The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

condemned because he was doing in fact what the legions of new newspaper readers were doing in the mind's eye – peeping and prying, goggling and wondering at the sins and sufferings of others. The Victorians saw in the detective a picture of themselves, and in collective self-revulsion they cast him out.

A few voices were raised in Whicher's defence. The ever-loyal Somerset and Wilts Journal criticised Edlin's 'ingenious bamboozling', and the 'cunning trick' whereby he had distorted the theory about the nightgown. The Daily Telegraph agreed: 'We cannot concur with Mr Edlin in his fervid denunciations of the cruelty of arresting this young lady . . . To believe the ad captandum reasoning of this young lady's advocate, the important point of her garment not being forthcoming has been satisfactorily cleared up; but the contrary would seem to be the case. Where is the nightgown? . . . Far different would it have been if a bedgown stained with blood had been discovered. Some of our readers may remember the awful circumstance of the gory sheet in the story of Beatrice Cenci. That one link would complete a chain of evidence that would speedily change into a halter of hemp.' Beatrice Cenci was a sixteenth-century Roman noblewoman executed for killing her father; in the nineteenth century she had become something of a romantic heroine, the beautiful avenger of a violent, incestuous bully. A bloody bedsheet provided proof of her guilt. Shelley cast Beatrice as an impassioned rebel in his verse drama The Cenci (1819). A character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860) describes her as 'a fallen angel, fallen and yet sinless'.

The Northern Daily Express remarked that 'The nightdress of Constance Kent, with plain frills – the wearer not having reached the years of maturity and lace – bids fair to become as famous as the ruffs of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespere, the snuff-coloured suit of Dr Johnson, Cowper's nightcap as painted by Romney, or the striped waistcoat of Burns.'

Henry Ludlow, the chairman of the Wiltshire magistrates, continued to lend Whicher his support. 'Mr Inspector Whicher's conduct in regard to the Road Murder has been much blamed,' he wrote in a letter to Mayne. 'Mr Ludlow feels much pleasure in bearing testimony to his good judgment and ability in the case. I fully agree with Mr Whicher as to the perpetrator of that most mysterious murder . . . he was perfectly justified in acting as he did.' Perhaps Ludlow felt guilty for the part he had played in encouraging Whicher to arrest Constance. All the blame for the case had attached to the detective.

'I beg further to report,' began Whicher on Monday, 30 July, 'for the information of Sir R. Mayne in reference to the murder of 'Francis Saville Kent' at Road Wilts on the night of the 29th June that the re-examination of 'Constance Kent' took place at the Temperance Hall Road on Friday Last . . .'

Over sixteen pages, in a forward-thrusting hand, Whicher argued his case. He irritably discounted the various rival theories advanced by the letter-writers and the journalists. He expressed his frustrations with the local police investigation: the evidence against Constance 'would have been far more conclusive', he said, 'if the Police had ascertained as soon as they arrived, how many night gowns she ought to have had in her possession'. If Foley had only 'taken the hint given' by Parsons as to the nightdress on Constance's bed appearing very clean, and had 'interrogated her at once as to how many she had in her possession I believe the blood stained bed gown would have been missed at once and possibly found'. Constance's lawyer, Whicher complained, had 'said that the mystery respecting the missing night dress had been cleared up, but such is not the case, as one of her three which she brought home from school is still missing and I have possession for the present of the remaining two'. He suspected that a confession would come soon but 'would no doubt be made to some of the family, and then possibly not made known'.

Whicher signed but did not send the document. Shortly afterwards he scratched out his signature and continued: 'I beg further to report . . .' and wrote two more pages, expanding and clarifying his findings. And nine days after that, still unable to let the matter rest, he resumed: 'I beg to add the following remarks and explanations . . .' The report that he submitted to Mayne on 8 August – twenty-three pages in total – was strewn with inky underlinings, corrections, adjustments, insertions, asterisks, double asterisks and crossings-out.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A GENERAL PUTTING OF THIS AND THAT

TOGETHER BY THE WRONG END

August–October 1860

In early August, with the Home Secretary's permission, the Wiltshire police exhumed Saville Kent's body. They said they hoped to find his sister's nightdress hidden inside the coffin. It was as if the police, in their frustration, could do no more than return to where they began. The officers dug up and unscrewed the box, but were faced only with Saville's corpse in its death robes. The foul gases that emanated from the coffin were so powerful that Superintendent Wolfe fell ill, and did not recover for several days.

The constables watched Road Hill House around the clock. They yet again examined the sewer that ran from the house to the river. Their chiefs briefed the local press on their tireless efforts: 'The assertion that the local police did not render Mr Whicher that assistance they should have done in investigating the circumstances of this mysterious case, is totally unfounded,' reported the Bath Chronicle, 'they having furnished him with all the information they had previously obtained, in addition to accompanying him on every occasion when necessary. There is no doubt that the late hasty steps taken by Inspector Whicher have, in a very great measure, impeded, if not increased, the difficulty which the County Police have to contend with in pursuing their enquiries.'

The police continued to receive letters from the public. A man in Queenstown, Ireland, informed them that Constance Kent had committed the murder; if they would send him the fare, he added, he would bring the missing nightdress to them. They turned down the offer.

At Wolverton railway station, Buckinghamshire, on Friday, 10 August – the day after Saville Kent would have turned four – a stumpy man with a round, red face approached Sergeant Roper of the North-Western Railway Police and confessed to the murder: 'It was I did it.' The man claimed to be a London bricklayer who had been promised a sovereign (about ?1) if he killed the boy. He refused to identify the person who had hired him, or to give his own name – he said he did not want his mother to know where he was. He had given himself up, he said, because he could picture the murdered child walking before him wherever he went. He had been about to lay his head on the track and let a train pass over him, but he had decided to surrender himself instead.

The next morning the police took him by train to Trowbridge. The news of his arrest was sent on by telegraph, and hundreds of people lined the track from Wolverton, via Oxford and Chippenham. At one stop a man put his head into the carriage and asked which was the murderer. The bricklayer shook his clenched, handcuffed fists and confided to the policeman next to him: 'I've a good mind to give him a rattle in the guts.' When they reached Trowbridge police station the magistrates remanded the prisoner until Monday. He had 'a florid complexion', said the Somerset and Wilts Journal, 'and a large head, singularly flat at the crown. He complained of headache greatly, and refused any food.'

By Monday the bricklayer was protesting his innocence. He supplied an alibi for the night of 29 June – he had been at an inn in Portsmouth, he said, having a boil on his back bathed in sugar-water – and he wrote down his