The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

SURELY OUR REAL DETECTIVE LIVETH

1865–1885

In October 1865, Constance was transferred from Salisbury to Millbank, a thousand-cell holding prison on the Thames – 'a big, dark building with towers', wrote Henry James in The Princess Casamassima, 'lying there and sprawling over the whole neighbourhood, with brown, bare, windowless walls, ugly, truncated pinnacles, and a character unspeakably sad and stern . . . there were walls within walls and galleries on top of galleries; even the daylight lost its colour, and you couldn't imagine what o'clock it was'. The female prisoners occupied a wing known as the Third Pentagon. A visitor to the gaol would see them 'erect themselves, suddenly and spectrally, with dowdy united bonnets, in uncanny corners and recesses of the draughty labyrinth'. The Penny Illustrated Paper sent a reporter to see in what conditions Constance was confined. He found Millbank 'a geometrical puzzle', 'an eccentric maze' with three miles of airless, seemingly subterranean 'twisting passages', 'dark nooks or 'doublings' in the zigzag corridors', 'double-locked doors, opening at all sorts of queer angles, and leading sometimes into blind entries, and frequently to the stone staircases which . . . seem as though they had been cut out of the solid brickwork'.

Constance was assigned a cell equipped with a gaslight, a washing tub, a slop pan, a shelf, tin mugs, a salt cellar, a plate, a wooden spoon, a Bible, a slate, a pencil, a hammock, bedding, a comb, a towel, a broom and a grated peephole. Like the other inmates, she wore a brown serge dress. Her breakfast was a pint of cocoa and molasses; lunch was beef, potatoes and bread; supper bread and a pint of gruel. For the first few months of her sentence she was forbidden from speaking to other inmates and from receiving visitors – the Reverend Wagner and Miss Gream applied for special permission to see her, but were turned down. Each day she cleaned her cell and went to chapel. Usually she was then set to work, perhaps making clothes, stockings or brushes for fellow prisoners. She had a bath a week, and a library book if she chose. For exercise she walked in single file, six feet behind the preceding convict, around the enclosed marshy waste ground that ringed the prison buildings. She could see Westminster Abbey to the north, smell the river to the east. Jack Whicher's home was a block away, invisible behind Millbank's high walls.

Whicher, meanwhile, took up his life again. In 1866 he married his landlady, Charlotte Piper, a widow three years his senior. If he had ever been legally married to Elizabeth Green, the mother of his lost son, she must have been dead now. The service took place on 21 August at St Margaret's, an exquisite sixteenth-century church in the grounds of Westminister Abbey, where sheep grazed on the green.

Elizabeth Gough had also married that year. At the church of St Mary Newington, Southwark, on 24 April 1866, almost a year to the day after Constance Kent's confession, she became the wife of John Cockburn, a wine merchant.

By the beginning of the next year Whicher was working as a private investigator. He didn't need the money – his pension was adequate, and the new Mrs Whicher had a private income. But now that he had been vindicated, his brain was cleared of congestion and his appetite for detection had returned.

Private inquiry agents, such as Charley Field and Ignatius Pollaky, were thought to embody the most sinister aspects of detection. Sir Cresswell Cresswell, the judge who presided over the divorce court, fulminated in 1858 against 'such a person as Field': 'of all the people in the world the people of England have the greatest objection to anything like a spy system. To have men running after them wherever they go and making notes of all their actions is what they hold in utter abhorrence. Everything of the kind is held in the greatest detestation in this country.' In Wilkie Collins' Armadale, published in 1866, the private detective is a 'vile creature whom the viler need of Society has fashioned for its own use. There he sat – the Confidential Spy of modern times, whose business is steadily enlarging, whose Private Inquiry Offices are steadily on the increase. There he sat – the necessary Detective . . . a man professionally ready on the merest suspicion (if the merest suspicion paid him) to get under our beds, and to look through gimlet-holes in our doors; a man who . . . would have deservedly forfeited his situation, if, under any circumstances whatever, he had been personally accessible to a sense of pity or a sense of shame.' The work was well-paid, if uncertain: in 1854 Field received fifteen shillings a day, plus expenses, to spy on a Mrs Evans, and an extra six shillings a day if he obtained the evidence of adultery that her husband required in order to divorce her.

