The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

LIKE A CRAVE

1861–1864

The inquiries into the Road Hill murder petered out. At the beginning of 1861 the Lord Chief Justice turned down a proposal to open a new inquest into Saville Kent's death, dismissing the allegations that the coroner had acted improperly in failing to examine Samuel. The Bath police collected a few more clues, or rumours of clues, which found their way into the newspapers in January but were taken no further: a pair of India-rubber galoshes had been seen at the foot of the back stairs soon after the murder; a pair of stockings had gone missing. Joseph Stapleton claimed that some damp and dirty socks were found in a cupboard under the back stairs. The Frome Times said that Constance Kent, when at Miss Ducker's school in Bath many years earlier, 'in retaliation for a supposed slight, destroyed and then threw down a water-closet some property belonging to her governess'. At this school, it was reported elsewhere, she had tried to cause an explosion by turning on the gas.

In a letter to a Swiss friend on 1 February, Charles Dickens expanded on his theory about the culprits. 'You talk of the Road Murder, I suppose, even at Lausanne? Not all the Detective Police in existence shall ever persuade me out of the hypothesis that the circumstances have gradually shaped out to my mind. The father was in bed with the nurse: The child was discovered by them, sitting up in his little bed, staring, and evidently going to "tell Ma". The nurse leaped out of bed and instantly suffocated him in the father's presence. The father cut the child about, to distract suspicion (which was effectually done), and took the body out where it was found. Either when he was going for the Police, or when he locked the police up in his house, or at both times, he got rid of the knife and so forth. It is likely enough that the truth may be never discovered now.'

It might be as Poe suggested in 'The Man of the Crowd' (1840): 'There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told . . . mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burthen so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave.'

Joseph Stapleton was gathering material for his book in defence of Samuel. In February he wrote to William Hughes, the Chief Superintendent of the Bath police, asking him formally to refute the rumours that Mr Kent 'led a life of habitual debauchery' with his female servants. On 4 March Hughes replied, confirming that he had examined more than twenty people on this matter: 'they all most emphatically assert that there is not the slightest foundation for any such rumour. From all I could glean on the subject, I feel convinced that his conduct towards his female servants was the very reverse of familiar, and that at all times he has treated them rather with undue haughtiness than familiarity.'

Later that month, Samuel applied to the Home Secretary to take early retirement from the civil service – he was by now more than halfway through his six months' leave. He asked to be granted a pension of £350, his full salary. 'In June 1860 I was overtaken by that great calamity, the murder of my child,' he explained, 'a calamity which has not only embittered the rest of my life, but has overwhelmed me with popular prejudice and calumny through the confounded representations of the public press . . . My family is large my income limited and I cannot without much deprivation resign upon my official pension.' In response, Cornewall Lewis observed that this was 'a strange proposal as ever I heard of – inform him that his request cannot be acceded to'. The newspapers reported a rumour that Constance had in March confessed to a relative that she had killed Saville, but the detectives who had worked on the case found it 'unadvisable' to reopen the investigation.

On Thursday, 18 April 1861 the Kents left Road. Constance was sent to a finishing school in Dinan, a walled medieval town in northern France, and William returned to his school in Longhope, where he boarded with about twenty-five other boys aged between seven and sixteen. The rest of the family moved to Camden Villa in Weston-super-Mare, a resort on the north coast of Somersetshire. Mrs Kent was again pregnant.

The Kents instructed a Trowbridge auctioneer to dispose of their belongings. Two days after their departure he opened Road Hill House to the public for viewing. He had already had so many enquiries that he had taken the unprecedented step of selling the catalogues, at a shilling apiece, and limiting them to one per person – seven hundred were purchased. At 11 a.m. on Saturday, the crowds swarmed over the building. In the drawing room the visitors took turns at lifting the central bay window to test its weight, and in the nursery they made their own appraisals about whether Elizabeth Gough could have seen into Saville's cot from her bed (the consensus was that she could). They minutely examined the staircases and doors. Superintendent John Foley, who had been enlisted to keep order, was besieged by requests from young ladies to see the privy, where spots of blood were still visible on the floor. The visitors took less interest in the furniture up for sale. In his opening address the auctioneer conceded that the contents of the house were 'not of a very elegant character', but argued that they were well-made, 'and I would observe that the effects have not only an artificial, but an historical value attached to them. They have been witnesses to a crime which has astonished, terrified, and paralysed the civilised world.'

