The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

CHAPTER TWELVE

DETECTIVE-FEVER

London, July–August 1860

Whicher reached Paddington station in the afternoon of Saturday, 28 July, and hailed a cab to take him and his luggage to Pimlico – probably to 31 Holywell Street, off Millbank Row. This was the house in which his niece, Sarah Whicher, an unmarried housekeeper of thirty, rented a room, and it was the address he gave as his own three years later.^* In the 1850s, his friend and colleague Charley Field lived at number 27, with his wife and mother-in-law, while Whicher's niece Mary Ann worked as a servant to a family of upholsterers at number 40.

The district was changing swiftly. To the west, Victoria railway station was almost complete, and to the north Sir Charles Barry's gothic Palace of Westminster was also nearly finished – the 'Big Ben' clock had been put in place a year before, though as yet it had only one hand and no chime. On the new Westminster bridge thirteen limelight lamps had been installed that summer: these were powered by a series of tiny explosions of oxygen and hydrogen that made the sticks of lime so hot that they burnt white, giving off a brilliant incandescence. Dickens visited Mill-bank one warm day in January 1861, and headed west along the river: 'I walked straight on for three miles on a splendid broad esplanade overhanging the Thames, with immense factories, railway work, and what not, erected on it, and with the strangest beginnings and ends of wealthy streets pushing themselves into the very Thames. When I was a rower on that river it was all broken ground and ditch, with here and there a public house or two, an old mill, and a tall chimney. I had never seen it in any state of transition, though I suppose myself to know this rather large city as well as anyone in it.'

The part of Millbank in which Whicher lived was a noisy, industrial riverside neighbourhood of mean yellow terraces, dominated by the great six-pronged flower of Millbank prison. The novelist Anthony Trollope described the area as 'extremely dull, and one might almost say, ugly'. Holywell Street was separated from the prison's boundary wall only by gasometers, a sawmill and a marble works. Number 31 backed onto these, and faced a huge brewery and a burial ground. Broadwood's piano factory lay a block north, and Seager's gin distillery a block south. Just beyond the distillery, coal barges were moored at the wharfs, while on the far side of the river lay the vast potteries and putrid bone-grinding factories of Lambeth. Paddle steamers carried Londoners to and from work, churning up the sewage poured into the Thames – the air was thick with the stench rising off the river.

On Monday, 30 July, Jack Whicher went to his office at Scotland Yard, just over a mile north of Holywell Street, along the Thames past the noxious slums of the 'Devil's Acre' and then the high buildings of Westminster and Whitehall. The public entrance to the police headquarters was in Great Scotland Yard, though its address was 4 Whitehall Place. There was a large clock on the wall that looked over the yard, a weathervane on the roof, and fifty rooms within. These had housed the Metropolitan Police administration since 1829, and the detective force (in three small chambers) since its formation in 1842. The boarding house that Dolly Williamson shared with other single officers stood in a corner of Great Scotland Yard, behind Groves the fishmongers. In another corner was a public house, outside which a drunken old woman sold pigs' trotters on Saturday nights. To the north of the yard was Trafalgar Square, and to the south the river.

Sir Richard Mayne, whose office was also in Scotland Yard, rated Whicher above all other policemen: in the late 1850s 'every important case was placed in his hands by Sir Richard', reported Tim Cavanagh in his memoirs. Commissioner Mayne, now sixty-six, 'was about five feet eight inches, spare, but well-built', wrote Cavanagh; he had a 'thin face, a very hard compressed mouth, grey hair and whiskers, an eye like that of a hawk, and a slightly limping gait, due, I believe, to rheumatic affection of the hip-joint'. He was 'respected but feared by all in the service'. When Whicher and Williamson got back to work, Mayne duly signed their expenses, including claims for extra pay for being out of town (eleven shillings a day for an inspector, six shillings for a sergeant). The Commissioner passed Whicher a slew of letters from members of the public proposing solutions to the Road Hill case. The letters, addressed to Mayne or the Home Secretary, kept coming throughout the month.