In his new role Whicher took part in the longest and most famous court battle of the late nineteenth century: the case of the Tichborne Claimant. At the end of 1866 a plump, jowly fellow turned up in London declaring himself to be Sir Roger Tichborne, a Roman Catholic baronet and heir to his family's fortune. Sir Roger had been lost in a shipwreck in 1854, his body never found; the Claimant said that he had been rescued and taken to Chile, from where he made his way to Australia. He had been living in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, under the assumed name Thomas Castro until he learnt that the Dowager Lady Tichborne, an eccentric Frenchwoman who persisted in believing her son was alive, had placed in the Australian press a plea for news of his whereabouts.

The Dowager Lady Tichborne greeted the Claimant as her son; friends, acquaintances, former servants also signed documents testifying to his identity. Even the family doctor insisted that this was the man he had attended since boyhood, right down to his peculiar genitals (when flaccid, the penis withdrew into the body, like that of a horse). Yet many others who had known Sir Roger derided the Claimant as an inept impostor. In some respects his knowledge was remarkable – he noticed that a painting at the Tichborne estate had been cleaned during his absence, for instance – but he made elementary errors, too, and had somehow forgotten every word of his first language, French.

One of the sceptics, Lord Arundel of Windsor, who was related to the Tichbornes, hired Whicher to unmask the Claimant. The detective was told that he would be paid handsomely if he gave the matter his unceasing attention. Over the next seven years the case claimed not only Whicher's unceasing attention but the attention of the whole country. It was a puzzle so confounding that it brought on a kind of national paralysis. 'It has weighed upon the public mind like an incubus,' wrote a barrister in 1872; 'no subject whatever occupied so large a space of the human mind', reported the Observer in 1874.

Whicher had two decades of experience in this kind of investigative work: shadowing, tailing, rustling up witnesses, fathoming lies and half-truths, coaxing information out of unwilling participants, using photographs to secure identifications, appraising personalities. Acting on a tip-off from an Australian detective, he began by making inquiries in Wapping, a poor district by the east London docks. He discovered that on Christmas Day 1866, within hours of reaching England, the Claimant had visited the Globe public house on Wapping High Street, ordered a sherry and a cigar, and asked after the Orton family. He claimed to be enquiring on behalf of an Arthur Orton, a butcher he had known in Australia. Whicher suspected that the Claimant was the Wap-ping butcher himself.

For months Whicher prowled the streets of Wapping. He invited a stream of locals who had known Orton – victuallers, confectioners, sailmakers and so on – to accompany him to the Claimant's lodgings in Croydon, south of London. One by one they met the detective at London Bridge station, took the train to Croydon and waited outside the Claimant's house until he emerged, or could be glimpsed through a window. Most, but not all, said they recognised the Claimant as Arthur Orton. Whicher would hide if the Claimant stepped out of the house. According to one witness, 'He said it would not do for him to be seen there – it would raise suspicion probably, and stop him coming out.' Whicher tracked down Orton's former girlfriend, Mary Ann Loder, who swore that the Claimant was the man who had deserted her in 1852 to seek his fortune overseas. She proved an important witness – amazingly, she even testified that Arthur Orton had a regressive penis.

Whicher's brief was wide. He not only sought evidence against the Claimant, but also tried to persuade his supporters to defect. In October 1868 he visited a Mr Rous, the landlord of the Swan in Alresford, Hampshire, and one of the Claimant's chief advisers. After ordering a glass of grog (rum and water) and a cigar, the detective asked him: 'You believe in him being the man?'

'Most certainly,' said Rous. 'I have no doubt he is the right man but foolish.'

'Mr Rous, don't you believe anything of the kind. You may depend upon it, he is no such person. What I shall tell you will make you very uncomfortable.' Whicher proceeded to unpick the Claimant's story.

The Claimant – who weighed twenty stone when he reached England – was growing fatter and fatter. His working-class supporters hailed him as a hero who was being punished by the aristocracy and the Catholic Church for the vulgarities he had adopted in the Australian bush. Once again Whicher was working for the establishment, and against the class from which he came – he was the turncoat, the archetypal policeman.

