The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

questions put to him with 'Yes, sir' and 'No, sir' – 'not a strong-looking youth', remarked the Bristol Daily Post. Elizabeth brought the five-year-old Mary Amelia into the courtroom to testify, but an argument broke out about whether she was fit to do so: did she know her catechism or understand an oath? Eventually she was removed from the court without being examined.

The servants of Road Hill House made ingenious – and touching – attempts to help Gough by showing that a stranger might have taken Saville. On Tuesday, Sarah Kerslake, the cook, told the court that she and Sarah Cox, the maid, had experimented on the drawing-room window that very morning. They wanted to establish whether someone standing outside the house could have pulled it down to within six inches of the ground, the condition in which it had been found on the day Saville died. 'People said it could not be done from the outside, and Cox and I were determined to see whether it could or not; we found that it could be done from the outside quite easy.' The chairman of the magistrates pointed out that, even if they were right, it remained impossible that the window had been opened from the outside in the first place.

When Sarah Cox was called the next day, she told the court that she had followed up this experiment by trying to adjust the shutters of the drawing-room window from outside the house, but had been unsuccessful because the wind had been too strong. Superintendent Wolfe took issue with her: he had witnessed the exercise, he said, and the wind had nothing to do with its failure. He added that he had conducted his own experiment that morning, and it had confirmed his theory that Gough could not have detected the child's loss as she described. In Wolfe's experiment Mrs Kent took Eveline, now twenty-three months old, into the nursery, and Elizabeth Kent tucked her into Saville's crib. PC Dallimore's wife Eliza, who was a similar size to Gough, then knelt on the nursemaid's bed to test whether she could see the child. She reported that she could see only a small portion of pillow.

It was Eliza Dallimore's amateur detective work that excited the strongest disapproval in court. When she took the stand she gave detailed accounts of conversations between herself and Gough while the nursemaid was lodged at the police station in early July.

On one occasion, said Eliza Dallimore, Gough asked: 'Mrs Dallimore, do you know there's a nightdress missing?'

'No – whose was it?'

'Miss Constance Kent's,' said Gough. 'You may depend upon it that nightdress will lead to the discovery of the murderer.'

On another occasion Mrs Dallimore asked her whether Constance might be the killer. 'I don't think Miss Constance Kent would do it,' said Gough. Asked if William could have helped the girl commit the crime, Gough exclaimed, 'Oh, Master William is more fit for a girl than a boy.' As for Mr Kent: 'No, I could not think for a moment that he committed the murder. He's too fond of his children.'

One evening Mrs Dallimore asked Gough, again: 'What do you think of Miss Constance doing the murder?'

'I can't say anything about that,' the nursemaid replied, 'but I saw the nightgown put into the basket.'

William Dallimore came in and, having overheard the end of the conversation, asked, 'Then you saw the nightgown put into the basket, nurse, as well as Cox?'

'No,' said Gough. 'I have nothing to say about that. I have enough of my own to contend with.' With this, said Eliza Dallimore, she went to bed.

Mrs Dallimore also reported other remarks Gough had made to her, some of them seemingly suspicious – for instance, her prediction that the plumber would not find any evidence in the privy, and her description of Saville as a teller of tales.

Gough's counsel, Mr Ribton, tried to discredit Mrs Dallimore's evidence by making sarcastic allusions to her 'marvellous memory', and by mocking her. Mrs Dallimore mentioned that breast flannels were worn by young women as well as the elderly and ill: 'I wear one myself.' This provoked whoops of laughter, which were renewed when Ribton retorted, 'I shall not take the liberty of asking you your age, ma'am.'

Mrs Dallimore was dismayed by the levity of the courtroom. 'I don't think so serious a matter should be turned to ridicule,' she said. 'It gives me the horrors to think about it.'

'You are very irritable, are you not?' asked Ribton.

'Yes, sir. Perhaps you are too.'

'Then don't give us the horrors,' said Ribton. 'How about the breast flannel? It fits you nicely?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Very nicely indeed?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Perhaps you have been wearing it?' This was greeted with more laughter.

'It's a very serious thing, sir, who done the murder.'

Mrs Dallimore was a real-life version of a nineteenth-century fictional heroine: the amateur female detective, as featured in W.S. Hayward's The Experiences of a Lady Detective (1861) and Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective (1864). Her investigations, like those of Mrs Bucket in Bleak House, were as spirited and probing as the inquiries made by her policeman husband and his fellow officers. Inspector Bucket, though, refers to his wife, respectfully, as 'a lady of natural detective genius', while Mrs Dallimore was treated as a gossip and a fool. In theory, detection was understood as a distinctly feminine talent – women had the opportunities for 'intimate watching', said Forrester, and an instinct for deciphering what they saw. In practice, a woman who indulged in detection was perceived as a sister to Mrs Snagsby in Bleak House, whose jealous curiosity drives her 'to nocturnal examinations of Mr Snagsby's pockets; to secret perusals of Mr Snagsby's letters . . . to watching at windows, listenings behind doors, and a general putting of this and that together by the wrong end'.

In his summing-up on Thursday, Ribton said he had 'seldom seen anything so disgraceful in a witness as the evidence of the woman Dallimore, or more calculated to send a thrill of horror through everybody, and make them fear for their lives, their liberties, their characters'. Mrs Dallimore had taken Whicher's place as the spy incarnate. Ribton dealt with Gough's contradictions about the blanket by suggesting that she had noticed its loss early in the day and then, in the confusion and distress of the morning, had forgotten she had done so. He dismissed the fact that the flannel fitted her, arguing that it might in any case have no connection to the crime.

The magistrates released the nursemaid, to wild applause, on condition that her family put up a ?100 bond to ensure that she would return for further examination if necessary. This was paid by one of Gough's two uncles, who