The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

name for the magistrates: John Edmund Gagg. When he was asked what had driven him to confess to a murder he had not committed, he said, 'I confessed because I was hard up, and thought it better if I could be hung. I am sick and tired of my life.' He had a history of falls, carbuncles, fits, 'an overflow of blood to the head', but was apparently sane. The strain of an unsolved murder could tell on a fragile man already under pressure. Like many, Gagg was haunted by the crime. His decision to confess took the ambition of the amateur detective to an extreme: he solved the murder by claiming it as his own.

The magistrates sent a message to Jack Whicher at Scotland Yard, asking him to track down Gagg's wife in London. Whicher notified them that she was 'a most respectable woman living by her own industry, with her mother and children'. Gagg's alibis in Portsmouth proved solid. On Wednesday, 22 August he was discharged, and the magistrates paid his train fare to Paddington.

That week Elizabeth Gough told the Kents that she wished to leave their employ. The Somerset and Wilts Journal explained that she had 'been subject to a most disagreeable surveillance by the house-hold'. It was later reported by the Frome journalist Albert Groser in a letter to The Times that after Saville's murder the Kents had not let their little girls, Mary Amelia and Eveline, sleep in Gough's room. On Monday, 27 August she left Road Hill House with her father and returned with him to Isleworth, Surrey, to join her mother, her two younger sisters and two younger brothers in the family bakery.

On 29 August the case of the Reverend Bonwell, which Whicher had investigated in 1859, reached its conclusion: the Church of England defrocked Bonwell as punishment for his scandalous affair and his attempt to conceal the birth and death of his child. A week afterwards, on 5 September, more than twenty thousand Londoners gathered to see William Youngman, the Walworth murderer, executed outside Horsemonger Lane gaol. This was the largest gallows crowd since Frederick and Maria Manning had been hanged on the same spot in 1849. On the day of his death Youngman breakfasted on cocoa, bread and butter. Outside, boys played leapfrog beneath the gallows, and the public house facing the 'drop' did a roaring trade. When Young-man fell through the trapdoor, 'quivering and twisting in the air', reported the News of the World, 'several persons of both sexes, who had been tippling all morning, burst out into unrestrained crying'. Just over a month had passed since the quadruple murder of Youngman's mother, brothers and sweetheart. In the final instalment of The Woman in White, on 25 August, Count Fosco's description of England as 'the land of domestic happiness' was unmistakably ironic.

The last of the wheat and corn was harvested with scythes in the fields around Road in September. At the beginning of the month two petitions were sent to the Home Secretary – one organised by the Bath Express, one by the Somerset and Wilts Journal – asking for a special commission to investigate the Road murder. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, the Home Secretary, turned down these pleas, but at the suggestion of the Wiltshire magistrates he quietly appointed E.F. Slack, a Bath solicitor, to conduct an investigation. The source of Slack's authority was at first unclear, and William Dunn, acting for the Kents, expressed the family's reluctance to cooperate: 'for aught we know you may be acting under the instructions of the detective officer whose former proceedings in this case have been condemned by the almost universal voice of the country'. Eventually, Slack divulged that he was working for the government. The Bath Express, among others, was disparaging about the way Lord Palmerston's Liberal administration was handling the inquiry – the paper described Cornewall Lewis as timid, terrified of criticism, and absurdly secretive.

Slack talked to everyone involved with the case. He conducted private interviews over three weeks, in his office in Bath, in a pub in Beckington and in the drawing room of Road Hill House. At one point he learnt that a small plot of land in the grounds was known as 'Miss Constance's garden', and ordered that it be dug up. Nothing of significance was found. He tried to interview the five-year-old Mary Amelia Kent, but was thwarted by Dunn, who argued that his client's daughter was too young to be examined. Dunn later described how it had been established that she was unfit to testify: when asked how old she was, she incorrectly gave her age as four; she claimed her family went to church daily, though Christ Church was not open every day; and she could not spell her murdered brother Saville's name: 'Please, sir, I have not been taught that.'

On Monday, 24 September, Slack closed his inquiry, letting it be known that he believed Constance Kent quite innocent. Her purse, he said, had been discovered behind her chest of drawers, which supported her claim to have been searching for it when she asked Sarah Cox to look through the laundry baskets on the day of the inquest. At Slack's behest, Superintendent Wolfe arrested Elizabeth Gough in Isleworth.

On Monday, 1 October, Gough was brought before the magistrates at the Trowbridge police court. The Kent family arrived in a fly, 'and were fortunate to get in unobserved', said the Bristol Daily Post, 'and therefore without any unpleasant demonstration from those congregated in the locality'.

In court, Gough sat with her hands drawn up to her throat, as if in prayer or protection. She was even 'thinner and more pale and careworn', according to the Bristol Daily Post, and watched the proceedings of the next four days with 'feverish anxiety'.

Gough's prosecutor argued that no one could have abducted and killed Saville alone, and that if two people had done it, one was surely the nurse. He questioned the credibility of Gough's statements so far. Why would she assume Saville's mother had taken him that morning, since she was too pregnant to lift him? Why did she change her story about the time at which she noticed the loss of the blanket? How could she see whether Saville was in his cot without getting out of her bed?

When Samuel Kent took the stand he was asked why he had been reluctant to let anyone draw up a plan of his house, why he had ridden to Trowbridge on the morning his son disappeared, and why he had locked the two policemen in the kitchen that night. He expressed confusion about the events of the day of Saville's death: 'my mind is so disturbed that there are many things I am not so clear about as I could wish'. On the question of the constables' incarceration in the kitchen, he said, 'I bolted the door that the house might appear as usual, and that no one might know there was a policeman in the house.' Foley was asked about the incident. 'I did not desire him to lock them up,' said the Superintendent. 'I was very much surprised when I heard of it.' He tried to make light of his part in the botched job with a weak, but pointed joke: 'They were, I understood, to have the whole range of the house, but they only had the kitchen range.' Samuel wept when he recounted the moment at which Peacock had told him of his son's murder.

The testimony of the rest of the Kent family was distinguished by its blandness. Mary Kent reluctantly lifted her thick black mourning veil to give her evidence; she was barely audible, and was repeatedly requested to speak up. She said of Gough: 'This girl, to the best of my belief, was particularly kind to the child, and seemed very fond of him; he was very fond of her; I can't tell whether she was much distressed that morning; I was too much occupied with my own and my husband's feelings . . . The boy was a nice little, playful, good-tempered, chatty boy, and a general favourite; I don't know of any one who entertained revengeful feelings against my family or little boy.'

Mary Ann Kent said, 'The poor little one who was murdered was my brother.' Elizabeth said, 'I am . . . the sister of the poor little fellow who was murdered.' They divulged little else beyond the times at which they had gone to bed and awoken on the night of his death.

Constance, with a veil pulled over her face, testified that Saville 'was a merry, good-tempered lad, fond of romping. I was accustomed to play with him often. I had played with him that day. He appeared to be fond of me, and I was fond of him.' William, who had been summoned from his boarding school near Gloucester, answered the