The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

of mind likely to be influenced by sudden fits of passion.' To Whicher, Samuel openly stated that his former wife's family was riddled with madness: 'the Father . . . informed me that [Miss Constance's] Mother and Grandmother were of unsound mind', the detective wrote, 'and that her Uncle also on the Mother's side had been twice confined in a Lunatic Asylum'.

Whicher unearthed a peculiar incident that had taken place at Road Hill House in the spring of 1859, when Saville was two. One evening Saville's then nursemaid, Emma Sparks, put the boy to bed, as usual, in a pair of knitted socks. The next morning, wrote Whicher, the nursemaid found 'the clothes had been stripped from off the child, and both his socks taken off'. The socks were discovered later: one on the nursery table, the other in Mrs Kent's bedroom. Whicher suspected that Constance was responsible, 'as she was the only grown up member of the family except Mrs Kent who was at home at the time, Mr Kent being from home on business and the two elder sisters away on a visit'. He didn't mention the whereabouts of William – perhaps he was at boarding school. The incident, a piece of faintly malicious mischief, could in retrospect be understood as a rehearsal for a more savage interference. It echoed the terrible congruence of the tender and the stealthy in Saville's murder: the sleeping boy lifted gently from his bed, carried carefully downstairs, taken out of the house and killed. We don't know whether Whicher was tipped off about the matter of the missing socks by Emma Sparks or by Mr and Mrs Kent – he interviewed all three on the subject.

The bedsocks incident had no value at all as evidence: 'I can put no construction on this,' Whicher said of the story. Yet he took it as a psychological clue. In Waters' Experiences of a Real Detective (1862) , Inspector 'F' explains: 'I contrived to elicit certain facts, which, though not worth twopence as legal evidence, were morally very suggestive.'

In 1906 Sigmund Freud was to compare detection to psychoanalysis:

In both we are concerned with a secret, with something hidden . . . In the case of the criminal it is a secret which he knows and hides from you, whereas in the case of the hysteric it is a secret which he himself does not know either, which is hidden even from himself. . . In this one respect, therefore, the difference between the criminal and the hysteric is fundamental. The task of the therapist, however, is the same as that of the examining magistrate. We have to uncover the hidden psychic material; and in order to do this we have invented a number of detective devices.

In effect, Whicher was gathering clues to Constance's inner life, her hidden psychic material, as well as the concealed facts of the crime. This murder was so dense with symbolism that it almost outdid interpretation. The child was thrust down a servants' lavatory, as if he were excrement. His attacker had tried to kill him, frantically or ritualistically, not once but four times: by suffocation, by slashing the throat, by stabbing the heart, by submersion in faeces.

Samuel informed Whicher of another morally suggestive fact – his daughter's fascination in the summer of 1857 with the Madeleine Smith murder trial.

Smith was a Glasgow architect's daughter of twenty-one who was charged with murdering her lover, a French clerk, by slipping arsenic into his hot chocolate. Her motive, allegedly, was to dispense with him in order to marry a richer suitor. After a sensational and widely reported court case, the jury declared the case against her 'not proven', a verdict available only in the Scottish courts. Smith was generally believed to be guilty, but the fact that she had outfaced the justice system with such breathtaking nerve only increased her allure. Henry James, for one, was an admirer – her crime was a 'rare work of art', he wrote. He hungered to have set eyes on her: 'I would give so much for a veracious portrait of her then face.'

Samuel told Whicher that the second Mrs Kent had taken the precaution of hiding from Constance the copies of The Times in which the trial was reported – this suggested that the girl was known to take an unusual interest in lurid crime, even at the age of thirteen. 'Owing to the peculiarity of the case the papers containing the account of the trial were studiously kept away from Miss Constance,' reported Whicher, 'and after her Trial they were concealed, locked up in a drawer by Mrs Kent.' When Mrs Kent checked the drawer a few days later she found the papers had vanished. 'Miss Constance was suspected and questioned but denied all knowledge of them, but on her bed room being searched they were found secreted between her bedstead and mattress.'

Perhaps reading the reports of Madeleine Smith's trial and acquittal had given Constance ideas about murder, as it had John Thomson, a man who in December 1857 said the case had inspired him to administer prussic acid to a woman who had spurned him. Though Saville was not killed with poison, his murder was well-plotted, silent, homespun: a blanket was a murder weapon as bland and comforting as a cup of chocolate. Madeleine Smith had shown that by being cunning and immovable a middle-class murderess could become a figure of glamour and mystery, a kind of heroine (Thomas Carlyle had used the phrase to describe the Bermondsey murderess Maria Manning). And if she kept her nerve she might never be caught.

There seemed to be a new breed of chilly female criminal whose concealed passions had twisted into violence. Usually the passions were sexual. Maria Manning and Madeleine Smith were apparently respectable women whose first sin was an illicit liaison, their second the murder of a former lover, a kind of violent extinction of their own lust. Madame Fosco in The Woman in White is sucked into crime by her passion for the dominating Count, and 'her present state of suppression may have sealed up something dangerous in her nature, which used to evaporate harmlessly in the freedom of her former life'. The murderess Madame Hortense in Bleak House, who was based on Maria Manning, was 'long accustomed to suppress emotion, and keep down reality'. She was 'schooled for her own purposes, in that destructive school which shuts up the natural feelings of the heart, like flies in amber'.

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The dizzying expansion of the press in the 1850s prompted worries that readers might be corrupted, infected, inspired by the sex and violence in newspaper articles. The new journalists shared much with the detectives: they were seen alternately as crusaders for truth and as sleazy voyeurs. There were seven hundred newspaper titles published in Britain in 1855, and 1,100 by 1860 – of the papers printed closest to Road, the Trowbridge and North Wilts Advertiser was established in 1855, as was the Somerset and Wilts Journal, while the Frome Times, which the Kents took, was founded in 1859. There was a huge rise in crime reporting, aided by the speed with which news could be transmitted by the electric telegraph, and newspaper readers came across accounts of violent death every week. When Mr Wopsle in Dickens' Great Expectations (1861) reads the news, he becomes 'imbrued with blood to the eyebrows'.

At least three cut-throat domestic killings were reported in newspapers all over the country in the month before Saville Kent's death. In Shoreditch, east London, a pipemaker murdered his common-law wife: 'Her throat was cut so extensively that the head was nearly severed from the body,' according to the Annual Register. 'She must have died instantaneously without struggle or noise.' At Sandown Fort on the Isle of Wight, Sergeant William Whitworth of the Royal Artillery killed his wife and six children with a razor, leaving their throats 'gashed in so horrible a manner as to show the vertebrae of the neck'. Above a confectioner's shop in Oxford Street, London, a French tailor decapitated his wife with a saw, then went to Hyde Park and shot himself. 'His brother stated that he was in the habit of going to Dr Kahn's Museum, and studying the arteries about the neck and throat, and especially familiarising himself with the position of the jugular vein.' The tailor had educated himself in how to kill, and any newspaper reader could do the same.

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