The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

WOMEN! HOLD YOUR TONGUES!

November–December 1860

In the first, cold days of November, the strangest inquiry yet opened at the Temperance Hall. Thomas Saunders, a barrister and magistrate of Bradford-upon-Avon, Wiltshire, had become convinced that the villagers of Road were in possession of important information about the murder, and he took it upon himself to elicit it from them. Though he was acting entirely on his own initiative, his status as a Wiltshire magistrate gave him an apparent authority, and no one at first challenged his right to investigate the case.

From 3 November onwards, Saunders summoned an array of local people to offer their thoughts and observations, some of it illuminating about the life of the village and of Road Hill House, but nearly all of it utterly irrelevant to the murder. This was the stuff that Whicher had sifted through during his fortnight in Road, the huge bank of rumour and peripheral detail that a police investigation threw up, and that usually never reached the public. Saunders aired these bits and bobs in a distinctly haphazard fashion: 'evidence, if evidence it may be called, was adduced in a most singular and undignified manner', said the Bristol Daily Post. 'On several occasions those present were at no pains to conceal the laughter which the proceedings were calculated to give rise to, and all throughout they seemed to consider that the whole affair was got up for their special amusement, rather than for the elucidation of a mysterious and terrible crime.'

The next two weeks in Road resembled a comic interlude in a tragic play, with Saunders as the buffoon who stumbled onstage to mangle and misunderstand all that had preceded him. He opened and closed the proceedings at whim, forgot the witnesses' names and puffed himself up with mysterious allusions to 'the secrets within my breast', while wandering in and out of the Temperance Hall with a bottle of liquid that according to the Bristol Daily Post 'had very much the appearance of brandy'. Saunders said it was medicine to treat a cold he had caught from a window draught on the premises (he castigated the hall's caretaker, Charles Stokes, for the poor insulation). The magistrate gulped at his potion during the proceedings, and nibbled on biscuits. He frequently interrupted his witnesses by issuing demands that squalling babies be removed from the hall or women silenced: 'Women! Hold your tongues!'

A typical witness was Mrs Quance, an old lady who lived in the cottages by Road Hill House. On Tuesday Saunders examined her about a rumour that she had said that her husband, who worked in the mill at Tellisford, saw Samuel Kent in a field at 5 a.m. on 30 June. She flatly denied it, complaining that the police had already questioned her on the matter.

'I think it is done too clever to be found out,' she added, 'except one of the party "peaches" [informs on another].'

'What has been too cleverly done?' asked Saunders.

'The child-murder.' Then Mrs Quance abruptly rose, shuffled about, said, 'Oh, Lord, I can't stay yer, my boiler's a-goin all the while,' and scampered out, to appreciative hoots from the onlookers.

James Fricker, the plumber and glazier, testified to having been pestered to fix Samuel Kent's lantern in the last week of June: 'It did not strike me at first that there was anything singular in this particular hurry for the lamp in the summer time, but it has since.'

Before Saunders opened his inquiry he had snooped around Road for a few days, and he now reported his observations to the court. One evening, he said, he and a police officer saw a young lady dressed in black, with a white petticoat, heading for Road Hill House. She paused at the gate, walked past it a little way, turned back and went in. A few minutes later Saunders saw a young lady, possibly the same one, combing her hair at an upstairs window. His account of this unremarkable incident drew complaints from the Kent family, and later in the week he apologised, acknowledging that the 'slight trepidation' the lady had shown may have been prompted by her awareness of the 'two strange persons who were watching her movements'. Someone in the audience called out that the young woman was Mary Ann.

The last witness examined by Saunders was Charles Lansdowne, a labourer, 'the pith of whose statement', observed the Frome Times, drily, 'was that he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, and knew nothing, about what had been done at Road Hill House, on the night of 29th June'.

The newspapermen who had been covering the case since July were flabbergasted by Saunders' inquiry. The reporter from the Morning Star, astounded at the 'absurd proceedings' of the 'crackbrained boggler', said he was caught between 'wonder at [Saunders'] audacity and contempt for his folly'. The Bristol Mercury described the magistrate as 'monomaniacal'. Saunders was an unintentional satirist, a caricature of the amateur detective who saw meaning in every banality, every trivial circumstance, who believed that he alone could unravel a mystery that had foxed the professionals. He felt a right to spy, a duty to speculate. He had a keen 'sense of the profound importance of immaterial statements', noticed the Somerset and Wilts Journal, and paid great respect to the letters he received from the public: 'each contains hints of great importance'. He read out several of these letters in court, including one from a fellow barrister who observed: 'You are an ill-conditioned meddling vain old idiot.'