The sums achieved on the paintings were disappointing – an oil of Mary Queen of Scots by Federico Zuccari, for which Samuel Kent claimed to have been offered £100, went for £14. But Mr and Mrs Kent's splendid Spanish four-poster fetched an impressive £7.15s., and the washstand and ware from their bedroom £7. The auctioneer also sold 250 ounces of silver plate, more than five hundred books, several cases of wine, including golden and pale sherries, a lucernal microscope (when used with a gaslight, this could project enlarged images onto a wall), two telescopes, some pieces of iron garden furniture and a fine yearling. Samuel's 1820 port (an exceptionally rich, sweet vintage) went for eleven shillings a bottle, his mare for £11.15s., his carriage for £6 and his pure-bred Alderney (a small, fawn cow that yielded creamy milk) for £19. The Kents' chamber organ was acquired for the Methodist chapel in Beck-ington. A Mr Pearman of Frome paid about £1 each for Constance's bed, Elizabeth Gough's bed and Eveline's cot, which Saville had used as a baby, bringing the total raised by the sale to £1,000. The cot from which Saville had been abducted was not put up for auction, in case it found its way to the 'Chamber of Horrors' in Madame Tussaud's waxworks museum.

During the sale a pickpocket stole a purse containing £4 from a woman in the crowd. Though Foley's men locked the doors to Road Hill House, conducted a search and arrested a suspect, the culprit was not found.^*

Samuel and Mary Kent's last child, Florence Saville Kent, was born in their new home on the Somersetshire coast on 19 July 1861. Over the summer the factory commissioners discussed where they could send Samuel. Posts came up in Yorkshire and Ireland, but they feared that he would be unable to exercise his authority in these areas, where the hostility towards him was great. In October, though, a job fell vacant for a sub-inspector of factories in north Wales, and the Kent family moved to Llangollen in the Dee valley.

An Englishwoman who lived in Dinan in 1861 later wrote to the Devizes Gazette about Constance Kent: 'I never saw her, but everyone I know did, and all describe her as a flat-faced, reddish-haired ugly girl, neither stupid nor clever, lively nor morose, and only remarkable for one particular trait, viz, her extreme tenderness and kindness to very young children . . . In the whole school in which she was a pupil she was the one who would probably be the least remarked if all were seen together.' Constance did her best to become invisible, and was known at the school by her second name, Emily, but the other girls were aware of her identity. She was the object of gossip and bullying. By the end of the year Samuel had removed her to the care of the nuns of the Convent de la Sagesse, on a cliff above the town.

For several months Whicher withdrew from the public eye, working only on cases unlikely to attract attention. Just one was covered in any depth by the newspapers – his capture of a clergyman who had obtained £6,000 by forging his uncle's will. Whicher's young colleague Timothy Cavanagh, then a clerk in the Commissioner's office, claimed that the Road Hill murder had undone 'the best man the Detective Department ever possessed'. The case 'almost broke the heart of poor Whicher' – he 'returned to head-quarters thoroughly chapfallen. This was a great blow to him . . . the commissioner and others losing faith in him for the first time.' According to Cavanagh, the Road Hill case changed Dolly Williamson as well. When Williamson came back from Wiltshire, he put away his playfulness, his penchant for practical jokes and dangerous games. He became subdued, detached.

