of Friday, 20 July, Whicher reported to the magistrates at the Temperance Hall on his investigation so far. He told them that he suspected Constance Kent of the murder.

The magistrates conferred, and then told Whicher that they wished him to arrest Constance. He hesitated. 'I pointed out to them the unpleasant position such a course would place me in with the County Police,' he explained in his report to Mayne, 'especially as they held opinions opposed to mine, as to who was the guilty party, but they (the magistrates) declined to alter their determination, stating that they considered and wished the enquiries to be entirely in my hands.' The chairman of the magistrates was Henry Gaisford Gibbs Ludlow, commanding officer of the 13th Rifle Corps, Deputy Lieutenant of Somersetshire and a rich landowner who lived in Heywood House, Westbury, five miles east of Road, with his wife and eleven servants. Of the other magistrates, the most prominent were William and John Stancomb, mill-owners who had built themselves villas on opposite sides of the Hilperton Road, an exclusive new district of Trowbridge. It was William who had lobbied the Home Secretary for the services of a detective.

Shortly before three o'clock in the afternoon Whicher called at Road Hill House and sent for Constance. She came to him in the drawing room.

'I am a police officer,' he said, 'and I hold a warrant for your apprehension, charging you with the murder of your brother Francis Saville Kent, which I will read to you.'

Whicher read her the warrant and she began to cry.

'I am innocent,' she said. 'I am innocent.'

Constance said she wanted to collect a mourning bonnet and mantle from her bedroom. Whicher followed her and watched as she put them on. They rode to the Temperance Hall in a trap, in silence. 'She made no further remark to me,' said Whicher.

A large group of villagers had collected outside the Temperance Hall, having heard a rumour that an arrest was being made at Road Hill House. Most expected to see Samuel Kent brought before the magistrates.

Instead they watched as Elizabeth Gough and William Nutt approached the hall in the early afternoon – they had been called to give evidence – and then, at 3.20, they were startled to see the occupants of the trap that drew up before them: ''Tis Miss Constance!'

She came into the hall on Whicher's arm, with her head bent down, weeping. She was wearing deep mourning, with a veil closely drawn over her face. She 'walked with a firm step but was in tears', reported The Times. The crowd pressed in after her.

Constance sat facing the magistrates' table, Whicher on one side of her and Superintendent Wolfe on the other.

'Your name is Miss Constance Kent?' asked Ludlow, the chairman.

'Yes,' she whispered.

Despite the thick veil with which Constance had masked herself, and the pocket handkerchief that she pressed to her face, the reporters gave minute accounts of her features and manner, as if enough attention to these surfaces would yield her inner self.

'She looks to be about 18 years of age,' reported the Bath Express, 'though it is said that she is only 16. She is rather tall and stout, with a full face, which was very flushed, and a dimpled forehead, apparently somewhat contracted. Her eye is peculiar, being very small and deep set in her head, which perhaps leaves a somewhat unfavourable impression on the mind. In other respects there is nothing unprepossessing in her appearance, judging from her looks yesterday; at the same time, the fearful crime with which she stands charged doubtless modified in some degree the habitual expression of her countenance, the predominant characteristic of which is said to be sullenness. The young lady wore a black silk dress and mantle, trimmed with crape, and kept her veil down throughout the proceedings. She sat with her eyes fixed upon the ground, shedding tears, and never once looked up. Indeed, to judge from her demeanour, she seemed to feel her awful position most acutely, though she manifested no violent emotion from the time she was taken until she left, at the close of the inquiry.' The crêpe that trimmed the dresses worn during the initial period of deep mourning was a dull gauze made of tightly twisted silk threads, fixed with gum.

Constance was 'strongly formed', according to the Western Daily Press,'with a round, chubby face, which does not convey at first either an impression of deep determination or of active intellect. She was collected in her manner, and preserved the same unmoved expression throughout the inquiry.'

The Frome Times reporter seemed to detect in her a disturbing quality: a stifled sexuality, or rage. She looked 'somewhat peculiar', he wrote. 'While she has a girlish look, her figure is remarkably developed for her age, which is only 16. Her features, which were very flushed, are rather pleasing, but have a heavy, almost sullen look, which we believe is a characteristic of the family.'^*

Whicher made his statement to the court.