Yet this inquiry uncovered one significant fact. A letter from James Watts, a police sergeant of Frome, prompted Saunders to examine several officers about a discovery the police had made at Road Hill House on the day of the murder, and then concealed. In the Temperance Hall on Thursday, 8 November, he questioned PC Alfred Urch on the matter, and on Friday he took evidence from Sergeant James Watts and Superintendent Foley.

At about five p.m. on 30 June, the audience heard, Watts had found a woman's shift, wrapped in newspaper, in the kitchen boiler hole, the fire-hole beneath the hotplate. Urch and PC Dallimore saw it too: 'It was dry, sir,' said Urch to Saunders, 'but very dirty . . . as if it had been worn a long time . . . It had some blood about it . . . I did not touch it myself. Sergeant Watts unfolded it, looked at it, and carried it to the coach house.' Was it coarse or fine, Saunders asked. 'I should think, sir, it was one of the servants' . . . We remarked, two or three of us who were there, that it was a small one.'

A shift was a linen garment worn under a dress in the day, or by itself at night. It could fall to the knee, the shin or the ankle; its sleeves were usually short, and its style plain. A nightdress was typically a fuller garment that reached to the floor, with sleeves to the wrists, strips of lace or embroidery at the collar, cuffs or hem. There was a borderland, where a shift and a simple nightdress might be confused. It was at least possible that the item in the boiler hole was the missing nightdress.

'Was it a night-shift or a day-shift?' Saunders asked Urch, to laughter from the audience.

'Well, sir, it was a shift.'

'Have you a sufficient knowledge of shifts?' At this the onlookers howled with merriment. 'Silence!' cried Saunders. 'Silence!'

Watts examined the shift in the coach house. It was 'very bloody', he said. 'It was dry then, but I should not think the stains had been on it a long time . . . Some of the blood was on the front and some on the back. I wrapped up the shift again, and as I was coming out I saw Mr Kent just outside the stable-door in the yard. He asked me what I had found, and said he must have it seen, and that Dr Parsons must see it. I did not let Mr Kent see it, but handed it over to Mr Foley.'

Foley immediately set to concealing the discovery of the shift. He 'shuddered', he explained to the court, 'to think the man who found it was so foolish as to expose it'. He was sure that the stains were innocent, and that the shift had been hidden, in shame, by a servant. A medical man – Stapleton – had confirmed his own view that the stains had 'natural causes' (that is, they were marks of menstrual blood).

Saunders asked Foley: 'Did he [Stapleton] look at it with a microscope?'

Foley replied indignantly: 'No, I should think he did not!'

The Superintendent had then given the garment to PC Dallimore, who took it back to the Stallard Street police station.

In September Watts had run into Dallimore at the Road Hill cheese and cattle fair, and asked what had become of the shift. Dallimore told him that he had returned the 'shimmy' (an Anglicisation of 'chemise') to the kitchen on Monday, the day of the inquest. He planned to put it back in the boiler hole but was surprised by the cook entering the scullery, and so thrust it down the side of the boiler. Straight afterwards the nursemaid, just back from walking the two little girls, suggested he search the roof above the kitchen, and he did so – he had to clamber through a window overgrown with ivy. When he returned to the kitchen half an hour later the shift had vanished, presumably retrieved by its owner.

If the distinction between types of shift was bewildering territory for the police officers, so were the distinctions between types of blood. The ways of identifying menstrual blood and female underwear were hazy, all the more so when the items to be examined were whisked away so quickly. Much of the confusion about the underclothes and their stains was caused by embarrassment.

On the Thursday that the boiler-hole story came out, by strange chance, the private investigator Ignatius Pollaky arrived in Road to sit in on Saunders' proceedings. Pollaky, a Hungarian, was 'superintendent' of an inquiry office run by Charley Field, friend to Charles Dickens and Jack Whicher, who had retired from the Metropolitan Police in 1852. Private inquiry agents, as they were known, were a new breed, some of them retired detective officers such as Field. (Field briefly had his police pension withdrawn in the 1850s for improperly continuing to use his former title, Detective-Inspector, in his private practice.) The agents' main business was the sleazy stuff of the divorce court – divorce had been legalised in 1858, but proof of adultery was required if a man was to rid himself of his wife; a woman needed to prove cruelty to end a marriage.