'I beg to offer you an idea which suggested itself to me and which might tend to unravel the mystery,' wrote a Mr Farrer. 'I send it to you in perfect confidence, and hope you will keep my name as its author, a strict secret . . . That Eliz Gough the Nurse may have had William Nutt passing the night with her, and the child (FS Kent) waking up, and fearing he might alarm his parents by crying out, they strangled him, and whilst Nutt conveyed the body to the closet she remade the bed.' Mr Farrer added a postscript: 'As Willm Nutt is connected by marriage with the Laundress' family he may have been enabled to abstract the night dress so as to throw suspicion on another party.'

The theory that Nutt and Gough had killed the boy was, overwhelmingly, the most popular. A writer who thought Constance 'most cruelly used and made a scapegoat' argued that the medical evidence indicated a knife with a 'skew point' had been used in the murder – 'very likely a shoemakers knife very much used.' Nutt was a shoemaker. 'The throat was cut from one ear to the other dividing it all down to the spine, this is more indicative of the power and determination of a man than a nervous girl of 16,' and, 'Shoemakers often have two knives and one might be down the Closet.' A correspondent from Mile End took a similar view, as did the chaplain of the Bath Union Workhouse, Bath, the master of the workhouse in Axbridge, Somersetshire, Mr Minot of Southwark and a Mr Dalton, writing from a hotel in Manchester. A tailor from Cheshire wanted Gough 'put under strickt servilance'.

A curate from Lancashire, himself a magistrate, gave the fullest account of the theory:

Though the suspicions I am about to mention have frequently from the commencement of the enquiry been broached in my own family, yet I should have thought it unfair to give them wider range had not the public press (the Morning Post) hinted at the individual named – I mean in the matter of the Kent murder.

Is it not possible that the nursemaid may have had a paramour either in the house or so well acquainted with the premises that he could gain ready access in the night . . . Of course, from what we have heard one's thoughts fall at once on Nutt . . . If he be an admirer of the girl, should not medical examination establish whether she was likely to have received nightly visits or not? He had all means at command – knives &c – he had the night to work in. He is a connection of the laundress and if the laundress knew of anything going on between these two a suspicion flashed for a moment upon her mind, especially as he had found the body so easily – may she not have been the one to conceal the night-dress and so immediately changed the direction of anything which might then exist in the form of suspicion and fasten it upon that eccentric Miss Kent who sometime ago had run away in man's attire. All these are of course mere suspicions – but when all seems so wide of the mark so far – it leads one to think that the persons employed have gone to work with an a priori view of the case, and rejected or at any rate neglected what did not tell in favour of their own suspicions . . . having had a little experience on the Bench in rather a wild district I have learned to study people's possible motives more than I should otherwise have done.

In early August Sir George Cornewall Lewis, the Home Secretary, received two letters identifying Elizabeth Gough and a lover as the murderers. One was from a Guildford barrister, who wrote patronisingly of Whicher's efforts: 'A policeman may be a good hand at discovering a criminal: but it requires intellect and a mind enlarged by observation to detect a crime and unravel a mystery.' The other letter was from Sir John Eardley Wilmot of Bath, a baronet and former barrister, who took such a passionate interest in the case that he persuaded Samuel Kent to let him visit Road Hill House and interview a few of the inmates. Horatio Waddington, the formidable Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office, forwarded the letters to Mayne. 'This is now the favourite theory,' Waddington wrote on one of the envelopes, in a spiky hand. 'I should like to hear Inspector Whicher's remarks upon these two letters, surely if the girl had a lover, somebody must have known or at least suspected it.' Once Whicher had complied, with a report outlining his counter-arguments ('I fear that Sir John has not gone sufficiently into the facts . . .'), Waddington agreed: 'I rather incline to the opinion of the police man.'