In the summer of 1861 Whicher was given charge of a murder investigation for the first time since Road Hill. It was an apparently straightforward case. On 10 June a fifty-five-year-old woman called Mary Halliday was found dead in a rectory at Kingswood, near Reigate, Surrey, where she had been keeping house while the vicar was away. Mrs Halliday seemed to have been the victim of a botched burglary – a sock stuffed into her mouth, probably to silence her, had suffocated her. The intruder or intruders had left clues: a beech cudgel, some lengths of unusual hemp cord tied around the victim's wrists and ankles, and a packet of papers. These papers included a letter from a famous German opera singer, a begging letter signed 'Adolphe Krohn', and identification documents in the name of Johann Karl Franz of Saxony.

The police had descriptions of two foreigners who had been in the area that day, one short and dark, the other taller and fairer; they had been seen in a pub, in fields near the rectory and in a Reigate shop, where they had bought the same kind of cord as that found at the murder scene. The descriptions of the taller of the two matched the details on the identification papers. A £200 reward was offered for the capture of the pair, presumed to be Krohn and Franz.

Whicher sent Detective-Sergeant Robinson to interview Mademoiselle Thérèse Tietjens, the celebrated opera singer whose letter had been found in the rectory, at her house in St John's Wood, near Paddington. She said that a young, tallish German with light-brown hair had turned up on her doorstep a week earlier, pleading poverty and asking for her help in returning to Hamburg. She had promised to pay his expenses, and had given him a letter to this effect. Whicher asked Dolly Williamson to check the sailings to Hamburg and to make enquiries at the Austrian, Prussian and Hanseatic embassies and consulates.

Extra constables were sent to the sugar-baking district of Whitechapel, in the East End, where many itinerant Germans took lodgings. Several German tramps were taken in for questioning. One by one, Whicher ruled them out. 'Altho' he somewhat answers the description of one of the men concerned in the murder of Mrs Halliday,' he reported of a suspect on 18 June, 'I do not think he is one of them.'

The next week, though, Whicher told Mayne he had found Johann Franz: a twenty-four-year-old German vagrant picked up in Whitechapel who claimed his name was Auguste Salzmann. At first, Whicher could find no eyewitnesses to confirm that this was one of the Kingswood Germans. On the contrary: 'He has been seen by three persons from Reigate and Kingswood who saw two foreigners in the neighbourhood the day before and on the day of the murder, but they are unable to identify him as one of them,' Whicher wrote to Mayne on 25 June. 'He has also been seen by PC Peck, P Division, who met the two men at Sutton on the morning of the murder, but he cannot recognise him. Altho' these persons have failed to identify him, I have no doubt but he is "Johann Carl Franz" the owner of the book left behind, and as there are other persons who saw the two foreigners in the neighbourhood, I beg to suggest that Serjeant Robinson should fetch them to London to see the prisoner.' Whicher's self-assurance – or his fixation – paid off. On 26 June witnesses from the pub and the string shop in Reigate agreed that this was the taller and fairer of the two Germans who had visited the town. Whicher declared himself 'thoroughly confident' of securing a conviction.

He sent photographs of the identification papers to officials in Saxony, who confirmed their authenticity, adding that their owner had a prison record. Whicher also discovered that two days after the murder the suspect had given his landlord a blue checked shirt for safekeeping. The shirt exactly matched the description of that worn by one of the men seen at Kingswood, and wrapped around it was a piece of cord just like that which had bound the murder victim's body. The detectives traced the maker of the cord, who confirmed that he had spun the string which was found round the shirt and round Mrs Halliday's ankles: 'They are all off the same ball. I am quite sure of it.' More eyewitnesses agreed that they had seen the prisoner in Surrey. Even PC Peck said he now believed the suspect was one of the men he met at Sutton. Whicher had put together a strong chain of circumstantial evidence. On 8 July the prisoner admitted he was Franz. He was committed for trial.

