the physiognomy of children be regarded as the best index of the family weather.' Stapleton's rhetoric drew on the swirl of early Victorian ideas that had culminated in Darwin's
All the visitors to Road Hill House in the weeks after the murder scanned the inhabitants for clues. Most literally, the medical men examined Saville's corpse to read the story that it told. Others studied the faces and bodies of the living inmates of the house. Rowland Rodway said of Elizabeth Gough: 'I observed on her face traces of emotion and fatigue.' Albert Groser, a young reporter who sneaked into the house on the day of the murder, noticed Gough's 'agitated, troubled' demeanour. But where their suspicions were aroused by the nursemaid's frowns and fidgets, Whicher was to find his traces in absences, silences.
In his report to Sir Richard Mayne, Whicher outlined what he had noticed about the Kent family. Mr and Mrs Kent were 'doating' towards their younger children. William was 'very dejected'. Constance and William had a 'sympathy' and a 'close intimacy' ('close' in 1860 meant secretive). Whicher took account of how the family reacted to Saville's death. When Elizabeth Gough was 'telling the two elder Miss Kents that the child had been taken away during the night', he wrote,
The puzzle of the Road Hill case lay in the killer's peculiar combination of heat and cold, planning and passion. Whoever had murdered, mutilated and defiled Saville Kent must be horribly disturbed, possessed by unnaturally strong feelings; yet the same person, in remaining so far undiscovered, had shown startling powers of self-control. Whicher took Constance's cold quiet as a clue that she had killed her brother.
Whicher's confrontation with Constance over the nightdress may have been designed as an experiment on her nerves. If so, her unruffled blankness only confirmed his suspicions. As with the expressionless manner, so with the vanished nightdress: the clues lay in the gaps, in the hints of things hidden. What Whicher thought he saw in Constance was as slight as what Mr Bucket detected in the murderess Madame Hortense, 'her arms composedly crossed . . . [but] something in her dark cheek beating like a clock'. And Whicher's conviction of his suspect's guilt was as sure as Bucket's: 'By the living Lord it flashed upon me . . . that she had done it!' Or, in the words of Wilkie Collins' Sergeant Cuff, the fictional detective whom Whicher inspired: 'I don't suspect. I know.'
Even before Whicher's arrival, the Road Hill case had spawned would-be sleuths among the readers of English newspapers. They sent their tips to the police. 'I have had a dream which has given me a deal of uneasiness,' wrote a man from Stoke-on-Trent. 'I dreamed I saw 3 men making up the plot at a house near Finished Building, about half a mile from the sean of murder . . . I can give a minute description of the men I saw in my dream.' A newspaper vendor in Reading, Berkshire, suspected a man who had visited her shop on 4 July because he had asked 'in a tremulous way' whether there was anything about the murder in the previous day's
On the day that Whicher reached Road another stranger had visited the village, introducing himself as a professor of phrenology. He offered to examine the heads of the murder suspects: by feeling the contours of their skulls, he claimed, he could determine who was guilty. A bump behind the ear indicated destructiveness; the part of the skull just above that was the seat of secretiveness. This was probably the same phrenologist who a week earlier had written from Warminster, five miles away, offering his services to the police. He practised a 'tried, disinterested science', he assured them: 'I find it as easy to detect the murderer's head, as it is to select a tiger from a sheep.' The police declined the offers – in 1860 phrenology was widely dismissed as quackery. But in some ways it was a close cousin of detective work. Much of the excitement about detection lay in its novelty, its mystery and its aura of science, the same qualities that had once attended phrenology. Poe wrote of his own detective stories: 'These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious – but people think them more ingenious than they are – on account of their method and air of method.'
It was possible that Whicher's speculations were no better founded than those of any other observer of the crime. Detectives, like phrenologists, might be masters of mystification, men who cloaked common sense in complexity, dressed up guesses as science.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SHAPE-SHIFTERS
18 July
The warm weather held on Wednesday, though clouds passed over the West Country in the afternoon, obscuring a partial eclipse of the sun. The local police maintained a strict surveillance on Road Hill House, and distributed a thousand handbills advertising the ?200 reward for information that led to the conviction of Saville's murderer.
Whicher broadened his inquiries further. He took the train from Trowbridge to Bristol, and hired a cab for two hours in Bath. There he interviewed the police and the owner of the Greyhound Hotel about an odd episode that had taken place four years earlier, in July 1856.
The Kents had by then been living in Road Hill House for about a year. The second Mrs Kent was eight months pregnant with Saville. Constance and William, aged twelve and eleven, were both home from boarding school for the holidays, Constance apparently afflicted with weak ankles. A doctor advised that she wear laced stockings and avoid exercise. When the family visited Bath for the summer flower show she was pushed around in a wheeled chair.
One day Constance and William ran away. In the privy in the shrubbery on 17 July Constance changed into some of William's old clothes, which she had mended and hidden for this purpose. She then cut off her hair and threw it, with her discarded dress and petticoats, into the vault of the privy. She and William planned to go to sea as cabin boys, and were headed for Bristol. Like their older brother Edward, they hoped to flee the country. The two walked the ten miles to Bath by evening. When they tried to get a room for the night at the Greyhound Hotel, the innkeeper suspected that they were runaways, on account of their fine clothes and manners, and questioned them closely. Constance was 'very self-possessed, and even insolent, in her manner and language', Stapleton recounted, but 'William soon broke down, and burst into tears'. William was put to bed in the hotel, according to Stapleton, and Constance was handed over to the police. She spent the night at the station house, where she kept a 'determined silence'.
The reports of this incident in local papers differed from the account given by Stapleton, who may have emphasised William's sensitivity in order to play up Constance's dominant nature; the source for his account was almost certainly Samuel Kent. In one newspaper, which characterised the episode as 'an instance of extraordinary affection and adventurous daring', William did not break down in tears and Constance was not rude. They were both 'exceedingly polite' when interrogated by the landlord, simply repeating that they were going to sea. William was taken to the station. They kept their secret until the morning, when a servant from Road Hill House arrived in Bath
