The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

practical joke: at Ascot in the late 1850s he and some fellow officers crept up on a sleeping inspector, who was known for the pride he took in his whiskers, and shaved the bushy black growth off his left cheek.

Yet Whicher was a reserved man, private about his past. At least one sadness attended him. On 15 April 1838 a woman who called herself Elizabeth Whicher, formerly Green, nee Harding, had given birth in the borough of Lambeth to a boy named Jonathan Whicher. On the birth certificate she recorded the father's name as Jonathan Whicher, his occupation as police constable, their address as 4 Providence Row. She had been about four weeks pregnant when Jack Whicher applied to join the police force – it may have been the prospect of a child that prompted him to enlist.

Three years later, Whicher was living in the Hunter Place station house, Holborn, as a single man. Neither his son nor the child's mother seems to appear on a death register between 1838 and 1851, nor in any census taken that century. The certificate apart, there is no evidence that Jack Whicher ever had a child. Only the record of the boy's birth remains.

CHAPTER FIVE

EVERY CLUE SEEMS CUT OFF

16 July

On the morning of Monday, 16 July, Superintendent Foley drove Whicher to Road in a trap, taking the same lane by which Samuel Kent had returned to the village when he learnt that his son was dead. It was another dry day – no rain had fallen since Saville's murder. As the policemen rode further from the sooty town, the plains began to give way to hills, woods and pastures. There were sheep in the fields, dark birds in the trees: jackdaws, magpies, blackbirds, ravens and carrion crows. Smaller birds nested in the grass and gorse – olive chiffchaffs, chestnut- winged corncrakes – while swallows and swifts sailed overhead.

The village of Road sat smack on the border of two counties: though Road Hill House and the Reverend Peacock's Christ Church were in Wiltshire, most of the several hundred villagers lived down the hill in Somersetshire. In this part of England, people addressed each other as 'thee' and 'thou', and spoke with a guttural burr – a farmer was a 'varmer', the sun was the 'zun', a thread was a 'dread'. The district had a distinctive vocabulary: someone marked with smallpox scars, like Whicher, was 'pock-fredden'; to 'skummer' a piece of cloth was to foul it with dirty liquid; to 'buddle' a creature was to suffocate it in mud.

Road was a picturesque village, its cottages built of limestone cobbles or flat blocks of sandstone punched through with square windows. There were at least four pubs (the Red Lion, the George, the Cross Keys, the Bell), a brewery, two Anglican churches, a Baptist chapel, a school, a post office, bakers, grocers, butchers, blacksmiths, shoemakers, tailors, dressmakers, saddlers and so on. Trowbridge lay five miles north-east, and Frome, a Somersetshire wool town, the same distance south-west. A few of the villagers wove on handlooms in their cottages. Most worked in the fields or at one of the several mills in the neighbourhood. Shawford Mill was a specialist wool-dyeing works, with a water-wheel driven by the river Frome – among the local dyes were dark green, from privet; brown, from yew; and indigo, from woad. Next to Road Bridge was a mill devoted to 'fulling', a process of hammering wet wool until the individual threads vanished and the cloth became dense, tight, impossible to unravel.

The village was alight with speculation about Saville's death. His murder had aroused 'a spirit' among the people, said Joseph Stapleton in his book about the case, 'which it might be difficult to govern or suppress'. In the words of the Bath Chronicle:

There is a very strong feeling amongst the lower class of inhabitants in the village against Mr Kent's family, as well as against himself, and none of them can scarcely walk in the village without being insulted. The poor little innocent, the victim of this dark assassination, is spoken of generally throughout the village in terms of much endearment. He is represented as having been a sturdy, handsome little fellow, with a merry, laughing face, and curly, flaxen hair. The women speak of him with tears in their eyes, and . . . call to remembrance his many little engaging ways and innocent prattling.

The villagers remembered Saville as a sweet cherub, and reviled his family as fiends.

Samuel Kent was disliked in the district anyway. In part this was because of his job – he was responsible for enforcing the Factory Act of 1833, devised principally to protect children from overwork and injury, which was resented by mill-owners and workers alike. Factory inspectors, like police inspectors, were agents of surveillance. When Samuel moved into Road Hill House in 1855, reported the Frome Times, many locals said, 'We don't want him here; we want someone who will give us bread, and not someone who will take it from us.' He had recently turned more than twenty boys and girls under the age of thirteen out of a Trowbridge mill, depriving them of their earnings of three or four shillings a week.

Samuel did nothing to better relations with his neighbours. According to Stapleton, he built an 'impervious fence' 'against the oversight and intrusion' of the inhabitants of the cottages lining the lane next to Road Hill House. He put up 'No Trespassing' signs by the river in his grounds, where the cottagers had been accustomed to fish for trout. The villagers took their revenge on Samuel's servants and family. 'His children were called after,' wrote Stapleton, 'in their walks and on their way to church, by the cottagers' children.' Since Saville's death, Samuel had repeatedly voiced his suspicion that these cottagers had something to do with the murder.

At eleven o'clock Whicher and Foley joined the secret proceedings in the Temperance Hall. Whicher watched as the magistrates re-examined Samuel Kent, the Reverend Peacock and then the local police's chief suspect, Elizabeth Gough. At one o'clock she was set free. The reporters who had gathered outside saw her emerge from the building. 'She appeared to have been suffering from severe mental anguish since she had been in custody,' wrote the man from the Bath Chronicle, 'as her face, which was bright and cheerful previously, now wore a very dejected and careworn appearance; in fact, we were astonished at the great change her features had undergone only during this slight detention.' The nursemaid told the reporters that she was returning to Road Hill House to help Mrs Kent during her confinement – the baby was due in a few weeks.

The reporters were then let into the hall, where they were addressed by one of the magistrates. He told them that the investigation was now in the hands of Detective-Inspector Whicher, and that there was a ?200 reward for any person giving information that would lead to the conviction of Saville's murderer: ?100 had been put up by the government and ?100 by Samuel Kent. If an accomplice turned in the killer, he or she would be given a free pardon. The inquiry was adjourned until Friday.

Whicher was joining the murder investigation two weeks late. The victim's body had been boxed up and buried, the testimony of the witnesses had been rehearsed, the evidence had been collected, or destroyed. He would have to reopen the wounds, unseal the scene. Superintendents Foley and Wolfe, both of the Wiltshire constabulary, led him up the hill to the house.

Road Hill House sat hidden above the village, a smooth block of creamy Bath limestone shielded from the road by trees and walls. A cloth merchant, Thomas Ledyard, had built the property in about 1800, when he ran the Road Bridge fulling mill. It was one of the finest houses in the area. A driveway curved beneath the yews and elms to a shallow entrance porch, which nudged out like a sentry box from the building's flat face. Concealed in the shrubbery