The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

and identified the children, complaining that he had worn out three horses searching for them.

William confessed to the police that he had run away from home, claiming that he had instigated the escapade: 'he desired to go to sea, he said, and his companion, his younger sister, had dressed herself in his clothes, and cut her hair short in order to accompany him to Bristol, where he hoped to be taken as cabin boy by some good-natured captain. All the money which they possessed was eighteenpence, but neither want of cash nor distance had been able to overcome the boy's determination or the sister's affection.' Another report also gave Constance the role of sidekick and William that of protector: 'the boy wanted to go to sea and entrusted his secret to his sister . . . whose ardent affection determined her to accompany him at all hazards'. She 'allowed him to cut her hair, which was then parted at the side'.

Stapleton and the Bath reporters agreed on Constance's unusual resolve, though they appraised it differently. According to one of the newspapers, 'The little girl, we are told, behaved like a little hero, acting the part of a boy to the admiration of all who saw her. We learn from Mr Inspector Norris . . . that Miss Kent manifested great shrewdness and resolution. The boy's clothes she wore were small for her, and she carried a small stick, which she used as if she had been accustomed to it. It was some time before he suspected that she was of the female sex, which he only discovered by a peculiarity in her mode of sitting.'

The servant took the children home. Samuel was away on a business trip, inspecting factories in Devonshire, but he returned to Road that afternoon. William 'at once expressed the greatest sorrow and contrition, and sobbed bitterly', according to Stapleton. But Constance refused to apologise to her father or her stepmother. She would say only that she had 'wished to be independent'.

It was, observed the Bath Express, 'a most strange circumstance in a delicately nurtured gentleman's family'.

When he had finished his inquiries in Bath on Wednesday, Whicher went by railway to Warminster, five miles east of Road, to speak to one of Constance's schoolfriends.

Emma Moody, fifteen, lived in a house in Gore Lane with her brother, sister and widowed mother, all wool- workers. Whicher showed Emma the breast flannel, which she said she had never seen before. He asked her if Constance had ever spoken about Saville.

'I have heard her say she disliked the child and pinched it, but it was done in fun,' said Emma. 'She was laughing at the time she said it.' When asked what made Constance tease the younger children, Emma said, 'I believe it was through jealousy, and because the parents showed great partiality.' She explained: 'I said upon one occasion, when we were talking about the holidays – we were going for a walk towards Road – I said, 'Won't it be nice to go home so shortly?' She said, 'Yes, perhaps it may be to your home, but mine is different' . . . She said that the second family were much better treated than herself and her brother William. She said this on several occasions. We were talking of dress at one time, and she said, Mamma will not let me have what I like. If I said I would have a brown dress she would let me have black, or just the contrary.' As Constance saw it, her stepmother felt such spite towards her that she was denied even the choice between black and brown. Like the coarse nightdress, the drab clothes cast Constance as a wronged and humiliated stepdaughter, a Cinderella shut out of the world of the other girls.

According to Whicher's reports to his superiors, Emma claimed to have often heard Constance express her aversion to Saville, on the grounds that he was so favoured by Mr and Mrs Kent. Once, Emma said, she remonstrated with Constance on this subject, 'telling her how wrong it was to dislike the child on that account as it was not his fault'. To this Constance replied, 'Well perhaps it is, but how would you like it if you was in my place?'

Whicher's job was not just to find things out, but to put them in order. The real business of detection was the invention of a plot. Whicher believed he understood Constance's motive: she killed Saville because of the 'jealousy or spite' she felt towards her stepmother's children, working upon a 'mind somewhat affected' by madness. The treatment of the first Mrs Kent could have stirred her youngest daughter into vengefulness. The second Mrs Kent, the woman who had brought Constance up as her own only to reject her once she bore children herself, might have been the object of the girl's rage.

The children's flight to Bath suggested to Whicher that Constance and William were peculiarly unhappy, and capable of acting on that unhappiness. It showed that they could make secret plans and see them through, that they were capable of disguise and deceit. Most significantly, it pointed to the privy as the children's hideway, the place in which Constance disposed of evidence and took on a new identity. In his reports, Whicher drew attention to 'the circumstance of the body being found in the same privy in which she cast her female apparel and hair before absconding from the home . . . disguised as a boy, previously having made a portion of the male attire herself, which she concealed in a hedge some distance from the house until the day of her departure'. The day she ran away could be construed as a step towards the murder of Saville.

Whicher worked alone that week. He 'has been actively and assiduously pursuing his inquiries', reported the Somerset and Wilts Journal, 'making no confidants, unless, indeed, Mr Foley be one. He has been plodding on, visiting for himself, and conversing with, all the persons engaged in this catastrophe, and following up, to its utmost, every gleam of light which might be seen to break in upon it.' The Western Daily Press described the detective's investigations as 'energetic' and 'ingenious'.

Whicher kept quiet about what the house-to-house interviews turned up. Heput out word to the local press that he was 'in possession of a clue by which the mystery will shortly be unravelled', which was dutifully reported by the Bath Chronicle. This was anoverstatement– what he had was a theory – but it stood a chance of rattling the culprit into a confession. The Bristol Daily Post was sceptical about the likelihood that Whicher would succeed: 'it is hoped, rather than expected, that his sagacity may unravel the mystery'.

'Sagacity' was a quality frequently attributed to detectives, in newspapers and in books. The Times referred to Jack Whicher's 'wonted sagacity'. Dickens praised Charley Field's 'horrible sharpness . . . knowledge and sagacity'. A detective story by Waters alluded to the hero's 'vulpine sagacity'. The word then denoted intuition rather than wisdom. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a 'sagacious' beast had a keen sense of smell: the early detectives were being compared, in their quickness and sharpness, to wolves and dogs.

Charlotte Bronte described a detective as a 'sleuthhound', a dog that followed the scent of its quarry's 'sleuth' or trail.^* In Waters' stories of the 1850s, the hero was an amalgam of huntsman and hound, closing on his prey: 'the chase was hot after him', 'I ran him to earth', 'I was upon the right track'. 'If any profession now- a-days can be enlivened by adventure,' wrote the celebrated Edinburgh detective James McLevy, 'it is that of a detective officer. With the enthusiasm of the sportsman, whose aim is merely to run down and destroy often innocent animals, he is impelled by the superior motive of benefiting mankind, by ridding society of pests.' Urban detectives hunted their prey through the city streets, deduced the identities of burglars and fraudsters by their signs and signatures, their unintended trails and traces. London was 'a vast Wood or Forest', wrote Henry Fielding a century earlier, 'in which a Thief may harbour with as great Security, as wild Beasts do in the Desarts of Africa or Arabia. For by wandering from one Part to another, and often shifting his quarters, he may almost avoid the Possibility of being discovered.' As Victorian explorers spanned out across the empire, charting new lands, the detectives moved inwards to the core of the cities, neighbourhoods that to the middle classes were as strange as Arabia. The detectives learnt to distinguish the different schools of prostitute, of pickpocket, of shoplifter and burglar, and to track them to their lairs.

Whicher was a specialist in the city's shape-shifters. Like the heroine of Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective, he 'had been much mixed up with people who wore masks'. In 1847, for instance,