'I have been engaged since Sunday last in investigating all the circumstances connected with the murder of Francis Saville Kent, which took place on the night of Friday, June 29th last, at the house of his father, situate at Road, in the county of Wiltshire. In company with Captain Meredith, Superintendent Foley, and other members of the police force, I have made an examination of the premises, and I believe that the murder was committed by an inmate of the house. From many inquiries I have made, and from information which I have received, I sent for Constance Kent on Monday last, to her bedroom, having first previously examined her drawers, and found a list of her linen, which I now produce, on which are enumerated, among other articles of linen, three night-dresses as belonging to her.'

He read out Constance's answers to his questions about the nightdresses.

'I now pray the Bench for a remand of the prisoner, to enable me to collect evidence to show the animus which the prisoner entertained towards the deceased, and to search for the missing night-dress, which if in existence may possibly be found.'

The magistrates heard testimony about Saville's loss and discovery from Elizabeth Gough (who wept) and from William Nutt. Then they asked Whicher how much time he needed to gather his evidence against Constance. He asked for a remand until the next Wednesday or Thursday.

'Will Wednesday be time enough?' asked the Reverend Crawley.

'Under ordinary circumstances,' said Whicher, 'a week is the time for a remand.'

The magistrates gave him a week, ordering that Constance be detained until 11 a.m. the following Friday. Ludlow then turned to her. 'I don't ask you to make a statement,' he said, 'but have you anything to say?' She did not reply.

Whicher and Wolfe escorted Constance out of the hall and took her by britzska – a long, soft-topped carriage – to the gaol at Devizes, about fifteen miles east of Road. They drove away under a dull sky, 'she during the journey remaining in a kind of sullen silence', wrote Whicher, 'and not displaying the slightest emotion'.

'The most blameless being on earth might have so demeaned herself under similar circumstances,' pointed out the Bristol Daily Post, 'and so (always supposing her to possess sufficient resolution) might the most offending.'

The crowd was quiet as the carriage departed, said the Western Daily Press. According to the Trowbridge and North Wilts Advertiser, Constance was seen off with 'repeated cheering'. Most of the villagers felt sure of her innocence, reported this newspaper. She was merely 'eccentric', they believed: the true murderer had stolen her nightdress in order to implicate her.

Once Whicher and Constance had left, the magistrates sent to Frome for Dr Mallam, Saville's godfather, and for 'a woman who had previously lived at Mr Kent's' – probably Emma Sparks, the former nursemaid. The likelihood was that Whicher had cited the testimony of both to the magistrates, who now wanted to hear it first-hand.

The magistrates ordered that Road Hill House be searched again for the nightdress. Samuel Kent let in the police, and in the late afternoon everything on the premises was 'turned over and emptied, from garret to cellar', said the Frome Times. The nightgown was not found.

Whicher must have hoped that the arrest would shock Constance into a confession. One of his favoured ruses was to bluff when he had no evidence, to accuse with confidence. This technique played a part in his first reported arrest – of the housemaid wearing a boa in a Holborn brothel – and in a story that he told Dickens about catching a horse-thief in a lonely country pub. 'It's no use,' Whicher said to the man he suspected but had never before met. 'I know you. I'm an officer from London and I take you into custody for felony.' He saw off the crook's two associates by pretending he had friends in tow: 'I'm not alone here, whatever you may think. You mind your own business, and keep yourselves to yourselves. It'll be better for you, for I know you both very well.' The horse-thief and his pals had given way. Constance had not. Whicher now had a week in which to find the evidence to justify her committal for trial.

From Trowbridge, Whicher sent a five-shilling telegraphic message to the day-and-night telegraph station on the Strand, near Scotland Yard, asking Sir Richard Mayne to send help. 'I have this day apprehended, on a warrant, Constance Kent the third daughter who is remanded for a week. The magistrates have left the case entirely in my hands to get up the evidence. I am awkwardly situated and want assistance. Pray send down Sgt Williamson or Tanner.' Williamson and Tanner were Whicher's most trusted sidekicks. When Mayne received the message later that day he wrote on the reverse: 'Let Sgt Williamson or Tanner go immediately.'

Detective-Sergeant Williamson was summoned urgently to Mayne's house in Chester Square, Belgravia, on Friday afternoon. The Commissioner gave him his instructions to go to Road, and Williamson took a cab on to the Strand telegraph office, from where he dispatched a message to Trowbridge telling Whicher he was coming.