When the Claimant sued for control of the family estates in 1871, the Tichbornes hired Sir John Duke Coleridge, who had defended Constance, to represent their interests. In the course of the trial, as at Road Hill, the other side sought to discredit Whicher and his discoveries. The Claimant's lawyers complained that their client had been 'haunted' by detectives, and by one in particular. 'I believe that the story of Arthur Orton has emanated from the brain of one of them,' said his barrister, 'and I think we shall yet learn how it has been concocted. I am not fond of people of this description. They are totally irresponsible, they belong to no known body, they are not called upon to account for their conduct. They don't belong to the recognised police, they are amateurs, and many of them superannuated officers who gain an honest livelihood by private enquiries. Without imputing to the honourable body that they invent evidence, I may say there is such a thing as torturing evidence so as to make it look uncommonly different from what it is.'

In 1872 the Claimant lost his case, and the Crown promptly sued him for perjury. Again the Claimant's lawyers – by then led by the Irish barrister Edward Kenealy – tried to demean Whicher, with accusations that he had bribed and coached his witnesses. Kenealy made snide comments to the prosecution witnesses when they took the stand: 'I suppose you and Whicher have had many a little drop of drink over this case?'

Since Road Hill, Whicher had learnt to shrug at vilification, to take a longer view. He had regained his old assurance. In 1873 he wrote in a letter to a friend: 'I daresay you hear me frequently abused in reference to the Tichborne case, but whether I shall live (as in the Road murder case) to outlive the innuendoes and slanders of – Kenealy I know not, but that the Claimant is Arthur Orton is as certain as that I am – Your Old Friend, Jack Whicher'.

In 1874, the Claimant was found guilty, and sentenced to fourteen years of penal servitude. He was sent to Millbank. Though the Tichbornes' solicitor urged the family to pay Whicher a bonus of a hundred guineas for his outstanding work on the case, there is no record of whether they did so.

Jack Whicher was still living with Charlotte at 63 Page Street, off Millbank Row – formerly 31 Holywell Street, but now renamed and renumbered. His niece Sarah had moved out in 1862, when she married Charlotte's nephew, James Holliwell, who had been awarded one of the first Victoria Crosses for his part in the Indian Mutiny of 1857: while under siege in a house in Lucknow, according to the citation, he had behaved 'in a most admirable manner, encouraging the other nine men, who were in low spirits, to keep going . . . His cheerful persuasion prevailed and they made a successful defence in a burning house with the enemy firing through four windows.' James and Sarah now lived in Whitechapel, east London, with their three sons. Jack and Charlotte, though childless, looked after children too – Amy Gray, born in Camberwell in about 1856, was a regular visitor from the age of five, and Emma Sangways, born in Camberwell in about 1863, was recorded as the Whichers' ward in 1871. The nature of the couple's connection with these girls is a mystery, but the bonds between them lasted until death.

In January 1868, while Whicher was hunting down witnesses in Wapping, the first instalment of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone appeared in All the Year Round. It was an immediate bestseller. 'It is a very curious story,' observed Dickens, 'wild and yet domestic.' The Moonstone, a founding fable of detective fiction, adopted many of the characteristics of the real investigation at Road: the country-house crime in which the criminal must be one of the inmates of the house; the secret lives led behind a veneer of propriety; the bumbling, pompous local policeman; the behaviour that seems to point to one thing yet turns out to point to another; the way that the innocent and the guilty alike act suspiciously, because all have something to hide; the scattering of 'real clues and pseudo clues', as a reviewer described them (the term 'red herring' – something that puts bloodhounds off the scent – was not used to mean 'pseudo clue' until 1884). In The Moonstone, as at Road Hill, the original source of the crime was a wrong done in a previous generation: the sins of the father were visited on the children, like a curse. These ideas were taken up by many of the detective novelists who succeeded Collins, as was the novel's air of uncertainty, what one of its characters calls 'the atmosphere of mystery and suspicion in which we are all living now'.