When Eardley Wilmot sent another letter, this time suggesting that Gough had a soldier boyfriend, Waddington wrote on the envelope: 'I never heard of this soldier before. I don't know where he picked him up.' The Permanent Under-Secretary scratched his comments on the ensuing stream of letters from the baronet: 'A strange infatuation as it seems to me'; 'This Gentleman has a monomania on the subject'; and 'Does he wish to be employed as a Detective, or what?'

The letter-writers suggested a few other suspects. George Larkin of Wapping confided:

Sir, For three successive weeks I have had the Frome Murder in my Mind every time I wake and cannot get rid of the thought of it. That Mr Kent is the Murderer has appeared to me in the following manner and that his offering a reward is all a delusion (Bosh) my impression is that Mr Kent has gone to the Nurse Maids Room for some Purpose, that the child has woke and recognised its Father that the Father through Fear of an Exposure in the Family strangled it in the Room after the Nurse Maid had gone to sleep that he there carried it to the Closet and cut the Throat.

A resident of Blandford, Dorset, wrote, 'I firmly believe that Mrs Kent killed the child at Road,' while Sarah Cunningham of west London claimed that 'step by step I can trace the murderer in the brother of William Nutt and the son-in-law of Mrs Holly the Laundress'.

Lieutenant-Colonel Maugham wrote from Hanover Square, London,

With grace allow me to suggest . . . that inquiries be made as to whether chloroform was kept in the house where the child was murdered . . . if not, whether any had been purchased in the neighbourhood, or at the towns, or villages, where the children of Mr Kent's family had been at school . . . I would further suggest whether any weapon was taken from or purchased in the neighbourhood of the schools.

In a note to Mayne, Whicher observed that Joshua Parsons had not detected any trace of chloroform in Saville's body. 'As regards the suggestion that a weapon might have been purchased in the Neighbourhood or brought from School by Miss Kent, inquiry has been made on that point already.'

On most of the letters from the public Whicher scrawled 'There is nothing in this to assist the enquiry'; occasionally he expanded, impatiently, 'all the points having been duly considered previously by me', or 'I saw all the persons alluded to while I was on the spot and am satisfied they are not connected with the murder.'

The only letter to offer information, rather than speculation, was from William Gee, of Bath: 'As to Mr Kent himself I learn from the widow of a schoolmaster a friend of mine that 4 years ago he was so straitened as not to be able to pay the Bills of the Son £15 or £20 half-yearly. I cannot reconcile his occupying so handsome a mansion (second to few in the neighborhood) with the way in which he [illegible] a poor Teacher.' Samuel's failure to pay his son's school bills suggested he was as cash-strapped as Joseph Stapleton implied; it also indicated a carelessness about William's welfare.

The letters to Scotland Yard were the fruit of a new English obsession with detection. The public was fascinated by murder, especially when it was domestic and mysterious, and was becoming engrossed by the investigation of murder, too. 'I like a good murder that can't be found out,' says Mrs Hopkinson in Emily Eden's novel The Semi-Detached House (1859). 'That is, of course, it is very shocking, but I like to hear about it.' The Road Hill case took the national enthusiasm for baffling crimes to a new level. In The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins dubbed this mania 'a detective-fever'.

While the press and the public condemned Whicher's prurient, impertinent speculations, they freely made their own. The first detective in English literature, like them, was an armchair detective: Poe's Auguste Dupin solved crimes not by searching for clues at the scene but by picking them out of newspaper reports. The time of the professional police detective had barely begun; the era of the amateur was already in full flower.