Frederick Adolphus Williamson – 'Dolly' – was Whicher's protégé. They had worked together often, most recently on the capture of Emily Lawrence and James Pearce, the celebrated jewel thieves. Dolly was a clever, energetic man of twenty-nine, who studied French in his spare time. He had a round, soft face and kindly eyes. His father, a police superintendent, had set up the first police-station library. Dolly shared lodgings in I Palace Place, Great Scotland Yard, with sixteen other single policemen. One of these, Tim Cavanagh, later gave an account of Dolly's relationship with a cat that had attached itself to the house. This animal, Tommas, had a habit of 'killing and eating the local cats', according to Cavanagh, and the officers' neighbours demanded that he be destroyed. 'Much to our regret, we had to put a stone around the poor old fellow's neck and drop him into the river. This was a great shock to "Dolly," who was much attached to "Tommas," and, if I may let a secret out now, actually trained the "warrior" for his midnight work. On more than one occasion did [Tommas] bring in a nice piece of venison, or a hare, or a rabbit from a near neighbour.' Williamson emerges from this as both ruthless and tender-hearted, a man who could train a cat to kill and then mourn its death. In time, he was to lead the detective department.

Whicher could not know whether the public would believe an adolescent girl capable of such a horrible, and well-organised, crime as the murder at Road Hill House. But he knew from his experience of the London 'rookeries', or slums, what dark mischief children could get up to. On 10 October 1837, during Whicher's first month in the force, a girl of eight was caught playing a sharp trick near the rookery of St Giles, Holborn. She stood in the street crying bitterly until she had gathered a crowd about her. Sobbing, she explained to her audience that she had lost two shillings and was afraid to go home for fear of punishment. Once she had been plied with halfpennies, she moved on, to repeat the ruse a few roads away. A constable of E division watched her do this three times before arresting her. In the magistrates' court, she again pleaded terror of her parents; it is hard to know whether she was justifying or replaying her scam. 'The prisoner, crying, said that her father and mother sent her out to sell combs,' reported The Times, 'and unless she took home 2s. or 3s. every night they beat her cruelly, and not having sold any during the day she acted in the way described to get the money required of her.' The next day, 11 October, a girl of ten was charged with having broken a pane of glass in a raid on a Holborn watchmaker's shop. A gang of fellow ten-year-olds accompanied her to the magistrates' court. 'They were attired in a flash style,' said The Times, 'and their appearance and manners indicated that they were thieves and prostitutes, although so young.' One of the boys said he had come to pay the girl's fine of three shillings and sixpence, the cost of replacing the window. He threw the money down scornfully.

Criminal children were usually ill-used children. In Whicher's first weeks in Holborn he saw many examples of the careless or vicious ways in which parents could treat their young. His colleague Stephen Thornton arrested a drunken crossing-sweeper, Mary Baldwin (alias Bryant), a member of the most notorious family in St Giles, who was seen trying to kill her three-year-old daughter. She put the child in a bag and dashed it violently against the pavement. When a passer-by heard the girl's cries and remonstrated with the mother, Mary Baldwin ran into the road to place the bag in the path of an omnibus. The child was rescued by some of the passengers.

Since those years, it had become apparent that middle-class children, too, could be damaged or corrupt; sometimes it was almost impossible to tell one from the other, the victim from the victimiser. In 1859 an eleven-year-old girl called Eugenia Plummer accused the Reverend Hatch, her private tutor and the chaplain of Wandsworth gaol, of sexually molesting her and her eight-year-old sister while they were boarders at his house. The eight-year-old, Stephanie, confirmed the story. After a lurid trial, in which Hatch (as the defendant) was not allowed to testify,^* he was sentenced to four years in prison, with hard labour. But in May 1860, a few weeks before the Road Hill murder, Hatch successfully sued Eugenia for perjury. This time it was she who was the defendant, and therefore unable to give evidence. The jury decided that she had made it all up. They agreed with the clergyman's lawyer that her accusation was 'an entire fiction, the result of a prurient and depraved imagination'.