The story diluted the horror of Road Hill: instead of a child-murder, there was a jewel theft; instead of bloodstains, splashes of paint. Yet the plot borrowed many specifics from the Road case: the stained and missing nightdress; the laundry book that proves its loss; the renowned detective policeman summoned to the countryside from London; a house-hold that shudders at his invasion; the indelicacy of a lower-class man accusing a middle-class girl. Most significantly, it translated Whicher into the prototypical detective hero, 'the celebrated Cuff'. ('To cuff', in contemporary slang, was to handcuff.) The seventeen-year-old Robert Louis Stevenson, when he read the novel that year, wrote to his mother: 'Isn't the detective prime?'

Physically, Sergeant Cuff is a papery, hawkish old thing, quite unlike Whicher. In character, though, they are akin. Cuff is melancholy, sharp-witted, enigmatic, oblique – he has 'round-about' and 'underground' ways of working, by which he lures his sources into disclosing more than they intend. His eyes 'had a very disconcerting trick, when they encountered your eyes, of looking as if they expected something more from you than you were aware of yourself'. Cuff is after unconscious secrets as well as facts that are deliberately withheld. He acts as a foil to the novel's sensation, a thinking machine to interpret the palpitations and pulsings of the other characters. By identifying with Cuff, readers could shield themselves from the thrills they sought – the story's untrammelled emotion, the tremble of danger. The fever of feeling was transmuted into the 'detective-fever' that burnt in the novel's characters and its readers, a compulsion to solve the riddle. In this way the detective novel tamed the sensation novel, caging the emotional wildness in an elegant, formulaic structure. There was madness, but it was mastered by method. It was Detective Sergeant Cuff who made The Moonstone a new kind of book.

Yet Cuff, unlike the detectives he inspired, gets the solution wrong: 'I own that I made a mess of it,' he says. He is mistaken in believing that the criminal is the daughter of the house – the secretive, 'devilish self-willed', 'odd and wild' Miss Rachel. She turns out to be more noble than his policeman's nature can understand. In so far as it reflected the events at Road Hill, the novel ignored the official solution – Constance Kent's guilt – and instead gave voice to the unease that still surrounded the story. It aired the notions of somnambulism, unconscious deeds, double selves that the Road case had aroused, the dizzying whirl of perspectives that had been brought to bear upon the investigation. The solution Collins gave to the mystery of the moonstone was that the odd and wild Miss Rachel had drawn suspicion to herself in order to protect someone else.

In 1927 T.S. Eliot compared The Moonstone, favourably, to the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle:

The detective story, as created by Poe, is something as specialised and as intellectual as a chess problem, whereas the best English detective fiction has relied less on the beauty of the mathematical problem and much more on the intangible human element . . . the best heroes of English detective fiction have been, like Sergeant Cuff, fallible.

In his lifetime, Collins was often dismissed as a master of plot with little aptitude for depicting his characters' interior lives. By comparison with novelists such as George Eliot, he built his stories from the outside rather than from within. Henry James characterised them as 'monuments of mosaic art', then amended this: 'They are not so much works of art,' he said, 'as works of science.'

In May 1866 Samuel Kent renewed his plea to the Home Office to retire on his full salary, which had risen to £500 when he completed thirty years' service that April. Since Saville's death, he explained in his letter, the family had experienced 'indescribable pain and anguish greatly aggravated by the disclosures which the penitence of his daughter Constance ultimately constrained her to make'. His attempts to find the murderer and shield his family, he said, had left him in debt. The health of his second wife was 'entirely shattered' – Mrs Kent was losing her sight and had fallen prey to a 'hopeless and helpless paralysis', so he had to nurse her and tend to their four young children.

In August, to his dismay, the Home Office granted Samuel a pension of £250, half of what he had requested but the maximum the rules allowed. He desperately backtracked, begging to withdraw his resignation – he would continue working, he said; he had not intended to resign, only to enquire into the possibility; he could not manage on so little money. The Home Office questioned whether he was fit to discharge his duties. Yes, he replied at the end of August: he no longer needed to nurse his wife – Mary Kent, née Pratt, had died earlier in the month aged forty-six, of congestion of the lungs.