In an anonymous penny pamphlet printed in Manchester – the sixteen-page Who Committed the Road Murder? Or, The Track of Blood Followed – 'a Disciple of Edgar Allan Poe' poured scorn on Whicher's investigation. 'Hitherto the brilliant "Detective's" effort has been to associate that nightdress with Miss Constance Kent; to prove that her guilt is wrapped up in it! and to find out where it is. All wrong! I perceive her purity in its loss; and, in its loss, another's guilt. The thief purloined that dress to shield herself, by casting suspicion on one of her own sex.' The pamphleteer had already absorbed one tenet of detective fiction: the solution must always be labyrinthine, indirect, paradoxical. The lost nightdress must mean just the opposite of what it seemed to mean: 'I perceive her purity in its loss'.

The author wondered if the village had been searched thoroughly for bloodstained clothing, if the Road Hill House chimneys had been examined for scraps of burnt evidence, if the records of local knife-sellers had been checked. He or she used an unsettling piece of imaginative reconstruction to argue that, since Saville's throat was cut from left to right, the murderer must be left-handed: 'Draw an imaginary line on the body of a chubby child . . . An ordinary person, committing such a crime, would (in an ordinary way) place his left hand on the child's breast and cut towards him with his right hand.'

The newspapers too made their conjectures. The Globe blamed William Nutt, the Frome Times pointed at Elizabeth Gough, the Bath Express hinted at William Kent's guilt. The Bath Chronicle – in an article that provoked a libel suit – fixed on Samuel:

If the hypothesis that a girl had an illicit intrigue, and that the other party to that intrigue preferred murder to exposure, be well founded, we must unhappily endeavour to find some one to whom such exposure would have been ruin, or at all events would have produced a state of things so terrible to himself that in a moment of wild terror he seized the most dreadful means of avoiding it. Who is there to whom such terms would at all apply? . . . at that strange, pale hour of morning when we have all the power of thought, almost painfully vivid, but are without the same will and wise resolution which come when we arise and buckle ourselves to the duties of the day . . . A weak, bad, terrified, violent man sees a child between him and ruin – and the fearful deed is madly done.

So far, the identity of the 'violent man' was at least partly ambiguous, but in the closing sentences of the piece the author all but named Samuel Kent:

A child is lost from its bed-room, not an exposed one, but upstairs, and in the penetralia of the mansion, at an hour when no visitor from outside can have approached the room, and a man, to whom that child should have been most dear, a man who should be most intense and practical in his researches after it, adopts the frivolous, novel-reader's idea that the child has been stolen by gipsies! Had he said that it had been flown away with by angels, the suggestion under the circumstances could not have been more ridiculous.

There was a consensus that sex was the motive for the murder – more particularly, that the catastrophe sprang from the fact that a child had witnessed a sexual transgression. In Whicher's view, Constance avenged the sexual affair between her father and her former governess by destroying the offspring of that liaison. In the popular view, it was Saville who witnessed a sexual encounter, and was killed for what he saw.

The dominant theme in the press was bewilderment. So much was known and yet so little could be concluded: the columns of coverage only amplified the mystery. 'Here our knowledge ends,' ran an editorial in the Daily Telegraph. 'Here our inquiries are baffled. We stumble on the threshold, and the vast vista of the crime lies all undiscovered beyond.' The story behind the murder was momentous, but hidden from view. Road Hill House may have been searched from cellar to cockloft but, symbolically, its door was shut fast.

In the absence of a solution, Saville's death became a pretext for unfettered speculation; it let loose a kind of wild imagining. There was no knowing what hidden identities might emerge at 'that strange, pale hour of morning'. The characters in the case had come to have double selves: Constance Kent and Elizabeth Gough were angels in the house, or she-devils; Samuel was the loving father, overwhelmed with grief and insult, or a ruthless, sex-crazed tyrant; Whicher was a visionary, or a vulgar fool.