In its influential editorial on the Road Hill murder, the Morning Post alluded to this case: 'That it should be a child [who killed Saville] would be incredible if Eugenie Plummer had not taught us to what length the wicked precocity of some children will extend.' Eugenia's precocity was sexual, but it also rested in her cool deceit, her composure under pressure, the containment and channelling of her disturbance into bare lies. If newspaper readers had been horrified to find a clergyman convicted of sexually molesting a child in 1859, they must have been even more disturbed, a year later, to find the situation had been turned upside-down to reveal the child as the agent of evil, a creature who had undone a man's life with her lewd imaginings.^* But even this was not certain. As Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine pointed out in 1861, the only unassailable fact was that 'one jury or the other convicted an innocent person'.

On Saturday morning Whicher travelled to Bristol, twenty-five miles north-west of Trowbridge, where he visited Chief Superintendent John Handcock, who lived in the city with his wife, four sons and two servants. Handcock was an old colleague of Whicher, who had worked the streets of Holborn alongside him when both were police constables twenty years earlier. Whicher spent two hours making inquiries in and around Bristol by cab, and then took the train twenty miles north to Charbury, Gloucestershire. A carriage took him the remaining eighteen miles to Oldbury-on-the-Hill, the home of Louisa Hatherill, fifteen, another of Constance's schoolfriends.

'She has spoken to me of the younger children at home,' said Louisa, 'and said that there was a partiality shown to them by the parents. She spoke of her brother William being obliged to wheel the perambulator for the young children and said that he disliked doing it. She said she had heard her father, comparing the younger son with the older, say what a much finer man he would be . . . She never said anything particular about the deceased child.' From Louisa's account, it seemed that all the anger Constance felt was on William's behalf.

Louisa, like Emma Moody, confirmed to Whicher that her friend was a tough young woman. He observed in his report that Constance was a 'very stout, strong built girl, and her school fellows state that she was very fond of wrestling with them, and displaying her strength and wishing some times to play at Heenan and Sayers'. The heavyweight boxing match between the American John Heenan and the Briton Tom Sayers in April that year had been a national obsession, and turned out to be the last fought under the old, brutal, bare-knuckle rules. Heenan was six inches taller than Sayers, and forty-six pounds heavier. In an extremely bloody two-hour contest that ended in a draw, Sayers fractured his right arm blocking a punch, while Heenan broke his left hand and was almost blinded by the blows to his eyes. The girls told Whicher that Constance boasted of her strength, and a tussle with her 'was dreaded by all'.

That Saturday's piece in the Somerset and Wilts Journal, the newspaper most sympathetic to Whicher's views, gently hinted at William's complicity in the crime. It passed on to the readers Gough's observation that the boy was 'accustomed to use the back stairs because of his thicker boots'. This reinforced the sense that Mr and Mrs Kent demeaned William, and it associated him with the servants' staircase, by which Whicher believed the murderer had taken Saville from the house. The reporter suggested that the stabbing of Saville 'may have been done by the accomplice, if two were actually concerned, so that the two might be equally implicated'. While Constance was in gaol a rumour circulated that William, too, had been taken into custody.

In Bristol and back in Trowbridge, Whicher briefed reporters on his investigation, emphasising the unhappiness of Constance and the insanity in her mother's line. 'The question of probable insanity is one to which Mr Whicher's inquiries have been specially directed,' said the Trowbridge and North Wilts Advertiser. The reason for this, its reporter was told, was that 'there are few, if any, recorded instances of murder, the victims of which have been children of a few years old, in which the murderer has not been acting under the influence of a morbid condition of mind'. As for motive: 'The deceased child, we are told, was the pet of the family, and doated upon by his mother.' The reporter was informed that the servants and the children of the first family were treated harshly, the second Mrs Kent 'ruling, it is said, with a severe hand, all beneath her sway'.

Detective-Sergeant Williamson reached Trowbridge in the afternoon of 21 July. That day's issue of All the Year Round carried a piece by Wilkie Collins about a new biography of the French detective Eugène Vidocq. Collins praised Vidocq's 'impudent, ingenious, and daring' methods, his 'address and powers of endurance in tracking out and capturing his human game', his 'cleverness'. The Frenchman – a master criminal turned police chief – was the detective hero against whom his English counterparts were measured.