The Home Office allowed Samuel to continue as a sub-inspector. That summer he was awarded £350 damages by the Edinburgh Daily News for an article that had portrayed his second wife as common and cruel. With the four surviving children of his second marriage – Mary Amelia, Eveline, Acland,Florence – Samuel went north to the small Welsh town of Denbigh, where he employed an Australian governess and two other servants. His eldest daughters, Mary Ann and Elizabeth, moved to London together. William also headed for the capital city, with the £1,000 inheritance he had secured on his twenty-first birthday in July.

Through the winter of 1867, William took evening classes at King's College, where he studied the 'new science' being forged by Darwin and others. William's passion was microscopy, and by the end of the year he had been elected a Fellow of the Microscopical Society. The biologist Thomas Huxley, one of the most influential scientists of his time, became William's sponsor. He encouraged the young man to investigate infusoria, single-celled water bacteria visible only through a magnifying lens.

Huxley was known as 'Darwin's bulldog' for his ardent advocacy of the natural historian's ideas. He gave the name 'retrospective prophecy' to the process of imagining the past by observing the present. A natural historian sought to see into the past as a prophet saw into the future – 'Would that there were such a word as 'backteller'!' said Huxley. In a lecture to working men in 1868, he took the piece of chalk he was holding as the starting point for an account of the geological history of the earth. 'A small beginning,' he concluded, 'has led us to a great ending.' From the tiny, a world could unfold.

William Kent had a furious curiosity about little things, a conviction that they held the big secrets. Over the next five years he pursued his calling at the Cambridge Zoological Museum, then at the invertebrate collection of the Royal College of Surgeons, and then at the zoology department of the British Museum, where his salary rose above £300. Here he fell for corals – he declared himself 'smitten with them'. Corals are small, soft marine animals whose limestone skeletons create reefs in tropical seas. Through their 'agency', in William's words, 'new islands and countries are made to rise from the bed of the trackless ocean' – they connected zoology and geology, the quick and the dead.

Charles Dickens died in 1870, leaving an unfinished work The Mystery of Edwin Drood. By dint of its author's death, this novel became the purest kind of murder story, the kind whose tension was never dissolved. 'Alone, perhaps, among detective-story writers, he never lived to destroy his mystery,' wrote G.K. Chesterton. 'Edwin Drood may or may not have really died; but surely Dickens did not really die. Surely our real detective liveth and shall appear in the latter days of the earth. For a finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.'

In 1865 Dickens, like many others, had been forced to question his belief that Samuel Kent and Elizabeth Gough had committed the Road Hill murder. As if revisiting the case, his last novel featured a brother and sister who recall Constance and William Kent. The orphaned and exotic Helena and Neville Landless frequently ran away from their unhappy home. 'Nothing in our misery ever subdued her,' Neville says of his sister, 'though it often cowed me. When we ran away . . . the flight was always of her planning and leading. Each time she dressed as a boy, and showed the daring of a man. I take it we were seven years old when we first decamped; but I remember, when I lost the pocket-knife with which she was to have cut her hair short, how desperately she tried to tear it out, or bite it off.' Helena may have been the leader, but Neville admits to having a 'misshapen young mind' and murderous desires. He matches his sister in loathing and in cunning: 'I have had, sir, from my earliest remembrance, to suppress a deadly and bitter hatred. This has made me secret and revengeful.'

Dickens depicted the two as dark, foreign creatures, the embodiment of suspense. They are 'slender, supple, quick of eye and limb; half shy, half defiant; fierce of look; an indefinable kind of pause coming and going on their whole expression, both of face and form, which might be equally likened to the pause before a crouch or a bound'.

In January 1872 Samuel Kent fell seriously ill with liver disease and William took the train up to Wales. From his father's bedside he wrote a letter to his supervisor at the British Museum, who had lent him £5 for the trip: 'You can imagine how thankful I am to have the opportunity to stay with him for a few days there being so many little things I can do to contribute to his comfort.' On 5 February he wrote in another letter: 'All is over! In the sorrow in which we are all plunged you will I am sure excuse my absence for a few more days.' Samuel was buried next to his second wife at Llangollen. He left his money to the children of his second marriage, to be held in trust until they reached the age of twenty-one. William and the proprietor of the Manchester Guardian – presumably a friend of the family – were joint executors.

