and the Nurse, and should it appear in the end that my opinions are correct, they would be considered at fault, but I have studiously endeavoured to act in concert with them as far as possible.' Whicher was careful to protect himself from charges of disrespect towards other policemen.
In his reports to Mayne, Whicher gave his reasons for rejecting the conjectures of the Wiltshire police. He defended Samuel Kent's behaviour in the immediate aftermath of the murder. Many were suspicious of Samuel's motives in leaving the house – if he had been involved with the murder, the flight to Trowbridge would have given him an opportunity to dispose of any incriminating evidence, as well as saving him from being present when the body was discovered. But there were innocent explanations for his behaviour: the desire to be sure that the alarm was raised, the restlessness aroused by anxiety. 'As regards the suspicion against Mr Kent,' wrote Whicher, 'in reference to his conduct after the murder was discovered in riding off four miles to Trowbridge to give notice to the Police that his child had been stolen, I think it perfectly consistent under the circumstances and the most natural course for him to have taken as it would in my opinion have been much more suspicious had he remained at home, a partial search of the premises having been made before and was being continued at the time of his departure.'
There were contradictory accounts of how long it took Samuel to make the trip to Trowbridge, and of whether Peacock caught up with him before or after he summoned Foley. The version in the
Some of the villagers spoke of Kent as an arrogant, bad-tempered master who was either rude or lascivious towards his servants, more than a hundred of whom were said to have passed through Road Hill House since he had moved in. But Whicher found him a decent, even sentimental man. 'As regards his moral character,' wrote Whicher, 'I cannot find that there is anything against him, and I am informed by the Servants now in the family, and by those who have left that he and Mrs Kent lived in perfect harmony, and one of them (the monthly nurse) stated that she considered him foolishly fond and indulgent towards her, and doatingly fond of the deceased child
Another suspect was William Nutt, who had seemed to predict his own discovery of Saville's body. He had a grudge against Samuel, who had prosecuted a member of his family for stealing apples from the Road Hill orchard. Some named Nutt as Elizabeth Gough's imagined lover. 'I do not think there are grounds for the suspicion entertained relative to the witness 'Nutt' who found the child,' Whicher wrote, 'as it appears very natural that he would have made the remark of 'looking for a dead child as well as a living one' as at that time he and Benger had searched other places and were then going to search the privy.' As for the suggestion 'that he was improperly connected with the Nursemaid, there is not the slightest grounds for that suspicion, as she in the first place was not acquainted with him and in the next place I do not suppose she hardly ever spoke to him nor would condescend to speak to him in any way much more as an admirer, as she is rather a superior girl for her station in looks and demeanour, while on the other hand 'Nutt' is a slovenly dirty man, weakly, asthmatical, and lame'.
Whicher steadfastly defended Gough's innocence. He said he saw nothing in her conduct to make her a likely suspect. This ignored her strange contradictions about the time at which she became aware that Saville's blanket was missing: at first she said she had noticed before his body was found, then that she noticed only afterwards. But if this was a lie rather than a confusion, it seemed a pointless one. There was no need for Gough to conceal her knowledge that the blanket had been taken – it would have been natural for her to check the bedding carefully. By changing her story, she only drew suspicion to herself. A similar ambiguity hung over her account of why she did not raise the alarm when she noticed Saville was missing at 5 a.m.: her delay seemed odd; yet if she had been guilty, she would surely not have brought it up at all. Some thought it suspicious that Gough had not mentioned Saville's absence to Emily Doel, her assistant, just before seven on the morning of his disappearance; Whicher thought her silence 'seems to tell in her favour', because it indicated that she really did believe the boy's mother had taken him, and that there was no cause for alarm. He also pointed to the innocence implied by the words she used when she roused Mrs Kent at 7.15: 'Are the children awake?'
The police in Isleworth, Gough's home town, had been directed to make inquiries about her character, and the report they sent on 19 July accorded with Whicher's perceptions: she 'is well known to be respectable, quick, kind, good tempered and very fond of children'. As for her supposed lover, the detective could find no evidence 'that she was even acquainted with any male person, either at Road, or the Neighbourhood'.
Some people speculated that Mrs Holley had destroyed Constance's nightdress in order to incriminate the girl and protect William Nutt, who was married to one of her daughters – the fullest version of this theory identified five conspirators: Nutt, Holley, Benger (whom Samuel Kent had apparently once accused of overcharging him for coal), Emma Sparks (the nursemaid who testified about the bedsocks, and had been dismissed by Samuel the previous year) and an unnamed man whom Samuel had prosecuted for fishing in the river. There was little evidence against any of them, other than the mildly suspicious fact that Mrs Holley claimed to have heard a rumour before Monday, 2 July that a nightdress was missing. Whicher had an explanation for this: 'The rumour about the nightdress . . . must have related to Mary Ann's stained nightdress, which the police had confiscated and examined but which had that morning been returned to her.'
On Sunday, Samuel Kent was given permission to visit his daughter in prison. He was accompanied to Devizes, another Wiltshire wool town, by William Dunn, a widowed solicitor born in east London and living in Frome. (Rowland Rodway had resigned as Samuel's legal representative because he believed Constance was guilty; he later agreed to represent Mrs Kent, who must have shared his view.) This case was far outside Dunn's regular remit. In the county court the previous month he had represented a man who had been sold a faulty turnip-cutter, and another whose cow had developed a lump as fat as two fists after being 'pogged' (poked with a stick) by a rival dairy farmer.
When they reached the gaol – designed like a wheel, with the governor's office at the hub and a hundred cells radiating out from it – Samuel found himself unable to face his daughter and sent Dunn to her cell in his stead. His reasons were inscrutable.
When Dunn visited Constance in her cell, she repeatedly told him that she was innocent. The solicitor sent to a local hotel for a comfortable mattress, to make her week in gaol more pleasant, and arranged for her to be provided with special rations.
A prison officer afterwards briefed the waiting reporters. 'We are credibly informed that Miss Kent's demeanour in the prison was calm and quiet,' said the