From his room in the Woolpack Inn on Sunday, 22 July, Whicher wrote his second report to Sir Richard Mayne, a five-page document that outlined the evidence against Constance. His case rested, he said, on the missing nightdress and on the testimony of Constance's schoolfellows. He listed the other suspicious circumstances: the murder took place soon after Constance and William came home from boarding school; she and William were the only people in the house who slept alone; the pair had used the privy as a hiding place before. She was powerful enough to have killed Saville, he assured Mayne, both physically and psychologically – 'she appears to possess a very strong mind'. Whicher thanked Mayne for sending him Williamson, and reminded him of his unhappy relations with the local police. 'I am very unpleasantly situated as regards acting with the County Police, in consequence of the natural jealousy entertained in this matter by them, they suspecting Mr Kent and the Nurse, and should it appear in the end that my opinions are correct, they would be considered at fault, but I have studiously endeavoured to act in concert with them as far as possible.' Whicher was careful to protect himself from charges of disrespect towards other policemen.

In his reports to Mayne, Whicher gave his reasons for rejecting the conjectures of the Wiltshire police. He defended Samuel Kent's behaviour in the immediate aftermath of the murder. Many were suspicious of Samuel's motives in leaving the house – if he had been involved with the murder, the flight to Trowbridge would have given him an opportunity to dispose of any incriminating evidence, as well as saving him from being present when the body was discovered. But there were innocent explanations for his behaviour: the desire to be sure that the alarm was raised, the restlessness aroused by anxiety. 'As regards the suspicion against Mr Kent,' wrote Whicher, 'in reference to his conduct after the murder was discovered in riding off four miles to Trowbridge to give notice to the Police that his child had been stolen, I think it perfectly consistent under the circumstances and the most natural course for him to have taken as it would in my opinion have been much more suspicious had he remained at home, a partial search of the premises having been made before and was being continued at the time of his departure.'

There were contradictory accounts of how long it took Samuel to make the trip to Trowbridge, and of whether Peacock caught up with him before or after he summoned Foley. The version in the Somerset and Wilts Journal of 7 July had it that Peacock overtook Kent before he reached Trowbridge, and that Kent returned instantly, while the clergyman rode on to the town to fetch Foley and his men. Since Kent was away for an hour, and Trowbridge was just four or five miles from Road, this left a lot of time unaccounted for. Could Kent have been using that time to dispose of a murder weapon or other evidence? A month later the Journal corrected its original story: Kent was on his way back to Road when Peacock accosted him, it reported, and he had already informed Foley of the loss of the child. This account – which concurred with the first published version of these events, in the Bath Chronicle of 5 July – made the timings more reasonable.

Some of the villagers spoke of Kent as an arrogant, bad-tempered master who was either rude or lascivious towards his servants, more than a hundred of whom were said to have passed through Road Hill House since he had moved in. But Whicher found him a decent, even sentimental man. 'As regards his moral character,' wrote Whicher, 'I cannot find that there is anything against him, and I am informed by the Servants now in the family, and by those who have left that he and Mrs Kent lived in perfect harmony, and one of them (the monthly nurse) stated that she considered him foolishly fond and indulgent towards her, and doatingly fond of the deceased child which I fear led to his untimely death.'

Another suspect was William Nutt, who had seemed to predict his own discovery of Saville's body. He had a grudge against Samuel, who had prosecuted a member of his family for stealing apples from the Road Hill orchard. Some named Nutt as Elizabeth Gough's imagined lover. 'I do not think there are grounds for the suspicion entertained relative to the witness "Nutt" who found the child,' Whicher wrote, 'as it appears very natural that he would have made the remark of "looking for a dead child as well as a living one" as at that time he and Benger had searched other places and were then going to search the privy.' As for the suggestion 'that he was improperly connected with the Nursemaid, there is not the slightest grounds for that suspicion, as she in the first place was not acquainted with him and in the next place I do not suppose she hardly ever spoke to him nor would condescend to speak to him in any way much more as an admirer, as she is rather a superior girl for her station in looks and demeanour, while on the other hand "Nutt" is a slovenly dirty man, weakly, asthmatical, and lame'.