Four months after his father's death, William married Elizabeth Bennett, a barrister's daughter of twenty-two, and moved to Stoke Newington. At William's request, his new father-in-law petitioned the government for Constance's release, but without success. In 1873 William was appointed resident biologist at the Brighton Aquarium, which had opened the previous year, a spectacular gothic arcade sunk into the promenade by the pier. He and Elizabeth took up residence at Upper Rock Gardens, a Regency terrace near the seafront.

The public craze for aquaria provided scientists with unprecedented opportunities for studying live sea creatures, but William claimed that the commercial backers of the Brighton venture thought a resident naturalist 'an unnecessary extravagance', and were hostile towards him. He fell out with his colleagues as well. He accused one of his juniors of undermining him, and then was himself accused of ungentlemanly conduct by a fellow researcher. The pair had witnessed the aquarium's two octopuses copulating, and agreed to write a joint paper on the subject. When some of William's observations appeared in a letter to The Time, the colleague accused him of duplicity. William indignantly resigned his post. He had a high-handed, insensitive streak, a side-effect of the sometimes maniacal passion with which he approached his work.

The next year William was appointed curator and naturalist at the new Manchester Aquarium. He rebuilt the tanks, fitted blinds to block out glare, installed a system to circulate the water and solved the problem of how to keep large seaweeds alive in artificial conditions. His official guidebook to the creatures in his care, published in 1875, conjured up an underwater world of great range and drama, in which he observed the victims and the predators alike with unflinching yet tender fascination. He wrote of the 'brilliant expressive eyes' of the smooth blenny in tank 13, a 'brave little knight' who protected his blenny 'wives'; of the 'remarkably pugnacious' spider crab in tank 6, who tore the limbs off his brother crabs; and of the spotted dogfish in tank 10, whose second eyelid during the day remained 'entirely closed over the true eye. When darkness has fully set in, this diaphragm is completely retracted, leaving the eyeball free and gleaming.'

At the Manchester Aquarium, William discovered that seahorses used sound to communicate:

The knowledge of this remarkable circumstance was arrived at in the following manner. Early last May, the majority of the specimens of the fine collection of these singular little fish were brought to England from the Mediterranean . . . Among them were several examples remarkable at the time, for the brightness of their colours, some being bright red, others pale pink, yellow, almost pure white . . . A few of these were kept by the writer for some days in a private room, to permit the opportunity of a hurried coloured sketch. An ordinary inverted bellglass was devoted to their reception, while the individuals 'sitting for their likeness' were for a short time isolated in a still smaller glass receptacle. During one of these occasions a sharp little snapping noise was heard at short and even intervals, to proceed from the larger vase on a side table, and which was immediately afterwards responded to in a similar manner from the smaller one close at hand. Surprise and admiration was intense on discovering that it proceeded from the mouth of the usually regarded dumb little fish, and closer inspection elicited that the sound was produced by a complex muscular contraction and sudden expansion of the lower jaw.

In 1875 William's wife, Elizabeth, died suddenly aged twenty-five, of an obstruction of the bowel. Within a year he married again – his second wife was Mary Ann Livesey, a handsome, square-faced woman of thirty – and moved to London to become curator and naturalist of the new Royal Aquarium, a magnificent construction opposite the Palace of Westminster. Over the next few years William won a reputation as an expert in marine biology. In 1882 he published the third and last volume of his nine-hundred-page A Manual of the Infusoria, with fifty of his own illustrations of the microscopic water creatures. At 87 St Stephen's Avenue, Shepherd's Bush, his wife was delivered that May of a stillborn boy.

Jack and Charlotte Whicher moved south of the river in about 1880, to a small terrace on the brow of Lavender Hill, Battersea. This district, a mile from Westminster, was known for its market gardens, like the village in which Whicher was raised, but the flowerbeds and nurseries were disappearing under rows of suburban houses. The Whichers' house, 1 Cumberland Villas, had a substantial garden to the rear – the biggest in the block – with views down to the railway. From January 1881, horse-drawn trams rattled along the road in front of the house. Directly opposite, a Mr Merryweather ran a nursery garden, the last to survive on a hill that only a few years earlier had been famous for its fields of lavender.