An editorial in the Morning Post showed how suspicion still fell on just about everyone in the house, and several beyond it. Samuel or William might have killed Saville, the piece argued, or Mrs Kent might have done it, 'under one of those delusions to which women in her condition [that is, pregnancy] are sometimes liable'. Saville could have been murdered by 'one or more of the juveniles in the family, in a passion of jealousy; or, by anyone who wished to wound the parents in the tenderest point'. The writer wondered about the antecedents of Sarah Kerslake, the knives of William Nutt, the lies of Hester Holley. His imagination took him into the dips and hollows of Road Hill House, its tenderest points. 'Have the wells been searched, the ponds, the drains, the chimnies, the trunks of trees, the soft earth in the garden?'

'Dark as the mystery is,' he wrote, 'we are persuaded it turns on the nightgown and the knife.'

Within days of reaching London, Jack Whicher and Dolly Williamson were set to work on a fresh murder case, another domestic horror show that featured nightgowns and a knife. 'No sooner do we hear of one atrocious and cruel murder being committed,' observed the News of the World, 'and that it is not likely to be discovered, than we are startled at finding that the impunity is causing its usual result, and murder upon murder springs up in different directions, as though it were some fearful epidemic suddenly bursting forth.' An unsolved murder seemed to be infectious. By failing to catch one killer, a detective might unleash a host of them.

On Tuesday, 31 July, the police were called to a house in Walworth, a district of south London between Camberwell and the river. The landlord and a lodger had heard a scream and a thump soon after dawn. When the local police officers reached the house, they found a short, very pale young man in a nightshirt standing over the dead bodies of his mother, his two brothers (aged eleven and six) and a woman of twenty-seven. All were dressed for bed. 'This is my mother's doing,' said the man. 'She came to the bedside where my brother and I were sleeping. She killed him with a knife and made a stab at me. In my own defence I wrenched the knife from her hand and killed her, if she is dead.' The survivor of the massacre was William Youngman. When he was arrested on suspicion of murder, he said: 'Very well.'

Whicher and Williamson were assigned to assist Inspector Dann of the Lambeth division. Unlike Foley, Dann was an able officer, and he remained in charge of the investigation. The police soon established that Youngman had been engaged to marry the young woman, Mary Streeter, and had taken out a £100 insurance policy on her life six days before she died. Whicher found that the banns to the couple's marriage had already been published at the parish church. It emerged that Youngman had purchased the murder weapon two weeks before the killings – he claimed he had bought it to cut his bread and cheese.

There were similarities between the murders at Road and at Walworth: the composure of the chief suspects, the extreme violence towards members of the immediate family, the intimations of madness. But The Times found the differences were greater. The London killing had a 'repulsive literality and distinctness', it argued, appearing to accept that Youngman's motive for slaughtering his family was purely financial. 'The public mind is neither harrowed by suspense nor excited by uncertainty.' The solution was too obvious, and the crime meant nothing beyond its own ugly horror. There was nothing missing. The Road case, by contrast, posed a tantalising riddle, and its solution seemed of urgent, personal concern to many middle-class families.

The News of the World concurred that there was something about the Road Hill murder that 'seems to set it altogether apart, in a class by itself'. Yet the newspaper saw a disturbing connection between the various vicious murders of 1860 – all were virtually motiveless: 'you are astonished, at once, by the brutality of the crime and the smallness of the motive'. Both the Road and the Walworth killers seemed almost, but not quite, insane: their ferocity seemed disproportionate to any possible gain, and yet they had carefully planned to commit and then conceal their crimes. The newspaper remarked of the Walworth murders, 'Either, then, this crime is an outbreak of insanity, or else it is the most horrible and appalling murder that has ever been committed by human hands.'

Just over a fortnight after the investigation began, Youngman was tried at the Old Bailey. He 'appeared perfectly unconcerned', reported The Times, 'exhibited the most extraordinary coolness and self-possession, and . . . did not evince the least emotion'. When the jury convicted him of murder, he said, 'I am not guilty,' turned around and 'walked with a firm step out of the dock'. The suggestions that he was insane were rejected, and he was sentenced to death. As soon as Youngman reached his cell he demanded supper. He ate it with gusto. While he waited in prison for his execution a lady sent him a religious tract, on which she had underlined the passages she thought applicable to his case. 'I wish she had sent me something to eat instead,' he remarked, 'as I could do a fowl and a piece of pickled pork.'