Whicher steadfastly defended Gough's innocence. He said he saw nothing in her conduct to make her a likely suspect. This ignored her strange contradictions about the time at which she became aware that Saville's blanket was missing: at first she said she had noticed before his body was found, then that she noticed only afterwards. But if this was a lie rather than a confusion, it seemed a pointless one. There was no need for Gough to conceal her knowledge that the blanket had been taken – it would have been natural for her to check the bedding carefully. By changing her story, she only drew suspicion to herself. A similar ambiguity hung over her account of why she did not raise the alarm when she noticed Saville was missing at 5 a.m.: her delay seemed odd; yet if she had been guilty, she would surely not have brought it up at all. Some thought it suspicious that Gough had not mentioned Saville's absence to Emily Doel, her assistant, just before seven on the morning of his disappearance; Whicher thought her silence 'seems to tell in her favour', because it indicated that she really did believe the boy's mother had taken him, and that there was no cause for alarm. He also pointed to the innocence implied by the words she used when she roused Mrs Kent at 7.15: 'Are the children awake?'

The police in Isleworth, Gough's home town, had been directed to make inquiries about her character, and the report they sent on 19 July accorded with Whicher's perceptions: she 'is well known to be respectable, quick, kind, good tempered and very fond of children'. As for her supposed lover, the detective could find no evidence 'that she was even acquainted with any male person, either at Road, or the Neighbourhood'.

Some people speculated that Mrs Holley had destroyed Constance's nightdress in order to incriminate the girl and protect William Nutt, who was married to one of her daughters – the fullest version of this theory identified five conspirators: Nutt, Holley, Benger (whom Samuel Kent had apparently once accused of overcharging him for coal), Emma Sparks (the nursemaid who testified about the bedsocks, and had been dismissed by Samuel the previous year) and an unnamed man whom Samuel had prosecuted for fishing in the river. There was little evidence against any of them, other than the mildly suspicious fact that Mrs Holley claimed to have heard a rumour before Monday, 2 July that a nightdress was missing. Whicher had an explanation for this: 'The rumour about the nightdress . . . must have related to Mary Ann's stained nightdress, which the police had confiscated and examined but which had that morning been returned to her.'

On Sunday, Samuel Kent was given permission to visit his daughter in prison. He was accompanied to Devizes, another Wiltshire wool town, by William Dunn, a widowed solicitor born in east London and living in Frome. (Rowland Rodway had resigned as Samuel's legal representative because he believed Constance was guilty; he later agreed to represent Mrs Kent, who must have shared his view.) This case was far outside Dunn's regular remit. In the county court the previous month he had represented a man who had been sold a faulty turnip-cutter, and another whose cow had developed a lump as fat as two fists after being 'pogged' (poked with a stick) by a rival dairy farmer.

When they reached the gaol – designed like a wheel, with the governor's office at the hub and a hundred cells radiating out from it – Samuel found himself unable to face his daughter and sent Dunn to her cell in his stead. His reasons were inscrutable. The Times said that 'the feelings of the father overcame him, and he was unable to undergo the interview', but did not make clear whether these were Samuel's feelings as a father to Constance or to Saville: he might have collapsed under the weight of his pity for Constance, or of his horror at her. The Bath Chronicle echoed the uncertainty: 'he could not bear the ordeal of an interview with his daughter, and, therefore, remained in an adjoining room, while the solicitor conferred with Miss Kent'. It could be that Samuel recoiled from any discussion of his son's death. In the weeks since the murder, his strategy had seemed to be silence. 'Mr Kent has never alluded to the murder to me from first to last,' Elizabeth Gough remarked later. 'The young ladies have, and so has Miss Constance, but not Mr Kent. Master William has frequently cried over it.'

When Dunn visited Constance in her cell, she repeatedly told him that she was innocent. The solicitor sent to a local hotel for a comfortable mattress, to make her week in gaol more pleasant, and arranged for her to be provided with special rations.

A prison officer afterwards briefed the waiting reporters. 'We are credibly informed that Miss Kent's demeanour in the prison was calm and quiet,' said the Western Morning News, 'and that she appeared to be conscious of her innocence and ashamed of being placed in such a position.'

'We understand she was perfectly calm and collected throughout the interview,' said the Bath Chronicle, 'as, indeed, she has continued to be since her incarceration, although the painfulness of her awfully critical position had, very naturally, wrought somewhat of a change in her features; still, her general demeanour has made such an impression upon the officials of the Gaol, that they do not hesitate to state that her appearance, at all events, bespeaks her innocence of this horrid transaction.'