The story the German gave in his defence sounded trumped-up from beginning to end. After disembarking from a steamer at Hull in April, he said, he had fallen in with two other German vagrants, Wilhelm Gerstenberg and Adolphe Krohn. Gerstenberg, who in build and colouring resembled Franz, pestered him to hand over some of his identification papers. Franz refused. One night in May, while Franz was asleep behind a haystack near Leeds, his two companions robbed him, taking not only the papers but also his pack and his spare clothes, which were cut from the same cloth as those he was wearing. This explained the similarity between his shirt and that seen near Kingswood, while his resemblance to Gerstenberg explained why some of the eyewitnesses thought they had seen Franz in Surrey. The destitute Franz made his way to London alone. When he reached the city he heard that a German called Franz was wanted for murder, so he quickly adopted a new name. As for the cord in his room, he said he had found it on the pavement outside a tobacconist's shop near his lodgings. His defence, then, was that he had been robbed of his clothes and papers by a German tramp who looked very like him, had changed his name for fear he would be mistaken for a murderer, and had happened to pick up a piece of cord on a London street that exactly matched the distinctive twine at the murder scene.

All this seemed the invention of a desperate and guilty man. But in the days leading up to the trial various facts emerged that seemed to corroborate Franz's account. A vagrant in Northamptonshire presented the police with some stray papers from the packet that Franz claimed had been stolen from him – he said he had found them on a heap of straw in a roadside hovel. This suggested that at least some of Franz's papers had gone astray, as he claimed. When Mademoiselle Tietjens came to see the prisoner she swore that he was not the light-haired man who had asked for her help in early June. This raised the possibility that there was indeed another light-haired German who had been associated with the darker Krohn. And it came to light that the London supplier of the hemp twine sold in Reigate, and found on Mary Halliday's body, was based in Whitechapel, just a few doors away from the stretch of pavement where Franz said he picked up the piece with which he tied his shirt.

The inquiry was slipping away from Whicher. He searched desperately for Krohn, whose capture he was convinced would make the case against Franz. He was so keen to find the missing German that he more than once expressed a conviction that he almost had him: 'I have little doubt but that the man described as Adolphe Krohn is a young Polish Jew named Marks Cohen,' he wrote to Mayne. He was proved wrong. Soon afterwards he was 'strongly impressed' that another man was Krohn, and again was mistaken. Whicher did not find him.

At the trial for Mary Halliday's murder on 8 August, Franz's counsel argued, in a passionate four-hour speech, that the circumstantial evidence in the case needed not only to be consistent with guilt but also to be inconsistent with innocence. It was said that ten of the twelve jurors went into the jury room convinced that Franz was the murderer, but when they came out they declared him not guilty. The Saxon Embassy paid his fare home.

The Times the next day, clearly convinced that Franz had killed Mrs Halliday, pointed out that circumstantial evidence was always – theoretically – consistent with innocence. Such evidence was never proof of anything: 'it is only an hypothesis binding together certain facts, though it is at the same time an hypothesis which, by a law of nature, we cannot in certain cases help believing to be the right one'.

The Kingswood investigation had unfolded like a nasty joke, a mockery of a detective's skills. It was a reminder that detective work relied on good fortune as well as acuity. 'If I was not the cleverest, of which I had grave doubts, I was certainly the luckiest of detectives,' says Inspector 'F', the narrator of Waters' Experiences of a Real Detective (1862). 'I had but held my mouth open, and fat things had dropped in of their own accord.' Whicher's luck seemed to have run out. He had probably been right about the identity of the Kingswood murderer, but once Franz was acquitted the detective's confidence started to look like something else – arrogance, perhaps, or delusion, or obsession. This was the last murder he investigated.

In the nineteenth century the idea was gaining ground that human witness (confession or eyewitness evidence) was too subjective to be trusted. Jeremy Bentham's A Treatise on Judicial Evidence (1825), for instance, argued that testimony needed to be backed up by material proof. Only things would do: the button, the boa, the nightgown, the knife. As Waters' Inspector 'F' puts it: 'I believe that a chain of circumstantial evidence in which there shall be no material break . . . [is] the most reliable testimony upon which human judgment can be based – since a circumstance cannot be perjured, or bear corrupt testimony.' The same preference could be discerned in the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: 'he ushers in the scientific and analytical literature in which things play a more important part than people', observed the French writers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt in 1856. Objects were incorruptible in their silence. They were mute witnesses to history, fragments – like Darwin's fossils – that could freeze the past.

