With grace allow me to suggest . . . that inquiries be made as to whether chloroform was kept in the house where the child was murdered . . . if not, whether any had been purchased in the neighbourhood, or at the towns, or villages, where the children of Mr Kent's family had been at school . . . I would further suggest whether any weapon was taken from or purchased in the neighbourhood of the schools.
In a note to Mayne, Whicher observed that Joshua Parsons had not detected any trace of chloroform in Saville's body. 'As regards the suggestion that a weapon might have been purchased in the Neighbourhood or brought from School by Miss Kent, inquiry has been made on that point already.'
On most of the letters from the public Whicher scrawled 'There is nothing in this to assist the enquiry'; occasionally he expanded, impatiently, 'all the points having been duly considered previously by me', or 'I saw all the persons alluded to while I was on the spot and am satisfied they are not connected with the murder.'
The only letter to offer information, rather than speculation, was from William Gee, of Bath: 'As to Mr Kent himself I learn from the widow of a schoolmaster a friend of mine that 4 years ago he was so straitened as not to be able to pay the Bills of the Son ?15 or ?20 half-yearly. I cannot reconcile his occupying so handsome a mansion (second to few in the neighborhood) with the way in which he [illegible] a poor Teacher.' Samuel's failure to pay his son's school bills suggested he was as cash-strapped as Joseph Stapleton implied; it also indicated a carelessness about William's welfare.
The letters to Scotland Yard were the fruit of a new English obsession with detection. The public was fascinated by murder, especially when it was domestic and mysterious, and was becoming engrossed by the investigation of murder, too. 'I like a good murder that can't be found out,' says Mrs Hopkinson in Emily Eden's novel The Semi-Detached House (1859). 'That is, of course, it is very shocking, but I like to hear about it.' The Road Hill case took the national enthusiasm for baffling crimes to a new level. In The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins dubbed this mania 'a detective-fever'.
While the press and the public condemned Whicher's prurient, impertinent speculations, they freely made their own. The first detective in English literature, like them, was an armchair detective: Poe's Auguste Dupin solved crimes not by searching for clues at the scene but by picking them out of newspaper reports. The time of the professional police detective had barely begun; the era of the amateur was already in full flower.
In an anonymous penny pamphlet printed in Manchester – the sixteen-page Who Committed the Road Murder? Or, The Track of Blood Followed – 'a Disciple of Edgar Allan Poe' poured scorn on Whicher's investigation. 'Hitherto the brilliant 'Detective's' effort has been to associate that nightdress with Miss Constance Kent; to prove that her guilt is wrapped up in it! and to find out where it is. All wrong! I perceive her purity in its loss; and, in its loss, another's guilt. The thief purloined that dress to shield herself, by casting suspicion on one of her own sex.' The pamphleteer had already absorbed one tenet of detective fiction: the solution must always be labyrinthine, indirect, paradoxical. The lost nightdress must mean just the opposite of what it seemed to mean: 'I perceive her purity in its loss'.
The author wondered if the village had been searched thoroughly for bloodstained clothing, if the Road Hill House chimneys had been examined for scraps of burnt evidence, if the records of local knife-sellers had been checked. He or she used an unsettling piece of imaginative reconstruction to argue that, since Saville's throat was cut from left to right, the murderer must be left-handed: 'Draw an imaginary line on the body of a chubby child . . . An ordinary person, committing such a crime, would (in an ordinary way) place his left hand on the child's breast and cut towards him with his right hand.'
The newspapers too made their conjectures. The Globe blamed William Nutt, the Frome Times pointed at Elizabeth Gough, the Bath Express hinted at William Kent's guilt. The Bath Chronicle – in an article that provoked a libel suit – fixed on Samuel:
If the hypothesis that a girl had an illicit intrigue, and that the other party to that intrigue preferred murder to exposure, be well founded, we must unhappily endeavour to find some one to whom such exposure would have been ruin, or at all events would have produced a state of things so terrible to himself that in a moment of wild terror he seized the most dreadful means of avoiding it. Who is there to whom such terms would at all apply? . . . at that strange, pale hour of morning when we have all the power of thought, almost painfully vivid, but are without the same will and wise resolution which come when we arise and buckle ourselves to the duties of the day . . . A weak, bad, terrified, violent man sees a child between him and ruin – and the fearful deed is madly done.
So far, the identity of the 'violent man' was at least partly ambiguous, but in the closing sentences of the piece the author all but named Samuel Kent:
A child is lost from its bed-room, not an exposed one, but upstairs, and in the penetralia of the mansion, at an hour when no visitor from outside can have approached the room, and a man, to whom that child should have been most dear, a man who should be most intense and practical in his researches after it, adopts the frivolous, novel-reader's idea that the child has been stolen by gipsies! Had he said that it had been flown away with by angels, the suggestion under the circumstances could not have been more ridiculous.
There was a consensus that sex was the motive for the murder – more particularly, that the catastrophe sprang from the fact that a child had witnessed a sexual transgression. In Whicher's view, Constance avenged the sexual affair between her father and her former governess by destroying the offspring of that liaison. In the popular view, it was Saville who witnessed a sexual encounter, and was killed for what he saw.
The dominant theme in the press was bewilderment. So much was known and yet so little could be concluded: the columns of coverage only amplified the mystery. 'Here our knowledge ends,' ran an editorial in the Daily Telegraph. 'Here our inquiries are baffled. We stumble on the threshold, and the vast vista of the crime lies all undiscovered beyond.' The story behind the murder was momentous, but hidden from view. Road Hill House may have been searched from cellar to cockloft but, symbolically, its door was shut fast.
In the absence of a solution, Saville's death became a pretext for unfettered speculation; it let loose a kind of wild imagining. There was no knowing what hidden identities might emerge at 'that strange, pale hour of morning'. The characters in the case had come to have double selves: Constance Kent and Elizabeth Gough were angels in the house, or she-devils; Samuel was the loving father, overwhelmed with grief and insult, or a ruthless, sex-crazed tyrant; Whicher was a visionary, or a vulgar fool.
An editorial in the Morning Post showed how suspicion still fell on just about everyone in the house, and several beyond it. Samuel or William might have killed Saville, the piece argued, or Mrs Kent might have done it, 'under one of those delusions to which women in her condition [that is, pregnancy] are sometimes liable'. Saville could have been murdered by 'one or more of the juveniles in the family, in a passion of jealousy; or, by anyone who wished to wound the parents in the tenderest point'. The writer wondered about the antecedents of Sarah Kerslake, the knives of William Nutt, the lies of Hester Holley. His imagination took him into the dips and hollows of Road Hill House, its tenderest points. 'Have the wells been searched, the ponds, the drains, the chimnies, the trunks of trees, the soft earth in the garden?'
