The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

and well-organised, crime as the murder at Road Hill House. But he knew from his experience of the London 'rookeries', or slums, what dark mischief children could get up to. On 10 October 1837, during Whicher's first month in the force, a girl of eight was caught playing a sharp trick near the rookery of St Giles, Holborn. She stood in the street crying bitterly until she had gathered a crowd about her. Sobbing, she explained to her audience that she had lost two shillings and was afraid to go home for fear of punishment. Once she had been plied with halfpennies, she moved on, to repeat the ruse a few roads away. A constable of E division watched her do this three times before arresting her. In the magistrates' court, she again pleaded terror of her parents; it is hard to know whether she was justifying or replaying her scam. 'The prisoner, crying, said that her father and mother sent her out to sell combs,' reported The Times, 'and unless she took home 2s. or 3s. every night they beat her cruelly, and not having sold any during the day she acted in the way described to get the money required of her.' The next day, 11 October, a girl of ten was charged with having broken a pane of glass in a raid on a Holborn watchmaker's shop. A gang of fellow ten-year-olds accompanied her to the magistrates' court. 'They were attired in a flash style,' said The Times, 'and their appearance and manners indicated that they were thieves and prostitutes, although so young.' One of the boys said he had come to pay the girl's fine of three shillings and sixpence, the cost of replacing the window. He threw the money down scornfully.

Criminal children were usually ill-used children. In Whicher's first weeks in Holborn he saw many examples of the careless or vicious ways in which parents could treat their young. His colleague Stephen Thornton arrested a drunken crossing-sweeper, Mary Baldwin (alias Bryant), a member of the most notorious family in St Giles, who was seen trying to kill her three-year-old daughter. She put the child in a bag and dashed it violently against the pavement. When a passer-by heard the girl's cries and remonstrated with the mother, Mary Baldwin ran into the road to place the bag in the path of an omnibus. The child was rescued by some of the passengers.

Since those years, it had become apparent that middle-class children, too, could be damaged or corrupt; sometimes it was almost impossible to tell one from the other, the victim from the victimiser. In 1859 an eleven- year-old girl called Eugenia Plummer accused the Reverend Hatch, her private tutor and the chaplain of Wandsworth gaol, of sexually molesting her and her eight-year-old sister while they were boarders at his house. The eight-year- old, Stephanie, confirmed the story. After a lurid trial, in which Hatch (as the defendant) was not allowed to testify,^* he was sentenced to four years in prison, with hard labour. But in May 1860, a few weeks before the Road Hill murder, Hatch successfully sued Eugenia for perjury. This time it was she who was the defendant, and therefore unable to give evidence. The jury decided that she had made it all up. They agreed with the clergyman's lawyer that her accusation was 'an entire fiction, the result of a prurient and depraved imagination'.

In its influential editorial on the Road Hill murder, the Morning Post alluded to this case: 'That it should be a child [who killed Saville] would be incredible if Eugenie Plummer had not taught us to what length the wicked precocity of some children will extend.' Eugenia's precocity was sexual, but it also rested in her cool deceit, her composure under pressure, the containment and channelling of her disturbance into bare lies. If newspaper readers had been horrified to find a clergyman convicted of sexually molesting a child in 1859, they must have been even more disturbed, a year later, to find the situation had been turned upside-down to reveal the child as the agent of evil, a creature who had undone a man's life with her lewd imaginings.^* But even this was not certain. As Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine pointed out in 1861, the only unassailable fact was that 'one jury or the other convicted an innocent person'.

On Saturday morning Whicher travelled to Bristol, twenty-five miles north-west of Trowbridge, where he visited Chief Superintendent John Handcock, who lived in the city with his wife, four sons and two servants. Handcock was an old colleague of Whicher, who had worked the streets of Holborn alongside him when both were police constables twenty years earlier. Whicher spent two hours making inquiries in and around Bristol by cab, and then took the train twenty miles north to Charbury, Gloucestershire. A carriage took him the remaining eighteen miles to Oldbury-on-the-Hill, the home of Louisa Hatherill, fifteen, another of Constance's schoolfriends.