Yet the Kingswood case and the Road Hill case showed up the slipperiness of things, made it clear that objects as well as memories were endlessly open to interpretation. Darwin had to decipher his fossils. Whicher had to read his murder scenes. A chain of evidence was constructed, not unearthed. Forrester's lady detective puts it simply: 'The value of the detective lies not somuch in discovering facts, as in putting them together, and finding out what they mean.' The mutilated body at Road Hill might be evidence of rage, or of the impersonation of rage. The open window could indicate an escape route, or the cunning of a killer still ensconced in the house. At Kingswood, Whicher found the most definitive kind of clue: a piece of paper bearing a name and a physical description. Even this, it turned out, could point to the opposite of what it seemed – the theft of an identity rather than identity itself.

A new mood was taking hold in England. By contrast with the vigorous, buoyant 1850s, the next decade was to be characterised by unease, self-doubt. Queen Victoria's mother died in March 1861 and her adored husband, Prince Albert, in December. The Queen went into mourning, and spent the rest of her life in black.

In the early 1860s the emotions aroused by the Road Hill murder went underground, leaving the pages of the press to reappear, disguised and intensified, in the pages of fiction. On 6 July 1861, almost exactly a year after the murder, the first instalment of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret appeared in Robin Goodfellow magazine. This novel, a huge bestseller when it was published in full in 1862, featured a wicked stepmother (a governess who married a gentleman), a brutal, mysterious murder at an elegant country house, a body thrust into a well; its characters were fascinated with madness and with detective work, and terrified of exposure. Braddon's story gave expression to the disquiet and excitement that Saville Kent's murder had awakened.

Constance Kent was refracted into every woman in the book: the sweet-faced, possibly insane murderess Lady Audley; the tomboyish, spirited daughter of the house, Alicia Audley; the impassive lady's maid Phoebe Marks ('Silent and self-contained, she seemed to hold herself within herself, and take no colour from the outer world . . . that is a woman who can keep a secret'); and the lonely, passionate Clara Talboys, sister to the murdered man: 'I have grown up in an atmosphere of suppression. . . . I have stifled and dwarfed the natural feelings of my heart, until they have become unnatural in their intensity; I have been allowed neither friends nor lovers. My mother died when I was very young . . . I have had no one but my brother.'

Jack Whicher surfaces in the figure of the tormented amateur detective Robert Audley, who conducts a 'backward investigation', a journey into his suspect's past. Where Inspector Bucket in Bleak House is suave, twinkling with secret knowledge, Robert Audley is racked with a guilty fear that he is insane. Who is the monomaniac, he wonders: is it the childlike woman he suspects of madness and murder, or by fixing on her is he merely proving himself in the grip of an obsessive delusion?

Was it a monition or a monomania? What if I am wrong after all? What if this chain of evidence which I have constructed link by link is constructed out of my own folly? What if this edifice of horror and suspicion is a mere collection of crochets – the nervous fancies of a hypochondriacal bachelor? . . . Oh, my God, if it should be in myself all this time that the misery lies.

Whicher's chain of evidence at Road could be proof of his suspect's guilt or of his own delusions, just as his chain of evidence at Kingswood had proved. The uncertainty was torture: 'Am I never to get any nearer the truth,' asks Robert Audley, 'but am I to be tormented all my life by vague doubts, and wretched suspicions, which may grow upon me till I become a monomaniac?' Yet if he succeeds in solving the mystery it might only magnify the horror: 'why should I try to unravel the tangled skein, to fit the pieces of the terrible puzzle, and gather together the stray fragments which when collected may make such a hideous whole?'

Lady Audley's Secret was one of the earliest and best of the 'sensation' or 'enigma' novels that dominated the 1860s literary scene, labyrinthine tales of domestic misery, deception, madness, intrigue. They dealt in what Henry James called 'those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries that are at our own doors . . . the terrors of the cheerful country house, or the busy London lodgings'. Their secrets were exotic, but their settings immediate – they took place in England, now, a land of telegrams, trains, policemen. The characters in these novels were at the mercy of their feelings, which pressed out, unmediated, onto their flesh: emotion compelled them to blanch, flush, darken, tremble, start, convulse, their eyes to burn and flash and dim. The books, it was feared, worked on their readers in the same way.

