The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very grateful to Bernard Taylor for directing me to his archive of papers on the Road Hill murder and for allowing me to use the images he gathered – he has been exceptionally generous. Thanks also to Stewart Evans, the custodian of the archive, for his guidance and hospitality, and to Cynthia Yates for being such a welcoming and informative hostess at Langham (formerly Road Hill) House. For help on specific queries, thanks to Joseph Wisdom at St Paul's Cathedral, Susanna Lamb at Madame Tussaud's, Eleri Lynn at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Katherine White at Trowbridge Museum and Anthony J. Harrison in Australia. Thank you to Leslie Robinson for the maps. More generally, I am indebted to the staff of the National Archives, the Family Records Centre, Battersea Library, Southwark Local History Library, Trowbridge Museum, Frome Museum, the London Library, the British Library, the London Metropolitan Archives and the Metropolitan Police Historical Collection.

For their advice and their support, huge thanks to my family and friends, among them Ben Summerscale, Juliet Summerscale, Valerie Summerscale, Peter Summerscale, Robert Randall, Daniel Nogués, Victoria Lane, Toby Clements, Sinclair McKay, Lorna Bradbury, Alex Clark, Will Cohu, Ruth Metzstein, Stephen O'Connell, Keith Wilson and Miranda Fricker. In the early stages of my research, I was sent to excellent sources by Sarah Wise, Rebecca Gowers, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Kathryn Hughes. Towards the end, I had wonderful readers in Anthea Trodd and Peter Parker. My thanks also to PD James for her observations on this case and to former Detective-Inspector Douglas Campbell for his comments about detective work in general.

For putting so much into publishing the book, thank you to Alexandra Pringle, Mary Morris, Kate Tindal-Robertson, Meike Boening, Kathleen Farrar, Polly Napper, Kate Bland, David Mann, Phillip Beresford, Robert Lacey, and the rest of the brilliant people at Bloomsbury. Thank you to my terrific editors at Walker & Co, George Gibson and Michele Amundsen, and to the other publishers who have shown faith in the book, including Andreu Jaume of Lumen S.A. in Barcelona, Dorothee Grisebach of Berlin Verlag, Dominique Bourgois of Christian Bourgois Editeur in Paris, Andrea Canobbio of Giulio Einaudi Editore in Turin, and Nikolai Naumenko of AST in Moscow. I am grateful also to Angus Cargill and Charlotte Greig for their early interest and encouragement. My thanks to the excellent Laurence Laluyaux, Stephen Edwards and Hannah Westland of Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd, to Julia Kreitman of The Agency, and to Melanie Jackson in New York. Special thanks to David Miller, my friend and agent, for always seeming to understand better than I did what it was that I was trying to do. His contribution to this book is immeasurable. My son, Sam, has already been rewarded (with a trip to Legoland) for being patient while I worked, but I'd like to thank him here for being altogether fantastic.