'The mysterious Mr Pollaky', as The Times described him, at first refused to speak to Saunders or to the police. Over the weekend he was seen in Bath and Bradford. The next week he visited Frome, Westbury and Warminster, made a trip back to London (probably to report his findings and take further instructions) and then returned to Road. 'There is good reason for believing that his direct object is not the detection of the murderer,' said the Bristol Daily Post; rather, this paper's reporter gathered, the agent was there to keep an eye on Saunders. Other newspapers confirmed this: his job was to intimidate rather than to investigate. Perhaps Field sent Pollaky down to Road as a favour to Whicher, whose findings Saunders was tending to undermine. Pollaky took notes whenever Saunders made particularly eccentric statements, and he succeeded in unnerving the magistrate. The Frome Times reported that 'we were informed that Mr Saunders had an interview with that gentleman . . . and asked if it were true that his mission was to collect evidence for a lunatico inquirendo against him. We understand that Mr Pollaky declined to reply.' Now even the investigators of the Road Hill murder feared accusations of insanity. Saunders' inquiry was suspended on 15 November.

Inadvertently, Saunders had furthered Whicher's case. When a report about the bloody shift appeared in The Times, Whicher sent Sir Richard Mayne a memorandum drawing his attention to the news item. 'Seen,' Mayne wrote on the memo the next day.

There was a danger that the investigations into the murder were now doing more to conceal than to reveal the solution. 'The consciences of those who may be privy to the secret are not likely to have become more sensitive or their invention less fertile in the course of the numerous proceedings which have already taken place,' observed The Times. 'Every futile investigation is a gain to the guilty party; it shows him what gaps should be stopped and what contradictions avoided.' The writer worried about the lack of method in detective work – its reliance on imagination, intuition, guesswork – and yearned for a more dispassionate procedure: 'it is well known that detectives begin by assuming the guilt of some one, and then try how far their hypothesis will fit the circumstances. There is still room for the application of a more scientific process, and it may be that the facts, more calmly and impartially interrogated, will tell their own story.' The Saturday Review echoed this, calling for a 'more severe Baconian process' of deduction from empirical facts: rather than start with a theory, the detective should simply make 'a rigid, impartial, and unimpassioned registration of phenomena'. The perfect detective, it seemed, was not so much a scientist as a machine.

The persistent feeling against Samuel Kent, which underpinned Saunders' inquiry, was evident in a sixpenny pamphlet by the anonymous 'A Barrister-at-Law'. The author identified himself with the 'amateur detectives, keen-witted, forensic readers of the newspapers, local quidnuncs and sharp-eyed idlers', and listed fifteen questions about the behaviour of Samuel Kent on the day of the murder (for instance, 'Why did he order his carriage and seek a policeman at a distance, when one lived nearer?'), as well as nine about Elizabeth Gough ('Could she, from her own bed, have seen the child in the cot?') and one about Constance ('What became of the night-dress?').

Rowland Rodway, the Trowbridge solicitor, came to Samuel's defence, protesting in a letter to the Morning Post that 'the press, with few exceptions, seems to point at Mr Kent as the murderer of his child, and is gathering about him a storm of public indignation which has destroyed the social position of his family, and now threatens his own personal safety'. There was no chance now that Samuel would be granted the full inspectorship for which he had applied.

His colleagues had to conduct his factory inspections. 'It would be quite impossible for Kent at present to visit factories at Trowbridge,' wrote one of them, 'such is the feeling of the lower orders against him . . . Mr Stapleton . . . took a gentleman with him to Brown & Palmer's factory, who the people in the weaving shed mistook for Kent and an immediate yell was set up which continued until they were undeceived.' This inspector added that the hostility to Kent was most prevalent among the working classes: 'I do not think well informed and respectable people in Trowbridge think him guilty.' Another inspector wrote to the Home Secretary arguing that the ill-will against the 'most unjustly accused' Kent was so acute 'not only in his own neighbourhood, but everywhere else' that even a transfer would be useless. What was more, it was 'scarcely possible that Mr Kent will be able to leave home and be absent during the night for some time to come'. This line gives an indication of how the Kent family was passing that winter: in a state of such anxiety, perhaps even of mutual fear, that the father felt unable to leave them alone after dark. Cornewall Lewis scribbled his response on the envelope: 'I do not myself believe Kent to be guilty, but whether he is or not, he is too much an object of public suspicion to be able to perform his duties – could he be suspended for a time?' Two weeks later, on 24 November, Samuel was given six months' leave of absence.

In the last days of November Jack Whicher wrote to his former colleague John Handcock of the Bristol police, reiterating his theory of the missing nightdress.