In 1863 the philosopher Henry Mansel described such novels as 'indications of a widespread corruption, of which they are in part both the effect and the cause: called into existence to satisfy the cravings of a diseased appetite, and contributing themselves to foster the disease, and to stimulate the want they supply'. Mansel expressed himself with unusual force, but his views were widespread. Many feared that sensation novels were a 'virus' that might create the corruption they described, forming a circle of excitement – sexual and violent – that coursed through every stratum of society. These books, the original psychological thrillers, were seen as agents of social collapse, even in the way they were consumed – they were read in the scullery and the drawing room, by servants and mistresses alike. They alluded to real crimes, such as the Road Hill case, to add a frisson of authenticity. 'There is something unspeakably disgusting in this ravenous appetite for carrion,' wrote Mansel, 'this vulture-like instinct which smells out the newest mass of social corruption, and hurries to devour the loathsome dainty before the scent has evaporated.' Sensation novels called forth their readers' brutish sensations, their animal appetites; they threatened religious belief and social order in a similar way to Darwinism. Mansel noted that the typical jacket illustration to one of these novels was of 'a pale young lady in a white dress, with a dagger in her hand' – the scene Whicher had conjured at Road.

Joseph Stapleton's book about the killing, The Great Crime of 1860, was published in May 1861, with an endorsement from Rowland Rodway. Stapleton was fantastically well-informed: he knew the suspects in the case and he had heard the local gossip. Henry Clark, the magistrates' clerk, had supplied him with information about the magistrates' inquiries and the police investigations, and Samuel Kent had briefed him on the family's history. Stapleton hinted heavily at Constance's guilt. Yet his book's tone was often frenzied and bizarre – the dark suggestions he threw out were not only about the identity of the murderer but about the decay and collapse of English society, a racial catastrophe.

In prose as heated as that of the sensation novelists, Stapleton urged his readers to 'think of the human hearts that pulsate' in the homes of the new middle classes, 'of the human passions that riot there . . . of family wrongs, of family conflicts, of family disgraces, covered over only by the miserable tinsel of gentility; flashing out here and there, fitfully, into a sudden, devouring, and inextinguishable flame'. He likened such families to volcanoes: 'in many an English house-hold, the amenities of social life are found to clothe with grace a rugged and a shallow crust. The tempest . . . gathers strength in those deep recesses where the crater is instinct with fire; and . . . it bursts out, in its fully fury, to hurl parents, children, servants, into one common, inevitable, and promiscuous destruction.'

The public had been corrupted by the Road Hill murder, Stapleton suggested. 'As the mystery attached to the crime has been deepened and prolonged, suspicion has become a passion.' He gave a lurid account of the spectators at Saville's inquest, comparing them to the women at a Spanish bullfight. 'Women had crowded into the room to hear how a throat had been cut,' he wrote, 'and they held young children in their arms to gaze upon the bloody relic.' It was as if the domestic angel of Victorian fantasy momentarily gave way to a bloodthirsty ghoul: 'Her sympathies for suffering are suspended till her instincts have been indulged; and, when curiosity and the love of the horrible have been satiated, the Englishwoman recovers from her eclipse and comes forth among us in the brightness of her better attributes again.' In Stapleton's eyes, the observers of a murder investigation were themselves transformed, briefly mutated by the vision of violence. Though he was eager to assign all the appetite for gore to the working-class women of the village, and to liken them to foreigners for good measure, the greedy curiosity about this case extended to all the English social classes, and both sexes. He was himself hungry for the matter of the murder, as his book made clear.