In the summer of 1881 Whicher fell ill with gastritis and a stomach ulcer, and on 29 June, after his stomach wall was perforated, he died, aged sixty-six. His ward Amy Gray, now a twenty-five-year-old milliner, was at the deathbed; on the death certificate she was registered as his niece. Whicher left Amy £150 in his will, and a gold Swiss watch. He left £100 to Emma Sangways, the other girl whom he and Charlotte had looked after, and £300 to his niece Sarah Holliwell. He bequeathed £150, a gold watch and chain and a signet ring to a friend called John Potter, a surveyor's clerk who worked in Whitehall Place, and £100 to his friend and proteégeé Dolly Williamson, now Chief Superintendent of Scotland Yard. These two were appointed executors of the will. The remainder of his estate – about £700 – went to his wife.

A three-sentence obituary of Jonathan Whicher appeared in the Police Gazette. He had been almost forgotten. For all the brilliance with which he investigated the Road Hill murder, Whicher had been powerless to give the public the certainty that they craved or to deliver them from the evils that he saw. He was punished for his failure. From now on, the detective heroes of England would be found only in the realm of fiction.^*

After Jack's death, Charlotte moved to the house of John Potter in Saunders Road, Notting Hill. Amy Gray and Emma Sangways went with her. Charlotte died in January 1883, at the age of sixty-nine, leaving the bulk of her assets to Amy and Emma. She appointed Dolly Williamson the sole executor of her will.

Williamson was 'a quiet, unpretending, middle-aged man', recalled the police historian and prison governor Major Arthur Griffiths, 'who walked leisurely along Whitehall, balancing a hat that was a little large for him loosely on his head, and often with a sprig of a leaf or flower between his lips. He was by nature very reticent; no outsider could win from him any details of the many big things he had 'put through'. His talk, for choice, was about gardening, for which he had a perfect passion; and his blooms were famous in the neighbourhood where he spent his unofficial hours.'

The Chief Superintendent was known as 'the Philosopher' for his abstracted, intellectual manner, and was said to direct operations from his desk as if playing a game of chess. A colleague described him as 'A Scot, from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, loyal, hardworking, persevering, phlegmatic, obstinate, unenthusiastic, courageous, always having his own opinion, never afraid to express it, slow to grasp a new idea, doubtful of its efficacy, seeing its disadvantages rather than its advantages, but withal so clear-headed, and so honest, and kind-hearted to a fault, he was a most upright and valuable public servant.' Williamson was the antithesis of Whicher's early partner Charley Field, who revelled in his proximity to a criminal underworld. These two men bracketed Whicher, defined the range of what a Victorian detective could be. Field – who by the 1870s was reduced almost to poverty – recalled the daredevil thief-takers of the eighteenth century, while Williamson gestured forward to the careful commanders of the twentieth.

In a notorious trial of 1877, several of Williamson's men were found guilty of corruption, confirming the public suspicion that professional detectives were greedy and duplicitous. Williamson was said to be heartbroken by the betrayal. He took charge of the Criminal Investigation Department when it was founded the next year. Though he led the department during the investigations into the 'Jack the Ripper' murders of Whitechapel prostitutes in 1888, he was too unwell to take an active part. According to a police commissioner, he was 'worn out before his time by the constant strain of very harassing work'. He died in 1889, aged fifty-eight, leaving a wife and five children. Williamson's coffin was covered with flowers and carried to St John's Church, opposite his house in Smith Square, Westminster, by six detective inspectors.

'Most of the prominent detectives of to-day learnt their work under Williamson,' wrote Griffiths in 1904. 'Butcher, the chief inspector . . . is as fond of flowers as was his master, and may be known by the fine rose in his buttonhole.' This love of flowers had originated with Jack Whicher's father, the Camberwell gardener, and seemed now to have been passed on through the first sixty years of the detective force, from man to man.

