The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

he caught Richard Martin, alias Aubrey, alias Beaufort Cooper, alias Captain Conyngham, who took delivery of orders of fancy shirts by impersonating a gentleman; and the next year he captured Frederick Herbert, a young man of 'fashionable exterior' who had conned a London saddler out of a gun case, an artist out of two enamel paintings, and an ornithologist out of eighteen hummingbird skins. Whicher's fictional double was Jack Hawk-shaw, the detective in Tom Taylor's play The Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863), whose surname suggests a sure-sighted bird of prey. Hawkshaw is 'the 'cutest [acutest] detective on the force'. He pursues a master criminal who 'has as many outsides as he has aliases'. 'You may identify him for a felon today, and pull your hat off to him for a parson tomorrow,' says Hawkshaw. 'But I'll hunt him out of all his skins.'

Some of the local newspapers welcomed Whicher's presence in Wiltshire. 'The skill of a London detective, accustomed to the darker criminal atmosphere of a city, has been called in aid of our own able officers,' reported the Bath Chronicle that Wednesday. 'We cannot but believe the searchers are on the track.' Yet the crime in this pretty village took Whicher into murkier territory than he ever encountered in the city: this was not an investigation into aliases and false addresses, but into hidden fantasies, buried desires, secret selves.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ALL TIGHT SHUT UP

19 July

On Thursday, 19 July, Whicher arranged for the waters of the Frome to be lowered so that the river could be dragged. The Frome lay at the edge of the Kents' grounds, down a steep bank and under a thick, feathery arch of trees. After almost three dry weeks, the river was not as swollen as it had been at the start of the month, but it was still full and restless. To lower its level, men blocked off the rush of water from the weir upstream, and then pushed out in their boats, scraping rakes or grappling hooks along the riverbed in the hope of pulling up a discarded weapon or garment.

The police rooted in the flowerbeds and gardens around the house. They combed the field beyond the lawns. Samuel Kent described the grounds behind his property: 'At the back of the house is a large garden, and a field in which was standing grass; that field is about seven acres in extent . . . The place is much exposed; the premises are large and very accessible.' His description of a home that was helplessly open, as if backing onto a plain, captured his feeling of defencelessness after Saville's death. The family's privacy was destroyed, its secrets uncovered, the house and grounds and the lives of everyone within exposed to all.

At first Samuel did his best to point the police away from the rooms of his family and servants. Like Elizabeth Gough, he insisted that a stranger had killed Saville. Perhaps the murderer was a disgruntled former servant, he suggested, taking revenge on the family. Before Whicher's arrival, Samuel showed Superintendent Wolfe the places in which an intruder could have hidden. 'Here is a room which is not often occupied,' he said, indicating a furnished spare room. Wolfe pointed out that a stranger could not have known that the room was rarely entered. Kent took him to a lumber room in which toys were stored. No one would hide here, Wolfe said, because they would have feared someone coming in to fetch a toy. As for the cockloft beneath the roof, said Wolfe, 'There was a considerable quantity of dust . . . and I think that if a person had been there I must have seen traces.'

A few newspapers speculated that a stranger had committed the crime. 'A intimate personal knowledge of every room in Road Hill House . . . convinces us that it would have been perfectly possible not only for one but for half-a-dozen persons to have been secreted on the premises, without risk of detection, on that night,' reported the Somerset and Wilts Journal later, in an astonishingly detailed exposure of the building's private places:

In no house of nineteen rooms that we know do we remember greater facilities for concealment. A cellar, divided into six large and small compartments, is entered by two several doorways and sets of steps. Midway up the back staircase is a large empty cupboard. A spare bedroom over the drawing-room contains a bedstead with valances, a dressing-table with a covering reaching to the ground, and two large and lofty closets, one of which are nearly always empty, and can be locked both inside and out. On this floor also are two small rooms, opening out of one another, each partly filled with lumber. On the floor above is a second spare bedroom, the bedstead having valances, a table, screen, and closets as in the room below . . . two small rooms, one almost empty, and the other containing Mr Kent's travelling apparatus; a large long closet, in which a dozen men might stand side by side; and a small room, without windows, containing two water tanks, and a ladder which communicates with the loft and the roof. . . All these we have ourselves seen.

Any number of villagers were already familiar with the nooks and crannies of Road Hill House, said the Journal's reporter, 'they having had the run of the house in a singular manner during the two years that it was void, previous to Mr Kent's occupation . . . this was so marked that, when the house was being prepared for him, six several times the stairs had to be painted, owing to the mischievous intrusion of village boys'. The building 'had almost been considered as public property', said the Frome Times, 'for those who chose to do so rambled over it without let or hindrance'.

The Kents kept indoors during Whicher's first week in Road, though the groom, Holcombe, took Mary Ann and Elizabeth by carriage to the shops in the town of Frome two or three times. In Frome, unlike Road or Trowbridge, members of the Kent family could usually pass an afternoon unmolested by hoots and hisses.

We have no physical descriptions of Elizabeth or of Mary Ann. They seem to move as one. Only in glimpses – Elizabeth standing alone as she scanned the night sky, or clutching the baby Eveline when Saville's corpse was brought into the kitchen – do they fleetingly acquire separate selves. They were intensely private young women. Mary Ann became hysterical when summoned to court. Elizabeth would not let the servants touch her clothes, either before or after they were washed: 'Miss Elizabeth makes up her own bundle herself,' said Cox, 'and I never meddle with it.' Since Mary Ann and Elizabeth were nearly thirty, neither was now likely to marry. The older sisters – like Constance and William – kept their own counsel, their bond with one another freeing them of the need to say much to anyone else.

By the end of the week Samuel had started to brief the police about Constance's insanity. Having denied the possibility of his daughter's guilt, he now seemed to be advancing it. 'Mr Kent,' said the Devizes and Wilts Gazette on 19 July, 'has not hesitated to intimate – and that in the plainest manner – that his own daughter committed the murder! and it has been alleged as a reason . . . that she has been guilty of freaks during childhood.' Was he incriminating her to protect himself? Was he shielding someone else in the family? Or was he trying to save Constance from the death penalty by advertising her instability? Dark rumours about Samuel were in circulation: some said that he and Mary Pratt had poisoned his first wife, even that he had killed the four Kent infants who died in Devonshire. Perhaps the first Mrs Kent had not been a raging lunatic, like the wife locked in Mr Rochester's attic in Jane Eyre, but an innocent, like the heroine of The Woman in White, sealed up in a wing of the house to seal her lips.

Publicly, Samuel still avoided any direct comment on his late wife's mental health: 'As to whether insanity had previously run in either branch of the family,' said the Bath Chronicle on Thursday, 'Mr Kent has been closely interrogated on that point; and he avers that he has never made an application to a medical man respecting anything of the kind.' This contradicted what he told Stapleton – that an Exeter doctor had diagnosed his late wife's madness – but it stopped short of denying that she had been insane. Parsons and Stapleton, both friends of Samuel, were on hand to insist on Constance's volatile nature: 'The two medical men . . . who have been privately examined, give it as their opinion that the young lady Constance possesses a temperament