Stapleton suggested that the murder was evidence of 'a national decay': 'An imputed degradation of race has become amongst ourselves a national reproach,' he wrote, 'just because we recognise in it the natural consequences and expression of a long ancestral series of debasing pleasures, grovelling occupations, and corrupting sins.' He was subscribing here to the theory of racial degeneration: if human beings could evolve, as Darwin argued, they could surely regress as well. A family's decadent past could tell on its children, dragging the race backwards. Mansel, too, cited the Road Hill murder as evidence of degeneration, along with the spread of alcoholism, consumerism, hysteria, pollution, prostitution and adultery. Stapleton, though eager to absolve Samuel of the murder, implied that his former colleague's corruptions and pretensions had undone his family. Dipsomania could mark a man's offspring, said the doctor, as could other kinds of intemperance, such as greed for money or an excess of sexual desire.

The unsolved murder at Road played out the sensation novelist's vision of Britain. The case didn't deliver meaning; only a jolt, like electricity. Its influence was evident in Charlotte Yonge's The Trial (1863), about a middle-class adolescent boy accused of murder, and in the anonymous Such Things Are (1862), about smart young ladies with horrifying criminal histories: 'Time was . . . when the English girl was looked upon, both abroad and at home, as the type of all that was pure and innocent, but things are altered now.' The reverberations of the case could be discerned in the books that depicted a crude police officer defiling a refined domestic scene – Grimstone of the Yard, for instance, with his 'greasy little memorandum book' and 'stumpy pencil' in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Aurora Floyd (1863).

The novelist Margaret Oliphant blamed it all on the detectives. Sensation fiction, she said, was 'a literary institutionalisation of the habits of mind of the new police force'. The 'literary Detective', she wrote in 1862, 'is not a collaborateur whom we welcome with any pleasure into the republic of letters. His appearance is neither favourable to taste or morals.' A year later she complained of 'detectivism', the 'police-court aspect of modern fiction'.

In the wake of the Road Hill murder, detectives were, in Robert Audley's words, 'stained with vile associations, and unfit company for honest gentlemen'. Audley was disgusted at the detective persona he himself had adopted: 'His generous nature revolted at the office into which he had found himself drawn – the office of spy, the collector of damning facts that led on to horrible deductions . . . onward upon the loathsome path – the crooked by-way of watchfulness and suspicion.'

In the feverish figure of Robert Audley, compelled to seek what he fears, 'sensation' and 'detectivism' were fused. The detective could be understood as a sensation-addict himself, hungry for the shudder and thrill of crime. James McLevy, the Edinburgh detective whose two volumes of memoirs were bestsellers in 1861, confessed to the unsettling excitement of his work. He depicted his desire to retrieve stolen goods as an animal urge, like the thief's desire to steal: 'It is scarcely possible to imagine a detective's feelings on pulling out of a mysterious bag the very things he wants. Even the robber, when his fingers are all of a quiver in the rapid clutch of a diamond necklace, feels no greater delight than we do when we retract that watch from the same fingers now closed with a nervous grasp.' McLevy said that he was drawn to danger, to mystery, to 'places where secret things have been done'. The yearning he felt for a 'wanted' man was physical: 'every look . . . seemed to send a back energy down through my arm, imparting something like a crave in the fingers to lay hold of him'. With a creepy eroticism, McLevy compared capturing a villain to seizing a lover: 'what a glorious grip that was I got of him . . . I would not have exchanged it for the touch of a bride's hand, with the marriage ring upon her finger . . . such was my weakness, that when I saw Thomson struggling ineffectually in the grasp of the officer, one whom I had so often sighed for in secret, and eyed in openness . . . I absolutely burned to embrace the dauntless leader of the gang.' McLevy portrayed himself as a solitary man whose energies were diverted and his emotions warped by his obsession with the cases he worked on, the crooks he craved. Like Jack Whicher, and most fictional detectives since, he was unmarried, his solitude the price of his excellence.