After all that has been said in reference to this case, and the different theories that have been advanced, there is in my humble judgment but one solution to it; and if you had made the personal investigations I did I am certain you would have come to the same conclusion. But possibly you, like others, have entirely been led by what you have heard, especially as regards the theory of Mr Kent and the nurse being concerned in the murder, simply upon the vague suspicion that he might have been in her room, &c. Now, in my opinion if there ever was one man more to be pitied, or who has been more calumniated than another, that unfortunate man is Mr Kent. It was bad enough to have his darling child cruelly murdered; but to be branded as the murderer is far worse; and, according to the present state of public opinion he will be so branded to the day of his death unless a confession is made by the person who I firmly believe committed the deed. I have little doubt but that confession would have been made if Miss Constance had been remanded for another week. Now, my opinion is . . . that the fact of there being two families . . . was the primal cause of the murder; and that the motive was jealousy towards the children by the second marriage. The deceased was the favourite child, and spite towards the parents, the mother in particular, I believe to have been the actuating motive of Constance Kent . . . Miss Constance possesses an extraordinary mind.

Whicher's anger about Samuel's treatment may have been sharpened by the fact that he also stood forever to be stigmatised by the case. Both men were government inspectors who had become the objects of highly critical inspection.

In his letter, Whicher mentioned that one of the Wiltshire magistrates had been to visit him, to discuss the shift that the 'bungling' police had lost. Whicher suspected that the police had returned it to the boiler hole as bait, to lure back its owner and catch her red-handed – this might account for why the constables were posted to the kitchen on the night of 30 June. 'Foley never would explain that to me . . . Mr Kent said in his evidence that Foley told him it was to see if anyone got up to destroy anything.' When the dress vanished, Whicher concluded, the police entered 'a compact of secrecy'.

After the revelations at Saunders' inquiry, the Wiltshire magistrates investigated the affair of the shift in the boiler hole. On 1 December they convened a public hearing, at which both Cox and Kerslake denied that the shift was theirs. Watts described finding the garment: 'It was in . . . as if to light the fire . . . pushed back as far as possible.' This meant that the shift must have been hidden after 9 a.m., when Kerslake put out the fire. Watts said the shift was flimsy, with 'a flap to tie down before, and another behind', and was nearly worn out – there were holes beneath the arms. The blood 'nearly covered the fore and hind parts. There were no marks of blood above the waist; the blood extended about 16 inches from the bottom. I should think, from the appearance, the blood had been caused from the inside.'

Eliza Dallimore said she thought the shift was Kerslake's because it was 'very dirty and very short . . . it would not come to my knees'. The cook had told her that her 'under linen was very dirty, because she had so much work to do'. Dallimore observed that neither Kerslake nor Cox was wearing a clean shift on the Saturday of Saville's death – she had seen their underclothes when they tried on the breast flannel.

Mrs Dallimore's enthusiastic detailing of the servants' underwear stood in strong contrast to Foley's distaste for the subject. The Superintendent said he had not discussed the discovery of the shift with the magistrates because he was too 'ashamed'. 'I did not keep it in my possession a minute. I did not like to touch it . . . I said, "You see, it is a nasty dirty chemise, so put it away" . . . I considered it would be an indecent and improper thing to expose it publicly. I have seen a great many stained garments. I don't suppose any man has seen more. One Sunday morning I searched fifty-two beds in Bath, and you may think I saw some scenes there . . . but I never saw a filthier garment than this.' He said he had wished to 'screen' the shift's owner.

The magistrates castigated Foley but forgave him, describing him as a 'shrewd, clever' officer whose error had been prompted by feelings of decency and delicacy.

On Henry Ludlow's instructions, the clerk read out a letter from Whicher: the shift hidden in the scullery, the detective said, 'was never mentioned to me by any member of the police during the fortnight I was engaged with them at Road assisting in the inquiry, and in daily communication with Supt Foley and his assistants . . . If, therefore, the magistrates feel annoyed at the matter being kept secret from them, I beg to state that I was no party to it . . . I wish them to know that I am in no way to blame.'

Joseph Stapleton's book about the murder quoted a further letter from Whicher, which argued that the shift and the missing nightdress were one and the same. 'When the finding of the bloodstained garment in the flue, and the "direful secresy" that had been previously kept respecting it, oozed out,' he wrote, 'I felt quite satisfied that it was the actual nightdress in which the deed was committed . . . I have no doubt it was placed there as a temporary hiding-place, and that the police afterwards, by some negligence, let it slip through their fingers. Hence the necessity for secrecy before, as well as after, it oozed out.' Whicher's repetition of the phrase 'oozed out' is striking. He seems to have a vivid, visceral apprehension of the blood he had nearly got his hands on, echoed in his image of a dress slipping, like liquid, through the constables' fingers.