square', he reported, 'and at the time contained several feet of water and soft soil'. Whicher believed that the assailant intended the child to drown or suffocate in the excrement, and then to disappear in it. If this plan had worked, there would have been no marks of blood to identify either the murder scene or the murderer. But the slanting splashboard, recently installed on the orders of Samuel Kent, left an opening of only a few inches between the lavatory seat and the wall, so that it blocked the body's descent into the vault. The killer, said Whicher, 'being thus foiled, resorted to the knife', snatching a weapon from the basket just inside the kitchen passage, and stabbing the boy in the throat and chest to make certain of his death. At least three of the knives in the basket, he said to the
That afternoon Whicher searched Constance's bedroom. In her chest of drawers he found a list of the linen she had brought back from school, which included three nightdresses. He had already been told that one of these had vanished. He sent for Constance.
'Is this a list of your linen?'
'Yes.'
'In whose writing is it?'
'It is my own writing.'
He pointed to the list. 'Here are three nightdresses; where are they?'
'I have two; the other was lost at the wash the week after the murder.'
She showed him the two still in her possession – plain, roughly woven garments. Whicher noticed another nightdress and a nightcap lying on the bed. He asked Constance whose they were.
'They are my sister's,' she replied. Since Mrs Holley was still refusing to take in the family's laundry, Constance's two nightdresses were now dirty, and she had borrowed a clean one on Saturday from Mary Ann or Elizabeth. Whicher told Constance he must confiscate her linen list and remaining nightclothes. The missing nightdress was his first clue.
The word 'clue' derives from 'clew', meaning a ball of thread or yarn. It had come to mean 'that which points the way' because of the Greek myth in which Theseus uses a ball of yarn, given to him by Ariadne, to find his way out of the Minotaur's labyrinth. The writers of the mid-nineteenth century still had this image in mind when they used the word. 'There is always a pleasure in unravelling a mystery, in catching at the gossamer clue which will guide to certainty,' observed Elizabeth Gaskell in 1848. 'I thought I saw the end of a good clew,' said the narrator of Andrew Forrester's
Then as now, many clues were literally made of cloth – criminals could be identified by pieces of fabric. One case that turned on such evidence was very close to home for Jack Whicher.
In 1837, a notorious murderer was traced to Wyndham Road, Whicher's own street in Camberwell. James Greenacre, a cabinetmaker who owned eight cottages in the road, killed and dismembered his fiancee, Hannah Brown, in his lodgings there in December 1836. He wrapped her head in a sack and carried it by omnibus to Stepney, east London, where he threw it in a canal. He dumped her torso on the Edgware Road, in the north-west of the city, and her legs in a ditch in Camberwell. The star of the police investigation was PC Pegler of the S (Hampstead) division, who found Hannah Brown's torso. He traced Greenacre through a piece of cloth – the sacking in which the body parts were wrapped – and secured his confession through another: a snippet of thick nankeen cotton found on the Edgware Road, which matched a patch on the frock of his girlfriend's baby. The unravelling of the crime was reported with fascination in the press. Greenacre was hanged in May 1837. Whicher joined the police force four months later.
In 1849 the London detectives, Whicher, Thornton and Field among them, found the Bermondsey murderess Maria Manning by way of a bloodstained dress she had stashed in a railway-station locker. Manning and her husband had murdered her former lover and buried him beneath their kitchen floor. The detectives tracked down the couple with the aid of telegraph messages, express trains and steamships. Whicher checked the hotels and railway stations in Paris, and then the ships sailing from Southampton and Plymouth. He used his experience in tracing banknotes to help shore up the evidence against the killers. Eventually, Manning was caught in Edinburgh, her husband in Jersey. Each accused the other of the crime, and both were sentenced to death. The executions drew tens of thousands of spectators, while the 'broadside' ballads about the case sold two and a half million copies. A series of woodcuts printed that year showed the investigators as dashing action heroes, and the Commissioner praised his men for the 'extraordinary skill and exertion' with which they had worked on the case. He awarded Whicher and Thornton a bonus of ?10 each; Field, as an inspector, was given ?15.
The next year Whicher told William Wills a more commonplace story of how clothes could help capture a criminal. A detective sergeant – probably Whicher himself – was called in by a smart London hotel to find a man who the previous night had ransacked a guest's portmanteau. On the carpet of the room in which the trunk had been looted, the detective noticed a button. He watched the hotel guests and staff all day, closely scanning their clothes – at the risk, said Whicher, of being 'set down for an eccentric critic of linen'. Eventually he spotted a man with a button missing from his shirt, the thread dangling; the remaining buttons matched the 'little tell-tale' that the detective had found.
The Road Hill case was dense with fabric. The setting of the murder happened to be clothmaking country, a land of sheep and wool mills. The family's dirty laundry lay at the heart of the investigation, their washerwoman was a key witness, and the investigation threw up three clues of cloth: a flannel, a blanket and a missing nightdress. Whicher closed in on the last of these, much as the narrator of Wilkie Collins' 'The Diary of Anne Rodway', a short story of 1856, closed in on a torn cravat: 'A kind of fever got possession of me – a vehement yearning to go on from this first discovery and find out more, no matter what the risk might be. The cravat now really became . . . the clue that I was resolved to follow.'
The thread that led Theseus out of the maze was true to another principle of Whicher's investigation: the progress of a detective was backwards. To find his way out of danger and confusion, Theseus had to retrace his steps, return to the origin. The solution to a crime was the beginning as well as the end of the story.
Through his interviews with the Kents and those who knew them, Whicher tracked the family back in time. Though there were gaps, contradictions, indications of further secrets, he pieced together a narrative that he believed provided an explanation for murder. Much of it was chronicled in the book about the case that Joseph Stapleton published in 1861; the surgeon's account was heavily biased towards Samuel Kent, but it was scrupulous – and scurrilous – enough to hint at the many fissures in the family story.
In east London in 1829 Samuel Kent, the twenty-eight-year-old son of a carpetmaker from the north-eastern suburb of Clapton, married Mary Ann Windus, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a prosperous coachmaker from