The press stepped up its assaults on Whicher and his colleagues. 'The modern detective is generally at fault,' stated the Dublin Review – the Road Hill case had 'justly shaken' public confidence in his 'sagacity and long-headed-ness . . . The detective system in this country is essentially low and mean.' The word 'clueless' was first recorded in 1862. Reynolds magazine compared the Metropolitan Police to 'a cowardly and clumsy giant, who . . . wreaks all the meanness and malignity of his nature on every feeble and helpless creature who comes in his way'. There were echoes here of the 'meanness' Whicher showed in arresting the helpless Constance Kent. A parody in Punch in 1863 referred to 'Inspector Watcher' of the 'Defective Police'. In the Saturday Review, James Fitzjames Stephen attacked the romantic presentation of police in fiction – 'this detective worship' – arguing that in reality they were useless at solving middle-class crimes.

In the summer of 1863 Samuel and William Kent visited Constance in Dinan, and on 10 August she returned to England to become a paying boarder at St Mary's Home in Brighton. This establishment, founded by the Reverend Arthur Douglas Wagner in 1855, was the closest thing to a convent that the Church of England could offer. A band of novice nuns, led by a Lady Superior, ran a lying-in hospital for unmarried mothers, assisted by about thirty penitents. Wagner was a disciple of Edmund Pusey, a leader of the nineteenth-century Tractarian or Oxford Movement that advocated a revival of vestments, incense, candles and sacramental confession in the Anglican Church. By joining the community that Wagner had founded at St Mary's, Constance was replacing her natural family with a religious family, freeing herself of the ties of blood. Having adopted the French spelling of her middle name, she was known as Emilie Kent.

In London, Jack Whicher's life had emptied out. There was little sign of the former 'prince of detectives' in the newspapers. His friend Detective-Inspector Stephen Thornton dropped dead of apoplexy at his house in Lambeth in September 1861, aged fifty-eight, leaving the way clear for Dolly Williamson to be promoted Inspector in October. Williamson was put in charge of the department.

After Kingswood, Whicher only once appears in the Metropolitan Police files on important cases. In September 1862 he and a colleague, Superintendent Walker, were sent to Warsaw at the request of the Russian rulers of the city to give advice on how to set up a detective service. The Russians were worried about the Polish nationalist insurgents, who had made assassination attempts on the Tsar's family. 'Everything seems very quiet,' the English officers reported from the Hotel Europe on 8 September, 'and no further attempts at assassination have been made, altho' . . . the government seems to be in constant apprehension. Our mission here is being kept entirely secret . . . as our personal safety might be endangered by a wrong construction being placed on the object of our visit.' Afterwards the Russians were polite about their guests – 'the two Officers . . . have entirely satisfied his Highness's expectations by the justice and sagacity of their remarks' – but did not take up their suggestions. In March 1863, when Russian soldiers were shooting insurgents in Warsaw, questions were asked in the House of Commons about the ethics of the detectives' secret mission.

On 18 March 1864 Jack Whicher left the Metropolitan Police, aged forty-nine, with an annual pension of £133.6s.8d. He returned to his rooms in Holywell Street, Pimlico. On his discharge papers he described his marital state as single and his next of kin as William Wort, a Wiltshire coach proprietor who in 1860 had married one of the detective's nieces, Mary Ann. The discharge papers gave the reason for Whicher's early retirement as 'congestion of the brain'. This diagnosis was applied to all sorts of conditions, such as epilepsy, anxiety, vascular dementia. An essay of 1866 described the symptoms as throbbing headaches, a flushed, swollen face and bloodshot eyes, and argued that its cause was 'protracted mental tension'. It was as if Whicher's thoughts had run too obsessively on the conundrum of the Road Hill murder and his mind had become as 'over-heated' as Robert Audley's. Perhaps congestion of the brain was what happened when the detective instinct went unanswered, when the hunger for resolution was not satisfied, when the truth could not be disentangled from the seeming.

'Nothing in the world is hidden for ever,' wrote Wilkie Collins in No Name (1862). 'Sand turns traitor, and betrays the footstep that has passed over it; water gives back to the tell-tale surface the body that has been drowned . . . Hate breaks its prison-secrecy in the thoughts, through the doorway of the eyes . . . Look where we will, the inevitable law of revelation is one of the laws of nature: the lasting preservation of a secret is a miracle which the world has never yet seen.'