Constance Kent was shuffled between gaols – from Millbank to Parkhurst, on the Isle of Wight, to Woking in Surrey, and back to Millbank. At Parkhurst she made mosaics, geometrical puzzles pieced together on boards and dispatched to be laid on the floors of churches in southern England: St Katharine's in Merstham, Surrey; St Peter's in Portland, Dorset; St Swithun's in East Grinstead, Sussex. She was a gifted mosaicist. While at Woking she worked on the floor for the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral in London. Like her brother William, she was drawn to the tiny, to fragments that told stories. Among the images on the floor of the St Paul's crypt is the fat-cheeked face of an infant boy, his eyes wide as if startled, wings sprouting from the sides of his head.

At Millbank, Constance worked variously in the kitchens, the laundry and the infirmary – a set of 'naked and grated chambers', wrote Henry James, washed in 'a sallow light'. Major Arthur Griffiths, then the deputy governor of the gaol, praised her work in the sickroom: 'nothing could exceed the devoted attention she gave the sick under her charge as a nurse'. He recalled her in his memoirs as

a small, mouse-like creature, with much of the promptitude of the mouse or the lizard, surprised, in disappearing when alarmed. The approach of any strange or unknown face whom she feared might come to spy her out and stare constituted a real alarm for Constance Kent. When anyone went the length of asking, 'Which is Constance?' she had already concealed herself somewhere with wonderful rapidity and cleverness. She was a mystery in every way. It was almost impossible to believe that this insignificant, inoffensive little person could have cut her infant brother's throat in circumstances of such particular atrocity. No doubt there were features in her face which the criminal anthropologist would have seized upon as being suggestive of instinctive criminality – high cheek bones, a lowering, overhanging brow, and deep-set, small eyes; but yet her manner was prepossessing, and her intelligence was of a high order.

Griffiths returned in another memoir to the young woman's ability to conceal herself:

Constance Kent was like a ghost in Millbank; flitting noiselessly about, mostly invisible . . . She spoke to no one, and no one addressed her, the desire to efface herself was always respected, and her name was never mentioned.

In 1877 Constance petitioned Richard Cross, the Home Secretary in Benjamin Disraeli's Conservative government, for an early release. William's former father-in-law, Thomas Bennett, also wrote to Cross on her behalf. Their pleas were turned down. That summer, the Millbank medical officer recommended that Constance be spared cooking duties (these were arduous, and the kitchens gloomy and bare) and instead given needlework shifts. The authorities should consider transferring her to another gaol, he said, as her health was weakening and she would benefit from a 'change of air' – but he did not recommend returning her to Woking, because of 'the great dislike which for some reason or other she entertains to that prison'. She was sent later that year to the female convict prison at Fulham, south-west London, which housed four hundred women.

From cell 29 of Fulham gaol she petitioned Cross again in 1878. In her efforts to win his mercy, she invoked her youth at the time she killed Saville, her contrition, the voluntary nature of her confession, her good behaviour in gaol. She tried to convey what had driven her to murder, in jagged, insistent phrases:

the unconquerable aversion to one, who had taught her to despise and dislike her own mother, who robbed that mother of the affection both of a husband and a daughter, the sense of the wrong done to her mother when once discovered became yet more intensified after her death, her successor never alluding to that mother but with taunting sarcasm, she therefore sought to retaliate on its authoress, the mental agony her own mother had endured.

The petition was refused. She pleaded for mercy again in 1880, in 1881 and in 1882, when she added to the list of her tribulations her failing sight (she had an eye infection) and the 'degrading associations' to which she was subjected in gaol. These pleas were turned down by the new Home Secretary, Sir William Vernon Harcourt, a member of William Gladstone's Liberal administration. The Reverend Wagner wrote letters on her behalf and found other churchmen – such as the Bishop of Bloemfontein – to do the same. Constance unsuccessfully petitioned Harcourt again in 1883, and by 1884 was almost in despair. She had served nearly two decades, she implored him, 'without one ray of hope to brighten a life which since earliest recollection has been passed in confinement, either of school, convent, or prison, while before her now only lies a gloomy future of approaching age after a youth spent in dreary waiting, and heart-sickening dis-appointment, in complete isolation from all that makes life worth living, amid uncongenial surroundings from which mind and body shrink'. Harcourt again marked her petition 'nil'.

Only after serving every day of the twenty-year sentence, on 18 July 1885, was Constance freed.