to the right of the front lawn was the privy in which Saville had been found – a lavatory in a shed built over a pit in the earth.
Through the front door of the house a large hall led to the main staircase. To the right of the hall was the dining room – an elegant rectangle that stretched out of the side of the building – and to the left was the snug square of the library, its tall arched windows overlooking the lawns. Behind the library was the drawing room, which ended in a crescent of bay windows leading on to the back gardens – it was one of these that had been found open by Sarah Cox on 30 June.
The stairs, laid with thick carpet, ran up to the first and second storeys. Between floors were landings with views across the grounds to the rear – a flower garden, a kitchen garden, an orchard, a greenhouse, and beyond them cows, sheep, a field of grass, a seam of trees along the river Frome.
On the first floor, behind the master bedroom and the nursery, were three spare rooms and a water closet. On the top floor, along with the four occupied bedrooms, were two spare rooms and a ladder to the attic. This floor was darker than those below, with lower ceilings and squatter windows. Most of the bedrooms in the house shared a view south over the drive and lawn and down to the village, though William's room looked east to the neighbouring cottages and the gothic twin turrets and spires of Christ Church.
Behind William's room the back stairs twisted steeply down to the first and ground floors. At their foot was the kitchen passage, busy with doors onto the scullery, kitchen, laundry, pantry, and the steps to the cellars. A door at the end of the passage led to a paved courtyard hemmed in by the carriage house, stable and outhouses. The privy lay just to the right, through a door by the knife-house. A ten-foot-high stone wall, with a gate for tradesmen, ran along the right-hand side of the property, by the cottage corner.
Stapleton gave a highly coloured sketch of this group of cottages, where the Holcombes, the Nutts and the Holleys had their homes: 'A beer-house obtrudes itself in the centre, flanked by a cottage kept from falling down only by the precarious support of wooden stakes stuck into the ground. The windows are crushed or thrust outwards by the tumbling walls, from the occupation of which the tenants had already fled. Several other cottages are grouped around, and some of them overlook Mr Kent's premises. It is indeed a 'rookery' – a bit of St Giles's gone out of town to rusticate. It might be mistaken for a haunt of outcasts and a den of thieves.'
Since the murder, Road Hill House had become a puzzle, a riddle in three dimensions, its floor plans and furnishings an esoteric code. Whicher's task was to decipher the house – as a crime scene, and as a guide to the character of the family.
The walls and fences that Samuel had erected around his grounds indicated a liking for privacy. Within the house, though, children and adults, servants and employers were strangely entangled. Affluent mid-Victorians usually preferred to keep the servants apart from the family, and the children in their own quarters. Here, the nursemaid slept feet away from the master bedroom, and the five-year-old slept with her parents. The other servants and the stepchildren were thrown together on the top floor like so much lumber in an attic. The arrangement marked out the lower status of the children of the first Mrs Kent.
In his reports to Scotland Yard* Whicher noted that Constance and William were the only members of the house-hold with rooms of their own. This was not indicative of status, only of the fact that neither had a sibling of the same sex and a similar age with whom they might share. Its significance was logistical: either child could have slipped out at night unnoticed.
In the nursery, Whicher was shown how the blanket had been drawn from between Saville's bedclothes on the night of his death, and the sheet and quilt 'folded neatly back' to the foot of the cot – which, he said, 'it can hardly be supposed a man would have done'. With Foley and Wolfe, he then conducted an experiment to see whether it was possible to take a three-year-old child from the cot without waking it or anyone else in the room. The newspapers did not divulge which three-year-old was used in the experiment, nor how it was induced to fall asleep repeatedly, but they claimed that the police officers accomplished the task three times.
In the drawing room, Whicher saw that the window could have been unfastened only from the inside. 'This window which is about ten feet high, comes down within a few inches of the ground,' he reported to Sir Richard Mayne, 'and faces the lawn at the back of the house, and opens by lifting up the bottom sash, which was found up about six inches at the bottom. These shutters were fastened with a Bar inside, consequently no entry could be made from the outside.' Even if someone had broken into the house by this window, he pointed out, they could have got no further, since the drawing-room door was locked from the other side. 'Therefore it is quite certain,' he wrote, 'that no person came in by that window.' He was also sure that no one had fled the premises by that window, since Sarah Cox told him that the folding shutters were partly closed from within. This, he said, confirmed his conviction that an inmate of the house had killed the boy.
The only indication that an intruder might have been at the crime scene was the scrap of bloodied newspaper discovered next to the privy. Whicher found, though, that this had not been torn from the
Whicher explained in his reports that he thought that the murderer had not taken Saville out through the drawing-room window, but by another route altogether: down the back stairs, along the passage past the kitchen, out of the kitchen door to the courtyard, and through a further door from the yard to the privy in the shrubbery. The murderer would have had to unlock, unchain and unbolt the kitchen door and unbolt the yard door, then secure both doors again on returning to the house, but this was perfectly practicable, and worth the effort. The kitchen door was only twenty paces, or yards, from the privy, Whicher pointed out, whereas the distance from the drawing-room window to the privy was seventy-nine paces. To walk from the drawing room to the privy also meant passing round the front of the building, immediately under the windows where the rest of the family and servants had been sleeping. Anyone who lived in the house would have known that the kitchen passage offered a much more direct and discreet route – in Whicher's words, 'the shortest and most secret way'. It meant passing the guard dog, but then the dog might not have barked at a familiar face. 'The Dog,' wrote Whicher, 'is perfectly harmless.' Even when the detective, a perfect stranger, approached the animal in daylight, it did not bark or bite.*
'I therefore feel quite convinced,' Whicher concluded, 'that the window shutters were merely opened by one of the inmates, to lead to the supposition that the child had been stolen.'
Whicher was familiar with this kind of feint, the false trail laid in an attempt to fox the police. In 1850 he had described to a journalist the methods of the 'Dancing School' of London cat burglars. They would watch a house for days, and find out at what time its inhabitants dined; this was the ideal moment for a burglary, since dinner tied up servants and employers alike. At the appointed hour, a gang member crept noiselessly, or 'danced', into the garret and plundered the upper storeys of small valuables, typically jewels. Before he made off across the rooftops with his spoils, the burglar would 'sell' (frame) a maid by hiding one of the jewels under her mattress. The planted jewel, like the open window in Road Hill House, was a 'blind', designed to point the detectives the wrong way.
Perhaps the killer did not only plan to mislead the police about how Saville had been removed, Whicher reasoned, but about where he had been taken – the open window faced the gardens and fields behind the house. The murderer might have hoped that the police would not find the body in the privy, which lay in the opposite direction. Whicher speculated that the killer's 'original intention was to have thrown the child down the privy . . . thinking it would sink into the soil out of sight'. The privy 'has a large cesspool about ten feet deep and seven feet