Whicher's part in the Walworth case went almost unnoted in the press, which continued to publish indignant criticisms of his investigation at Road Hill. As he scribbled his ripostes on the letters that arrived at Scotland Yard, he had to stay silent on the public discussion of his conduct.

On 15 August, the day before Youngman's trial, Whicher was denounced in Parliament. Sir George Bowyer, the leading Roman Catholic spokesman in the Commons, complained about the quality of Britain's police inspectors, using Whicher as his example. 'The recent investigation with regard to the Road murder afforded striking proof of the unfitness of some of the present officers,' he said. 'An inspector named Whicher was sent down to inquire into the matter. Upon the slightest possible grounds, merely because one of her nightgowns happened to be missing, that officer arrested a young lady who lived in the house where the murder was committed, and assured the magistrates that he would be prepared in a few days to produce evidence which would bring home the murder to her.' He accused Whicher of acting 'in a most objectionable manner. After all his boasting of the evidence he could produce, the young lady was discharged by the magistrates.' Sir George Cornewall Lewis, the Home Secretary, mildly defended the detective, arguing that 'the officer was justified in the course he adopted'.

The national mood, though, was with Bowyer. 'We can unhesitatingly state the public feeling,' claimed the Frome Times. 'An officer who can play at hap-hazard with such an awful charge as that of wilful murder, and can promise that which he must have known he could not perform, cannot expect to be looked on otherwise than with distrust.' 'The Whicher theory has failed to throw any light whatever upon the thick darkness of this horrible mystery,' said the Newcastle Daily Chronicle. 'A new clue must be discovered before justice can thread the mazes of the labyrinth of Road.' The Morning Star was dismissive of the 'frivolous, gossiping, and utterly vapid school-girl testimony' upon which Whicher had relied.

The Bath Chronicle criticised 'the slender speculations which were loosely strung together and adduced as evidence . . . the experiment made, has been a fearfully cruel one'. In an essay in the Cornhill Magazine, the distinguished lawyer Sir James Fitzjames Stephen argued that the cost of trying to solve a murder – the damage wrought by the exposure, the police intrusion – was sometimes too high: 'The circumstances of the Road murder are extremely curious, because they happen to afford an illustration of the amount of this price so exact that had it been committed on purpose it could hardly have been better arranged.' Since no other culprit could be found, Whicher was blamed for the muddle and mystery of Road. The 'Disciple of Edgar Allan Poe' played on the sinister associations of his name when he noted in his pamphlet that 'Constance is recognised as innocent, though metropolitan witchery once jeopardised her.'

One of the most damaging charges laid against Jack Whicher was that he was driven by greed. The early detectives were often presented as glamorous rogues, only a step away from the villains they sought. The French felon-turned-detective Eugène Vidocq, whose heavily fictionalised memoirs were translated into English in 1828 and dramatised for the London stage in 1852, had breezily swapped villainy for police work when it served his financial interests.

The rewards that detectives could earn were descendants of the eighteenth-century 'blood money' paid to thief-takers or informants. In August 1860 the Western Daily Press scornfully alluded to Whicher's 'zeal sharpened by the offer of a handsome reward'. A letter from 'Justice' in the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette compared Whicher to Jack Ketch, a notoriously clumsy seventeenth-century hangman who inflicted great suffering on his victims: Whicher was 'utterly irresponsible', wrote 'Justice', 'tempted with the vision of £200 reward, getting a young lady of 15 incarcerated in a common gaol for a week'. Like many correspondents, 'Justice' showed distaste for the working-class fellow who had meddled in middle-class affairs. The detectives were greedy and inept because they were not gentlemen. Perhaps Whicher was so vehemently condemned because he was doing in fact what the legions of new newspaper readers were doing in the mind's eye – peeping and prying, goggling and wondering at the sins and sufferings of others. The Victorians saw in the detective a picture of themselves, and in collective self-revulsion they cast him out.

