The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

J.J. Bird wrote to the Morning Star to suggest that the murder of Saville was the act of a somnambulist. 'Most people know with what precision and care sleepwalkers act,' he said. 'The parties suspected should be watched by night for some time.' He cited a case in which a hallucinating somnambulist, his eyes open and fixed, had stabbed an empty bed three times. If sleepwalkers could commit unconscious violence, he said, it was possible that Saville's murderer was unaware of his or her own guilt. Perhaps the killer had a double consciousness. The idea that madness could take this form, that several selves could inhabit one body, fascinated mid-century alienists and newspaper readers. Bird's letter was reprinted over the next week in several provincial papers.

On Monday, 23 July, Whicher briefed Dolly Williamson on the investigation so far. He took him to Bath, to Beckington and to Road. On Tuesday, Whicher put a placard on the door of the Temperance Hall: '?5 reward – Missing from the residence of Mr Kent, a lady's nightdress, supposed to have been thrown in the river, burnt, or sold in the neighbourhood. The above reward will be paid to any person finding the same, and bringing it to the Police Station, Trowbridge.' The same day he prepared the evidence he had gathered against Constance – Henry Clark, the magistrates' clerk, wrote up the findings on four foolscap pages. On Wednesday, Whicher went to Warminster to serve a subpoena on his key witness, Emma Moody, and sent Williamson to William's boarding school at Longhope, Gloucestershire, to see what he could glean about the boy.

As the rain came down, the two detectives searched the grounds of Road Hill House for the nightgown.

* * *

In that weekend's instalment of The Woman in White – the thirty-fourth – the hero had discovered the secret that Sir Percival Glyde had tried so desperately to hide, a shame that lay in his family's past. His knowledge, though, was not enough; to catch the villain, he had to find the proof. Whicher's predicament was similar. In the Sarah Drake case, he had elicited the confession he needed by presenting his suspect with her apron; if only he could find Constance's nightdress he might secure the same: the physical evidence and a confession in one.

Poe's Dupin observes: 'Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.' Unremarkable events were inscribed with hidden stories, if you knew how to read them. 'I made a private inquiry last week,' remarks Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone. 'At one end of the inquiry there was a murder, and at the other end there was a spot of ink on a tablecloth that nobody could account for. In all my experience along the dirtiest ways of this dirty little world, I have never met with such a thing as a trifle yet.'

Since he could not find the nightdress, Whicher returned to the moment at which it had vanished. He asked Sarah Cox, the maid, when she had sent it to be washed. The Monday after the murder, she told him, just before the inquest. At about ten o'clock on 2 July she had collected the family's dirty linen from their bedrooms. 'That of Miss Constance was generally thrown down either in the room or on the landing, some of it on Sunday, and some on Monday.' Constance's nightdress was on the landing, Cox remembered. It was not stained, she said, just lightly soiled as usual. 'It appeared to have been dirtied, as one would have been which had been worn nearly a week by Miss Constance.' Cox took the clothes to a lumber room on the first floor to sort out. Once she had done this, she asked Mary Ann and Elizabeth to enter the items in the laundry book while she packed them in the baskets for collection by Mrs Holley. She remembered packing three nightdresses – Mrs Kent's, Mary Ann's and Constance's – and she remembered Mary Ann noting them in the book. (Elizabeth wrapped her clothes in a separate bundle and listed them in a separate book.)

When Whicher questioned Cox more closely, she recalled that Constance had visited the lumber room while the laundry was being organised. The maid had already packed the clothes – 'I had it all in except the dusters' – and Mary Ann and Elizabeth had gone, leaving the laundry book. Constance 'stepped a step inside the room . . . She asked me if I would look in her slip pocket, and see if she had left her purse in it.' Cox searched the basket that contained the larger items until she found the slip. She pulled it out and checked the pocket. 'I told her the purse was not there. She then asked me if I would go down and get her a glass of water. I did so. She followed me to the top of the back stairs as I went out of the room. When I returned with the glass of water I found her where I had left her. I don't think I was gone a minute.' Constance drank the water, put the glass down and headed up to her room. Cox put the dusters in with the rest of the laundry and finished by laying a tablecloth over one basket, a dress belonging to Mrs Kent over the other.

At eleven o'clock, Cox and Elizabeth Gough set off to testify at the Red Lion, as the coroner had requested. Cox left the lumber room unlocked, she told Whicher, knowing that Mrs Holley would be arriving to collect the baskets within the hour.

Whicher put his mind to Cox's account. 'When I am deeply perplexed,' says the narrator of the fictional Diary of an Ex-Detective (1859), 'it is my practice to go to bed, and lie there till I have solved my doubts and perplexities. With my eyes closed, but wide awake, and nothing to disturb me, I can work out my problems.' From the start, a detective was imagined as a solitary thinker, who needed to withdraw from the sensory world to enter the free, fantastical world of his hypotheses. By piecing together the information he had gathered, Whicher compiled a story about the nightdress.

He reckoned that Constance asked Cox to look for the purse as a way of getting her to unpack the basket, so the girl could see where her nightdress had been placed. Then, when Cox was downstairs getting the water, Constance darted back into the room, snatched up her nightdress and hid it, perhaps beneath her skirts (the fashion for full skirts was at its peak in 1860^*). Importantly, this was not the bloodied nightdress, which Whicher believed Constance had already destroyed, but a clean substitute that she had donned on Saturday. The reason for stealing it back from the basket was mathematical: if it seemed that an unstained nightdress had been lost by the laundress, the bloody one in which Constance had killed Saville would not be missed.

Whicher wrote:

I am of opinion that the night dress she wore when the murder was committed was afterwards burnt or concealed by her, but still she would be apprehensive that the Police might ask her how many night dresses she had when she came from school and to prepare for that contingency, she I believe, resorted to a very artful stratagem to make it appear that the one she was deficient of was lost by the washerwoman, the week after the murder, which I suspect she carried out in the following manner.

The family soiled linen was collected as usual the Monday (two days) after the murder and amongst it was a night dress belonging to Miss Constance, the one I assume she put on after the murder. After the linen was collected it was taken into a spare room on the first floor where it was counted by the House Maid and entered into the Washing Book by the elder sister. It was then placed in two clothes baskets by the Housemaid but just before she quitted the room Miss Constance came in and asked her to unpack the baskets . . . to see if she had left her purse in her slip pocket . . . this I believe was part of her stratagem to ascertain which basket her night dress was in, as she immediately asked the Housemaid to go down stairs and fetch her a glass of water, which she did, leaving her by the room door, where she found her on her return with the water, and during this time I am of opinion she obtained possession of the night dress which had then been entered in the washing book and took it again into use which at the end of the week when the washing came home she calculated it would be missed, and the Laundress blamed, and that would account for her being one short if interrogated on that point.