'She has spoken to me of the younger children at home,' said Louisa, 'and said that there was a partiality shown to them by the parents. She spoke of her brother William being obliged to wheel the perambulator for the young children and said that he disliked doing it. She said she had heard her father, comparing the younger son with the older, say what a much finer man he would be . . . She never said anything particular about the deceased child.' From Louisa's account, it seemed that all the anger Constance felt was on William's behalf.

Louisa, like Emma Moody, confirmed to Whicher that her friend was a tough young woman. He observed in his report that Constance was a 'very stout, strong built girl, and her school fellows state that she was very fond of wrestling with them, and displaying her strength and wishing some times to play at Heenan and Sayers'. The heavyweight boxing match between the American John Heenan and the Briton Tom Sayers in April that year had been a national obsession, and turned out to be the last fought under the old, brutal, bare-knuckle rules. Heenan was six inches taller than Sayers, and forty-six pounds heavier. In an extremely bloody two-hour contest that ended in a draw, Sayers fractured his right arm blocking a punch, while Heenan broke his left hand and was almost blinded by the blows to his eyes. The girls told Whicher that Constance boasted of her strength, and a tussle with her 'was dreaded by all'.

That Saturday's piece in the Somerset and Wilts Journal, the newspaper most sympathetic to Whicher's views, gently hinted at William's complicity in the crime. It passed on to the readers Gough's observation that the boy was 'accustomed to use the back stairs because of his thicker boots'. This reinforced the sense that Mr and Mrs Kent demeaned William, and it associated him with the servants' staircase, by which Whicher believed the murderer had taken Saville from the house. The reporter suggested that the stabbing of Saville 'may have been done by the accomplice, if two were actually concerned, so that the two might be equally implicated'. While Constance was in gaol a rumour circulated that William, too, had been taken into custody.

In Bristol and back in Trowbridge, Whicher briefed reporters on his investigation, emphasising the unhappiness of Constance and the insanity in her mother's line. 'The question of probable insanity is one to which Mr Whicher's inquiries have been specially directed,' said the Trowbridge and North Wilts Advertiser. The reason for this, its reporter was told, was that 'there are few, if any, recorded instances of murder, the victims of which have been children of a few years old, in which the murderer has not been acting under the influence of a morbid condition of mind'. As for motive: 'The deceased child, we are told, was the pet of the family, and doated upon by his mother.' The reporter was informed that the servants and the children of the first family were treated harshly, the second Mrs Kent 'ruling, it is said, with a severe hand, all beneath her sway'.

Detective-Sergeant Williamson reached Trowbridge in the afternoon of 21 July. That day's issue of All the Year Round carried a piece by Wilkie Collins about a new biography of the French detective Eugene Vidocq. Collins praised Vidocq's 'impudent, ingenious, and daring' methods, his 'address and powers of endurance in tracking out and capturing his human game', his 'cleverness'. The Frenchman – a master criminal turned police chief – was the detective hero against whom his English counterparts were measured.

From his room in the Woolpack Inn on Sunday, 22 July, Whicher wrote his second report to Sir Richard Mayne, a five-page document that outlined the evidence against Constance. His case rested, he said, on the missing nightdress and on the testimony of Constance's schoolfellows. He listed the other suspicious circumstances: the murder took place soon after Constance and William came home from boarding school; she and William were the only people in the house who slept alone; the pair had used the privy as a hiding place before. She was powerful enough to have killed Saville, he assured Mayne, both physically and psychologically – 'she appears to possess a very strong mind'. Whicher thanked Mayne for sending him Williamson, and reminded him of his unhappy relations with the local police. 'I am very unpleasantly situated as regards acting with the County Police, in consequence of the natural jealousy entertained in this matter by them, they suspecting Mr Kent