A few voices were raised in Whicher's defence. The ever-loyal Somerset and Wilts Journal criticised Edlin's 'ingenious bamboozling', and the 'cunning trick' whereby he had distorted the theory about the nightgown. The Daily Telegraph agreed: 'We cannot concur with Mr Edlin in his fervid denunciations of the cruelty of arresting this young lady . . . To believe the ad captandum reasoning of this young lady's advocate, the important point of her garment not being forthcoming has been satisfactorily cleared up; but the contrary would seem to be the case. Where is the nightgown? . . . Far different would it have been if a bedgown stained with blood had been discovered. Some of our readers may remember the awful circumstance of the gory sheet in the story of Beatrice Cenci. That one link would complete a chain of evidence that would speedily change into a halter of hemp.' Beatrice Cenci was a sixteenth-century Roman noblewoman executed for killing her father; in the nineteenth century she had become something of a romantic heroine, the beautiful avenger of a violent, incestuous bully. A bloody bedsheet provided proof of her guilt. Shelley cast Beatrice as an impassioned rebel in his verse drama The Cenci (1819). A character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860) describes her as 'a fallen angel, fallen and yet sinless'.

The Northern Daily Express remarked that 'The nightdress of Constance Kent, with plain frills – the wearer not having reached the years of maturity and lace – bids fair to become as famous as the ruffs of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespere, the snuff-coloured suit of Dr Johnson, Cowper's nightcap as painted by Romney, or the striped waistcoat of Burns.'

Henry Ludlow, the chairman of the Wiltshire magistrates, continued to lend Whicher his support. 'Mr Inspector Whicher's conduct in regard to the Road Murder has been much blamed,' he wrote in a letter to Mayne. 'Mr Ludlow feels much pleasure in bearing testimony to his good judgment and ability in the case. I fully agree with Mr Whicher as to the perpetrator of that most mysterious murder . . . he was perfectly justified in acting as he did.' Perhaps Ludlow felt guilty for the part he had played in encouraging Whicher to arrest Constance. All the blame for the case had attached to the detective.

'I beg further to report,' began Whicher on Monday, 30 July, 'for the information of Sir R. Mayne in reference to the murder of "Francis Saville Kent" at Road Wilts on the night of the 29th June that the re-examination of "Constance Kent" took place at the Temperance Hall Road on Friday Last . . .'

Over sixteen pages, in a forward-thrusting hand, Whicher argued his case. He irritably discounted the various rival theories advanced by the letter-writers and the journalists. He expressed his frustrations with the local police investigation: the evidence against Constance 'would have been far more conclusive', he said, 'if the Police had ascertained as soon as they arrived, how many night gowns she ought to have had in her possession'. If Foley had only 'taken the hint given' by Parsons as to the nightdress on Constance's bed appearing very clean, and had 'interrogated her at once as to how many she had in her possession I believe the blood stained bed gown would have been missed at once and possibly found'. Constance's lawyer, Whicher complained, had 'said that the mystery respecting the missing night dress had been cleared up, but such is not the case, as one of her three which she brought home from school is still missing and I have possession for the present of the remaining two'. He suspected that a confession would come soon but 'would no doubt be made to some of the family, and then possibly not made known'.

Whicher signed but did not send the document. Shortly afterwards he scratched out his signature and continued: 'I beg further to report . . .' and wrote two more pages, expanding and clarifying his findings. And nine days after that, still unable to let the matter rest, he resumed: 'I beg to add the following remarks and explanations . . .' The report that he submitted to Mayne on 8 August – twenty-three pages in total – was strewn with inky underlinings, corrections, adjustments, insertions, asterisks, double asterisks and crossings-out.