The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

17

William Nutt, shoemaker, 36

Thomas Benger, farmer, 46

Stephen Millet, butcher, 55

Joe Moon, tilemaker, 39

James Fricker, plumber and glazier, 40

James Morgan, baker and parish constable, 56

THE POLICE

Superintendent John Foley, 64, of Trowbridge

Police Constable William Dallimore, 40, of Trowbridge

Eliza Dallimore, police 'searcher', 47, of Trowbridge

Police Constable Alfred Urch, 33, of Road

Police Constable Henry Heritage, of Southwick

Police Sergeant James Watts, of Frome

Captain Meredith, the Chief Constable of Wiltshire, 63, of

Devizes

Superintendent Francis Wolfe, 48, of Devizes

THE DETECTIVES

Detective-Inspector Jonathan Whicher, 45

Detective-Sergeant Frederick Adolphus Williamson, 29

Detective-Sergeant Richard Tanner, 29

Ignatius Pollaky, private inquiry agent, 31

IN NEIGHBOURING TOWNS

George Sylvester, surgeon and county coroner, 71, of

Trowbridge

Joshua Parsons, surgeon, 45, of Beckington

Joseph Stapleton, surgeon, 45, of Trowbridge

Benjamin Mallam, physician, of Frome

Rowland Rodway, solicitor, 46, of Trowbridge

William Dunn, solicitor, 30, of Frome

Henry Gaisford Gibbs Ludlow, landowner, magistrate for

Wiltshire and Deputy Lieutenant for Somersetshire, 50, of

Westbury

William Stancomb, wool manufacturer, magistrate for

Wiltshire and Deputy Lieutenant for Wiltshire, 48, of

Trowbridge

John Stancomb, wool manufacturer and magistrate for

Wiltshire, 45, of Trowbridge

Peter Edlin, barrister, 40, of Bristol

Emma Moody, wool-worker's daughter, 15, of Warminster

Louisa Hatherill, farmer's daughter, 15, of Oldbury-on-the

Hill, Gloucestershire

William Slack, solicitor, of Bath

Thomas Saunders, magistrate and former barrister, of

Bradford-upon-Avon

A NOTE ON MONEY

In 1860, ?1 had the purchasing power of ?65 ($130) in today's money. A shilling (s) was worth a twentieth of ?1 and had the purchasing power of about ?3.25 ($6.50) today. A penny (d) was worth a twelfth of a shilling and had the purchasing power of about twenty-five modern pence (fifty cents). This measure – based on the retail price index – is useful for calculating the relative cost of everyday items, such as fares, food, drink.

When assessing salaries, a more meaningful calculation is that an income of ?100 in 1860 is the equivalent of about ?60,000 ($120,000) today.

Estimates based on the calculations of the American economics professors Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson, explained on their website measuringworth.com.

PROLOGUE

Paddington Railway Station,

15 July 1860

On Sunday, 15 July 1860, Detective-Inspector Jonathan Whicher of Scotland Yard paid two shillings for a hansom cab to take him from Millbank, just west of Westminster, to Paddington station, the London terminus of the Great Western Railway. There he bought two rail tickets: one to Chippenham, Wiltshire, ninety-four miles away, for 7s.10d., another from Chippenham to Trowbridge, about twenty miles on, for 1s.6d. The day was warm: for the first time that summer, the temperature in London had nudged into the seventies.

Paddington station was a shining vault of iron and glass, built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel six years earlier, its interior hot with smoke and sun. Jack Whicher knew the place well – the thieves of London thrived on the surging, anonymous crowds in the new railway stations, the swift comings and goings, the thrilling muddle of types and classes. This was the essence of the city that the detectives had been created to police. William Frith's The Railway Station, a panoramic painting of Paddington in 1860, shows a thief apprehended by two whiskered plain-clothes officers in black suits and top hats, quiet men able to steady the turmoil of the metropolis.

At this terminus in 1856 Whicher arrested the flashily dressed George Williams for stealing a purse containing ?5 from the pocket of Lady Glamis – the detective told the magistrates' court that he had 'known the prisoner for years past as a member, and a first-rate one, of the swell mob'. At the same station in 1858 he apprehended a stout, blotchy woman of about forty in the second-class compartment of a Great Western train, with the words: 'Your name, I think, is Moutot.' Louisa Moutot was a notorious fraudster. She had used an alias – Constance Brown – to hire a brougham carriage, a page and a furnished house in Hyde Park. She then arranged for an assistant of the jewellers Messrs Hunt and Roskell to call round with bracelets and necklaces for the inspection of a Lady Campbell. Moutot asked to take the jewels upstairs to her mistress, who she claimed was sick in bed. The jeweller handed over a diamond bracelet, worth ?325, with which Moutot left the room. After waiting for fifteen minutes he tried the door, to find he had been locked in.

When Whicher captured Moutot at Paddington station ten days later, he noticed that she was busying her arms beneath her cloak. He seized her wrists and turned up the stolen bracelet. Also on her person were a man's wig, a set of false whiskers and a false moustache. She was an up-to-the-minute urban criminal, a mistress of the twisty deceits that Whicher excelled in untangling.

Jack Whicher was one of the original eight Scotland Yard officers. In the eighteen years since the detective force had been formed, these men had become figures of mystery and glamour, the surreptitious, all-seeing little gods of London. Charles Dickens held them up as models of modernity. They were as magical and scientific as the other marvels of the 1840s and 1850s – the camera, the electric telegraph and the railway train. Like the telegraph and the train, a detective seemed able to jump time and place; like the camera, he seemed able to freeze them – Dickens reported that 'in a glance' a detective 'immediately takes an inventory of the furniture' in a room and makes 'an accurate sketch' of its inhabitants. A detective's investigations, wrote the novelist, were 'games of chess, played with live pieces' and 'chronicled nowhere'.

Whicher, at forty-five, was the doyen of the Metropolitan force – 'the prince of detectives', said a colleague. He was a stout, scuffed man with a delicate manner, 'shorter and thicker-set' than his fellow officers, Dickens observed, and possessed of 'a reserved and thoughtful air, as if he were engaged in deep arithmetical calculations'. His face was pitted with smallpox scars. William Henry Wills, Dickens' deputy at his magazine House- hold Words, saw Whicher in action in 1850. His account of what he witnessed was the first published description of Whicher, indeed of any English detective.