The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

Samuel Kent may have encouraged the police to suspect Constance in order to shield his son. He may have been protecting William when he told Stapleton the story of the children's escape to Bath, twisting the narrative to suggest the boy's sensitivity and the girl's unshakeable nerve. At the time of the investigation, William was often dismissed as a suspect on account of his timidity. Yet Whicher believed that he was capable of taking part in a murder. The press reports of the Bath escapade suggested that the boy had a strong-willed, inventive nature, and his later life bore this out.

Throughout the investigation into Saville's murder many had argued that two people must have participated in the crime. If William helped Constance, this would explain how the bedclothes had been smoothed down when Saville was taken out of the nursery, how Saville was kept hushed as the windows and doors were negotiated, how the evidence was destroyed afterwards. Constance may have mentioned only the razor in her confession because she herself used only a razor, while William wielded the knife. The letter from Sydney avoided any reference to the murder itself; perhaps this was because there was no explanation that could fail to implicate her accomplice.

Several of the stories that drew on the case seem haunted with the possibility that Constance and William were still hiding something. In The Moonstone, the heroine protects the man she loves by allowing herself to be a suspect. The runaway brother and sister in The Mystery of Edwin Drood share a dark history. The enigma of The Turn of the Screw lies in the silence of two children, a brother and sister locked together by a secret.^*

Whether William had been her accomplice or simply her confidant, Constance worked at all times to shelter him. As soon as she confessed, she insisted that she had committed the crime 'alone and unaided'. She told her lawyer that she refused to plead insanity because she wanted to protect William, and she tailored her statements about the murder and its motive to the same end. In none of them did she mention him. Though she had complained to her schoolfriends about how he was treated by Samuel and Mary – the humiliating comparisons to Saville, the way he was made to push a perambulator around the village – she made no reference to this in 1865. She said of her father and stepmother, 'I have never had any ill will towards either of them on account of their behaviour to me,' carefully avoiding the ill will she might bear them on anyone else's account. The answer to the mystery of Saville's murder might lie in Constance's silence after all; specifically, her silence about the brother she loved.

Constance gave herself up in the year before William's twenty-first birthday, when he was due to inherit a ?1,000 bequest from their mother. He hoped to use the money to fund a career in science, but was still hampered by the uncertainty and suspicion surrounding the family. Rather than both of them live under the cloud of the murder, Constance chose to gather the darkness to herself. Her act of atonement liberated William, made his future possible.

AFTERWORD

The third chapter of Joseph Stapleton's book on the Road Hill murder is devoted to the post-mortem examination of Saville Kent's body. Among the doctor's many observations about the corpse is a description, in characteristically florid prose, of two wounds on the boy's left hand.

But upon the hand – that left hand, that beautifully chiselled hand, hanging lifeless from a body that might, even in its mutilation, furnish a study and a model for a sculptor – there are two small cuts – one almost down to the bone; the other just a scratch – upon the knuckle of the forefinger. How came they there?

Stapleton's explanation for these injuries briefly, violently, pulls Saville back into view. From the nature and position of the wounds the surgeon deduces that the child woke just before he was killed, and raised his left hand to fend off the knife striking at his throat; the knife sliced into his knuckle; he lifted his hand a second time, more feebly, and the blade grazed his finger as it cut into his neck.

The image makes Saville suddenly present: he wakes to see his killer and to see his death descend on him. When I read Stapleton's words I was reminded, with a jolt, that the boy lived. In unravelling the story of his murder, I had forgotten him.

Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional – to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death.

NOTES

PROLOGUE

xix On Sunday, 15 July 1860 . . . for is.6d. From Whicher's expenses claims in the Metropolitan Police files at the National Archives – MEPO 3/61.

xix The day was warm. . . into the seventies. Weather reports in the July, August and September 1860 issues of The Gentleman's Magazine.

xix At this terminus in 1856 . . . excelled at untangling. From reports in The Times, 7 & 12 April 1856; and 3, 4 & 12 May 1858.

xx Dickens reported that 'in a glance' . . . 'chronicled nowhere'. In 'A Detective Police Party', parts one and two, House-hold Words, 27 July 1850 and 10 August 1850.

xxi 'the prince of detectives'. In Scotland Yard Past and Present: Experiences of Thirty-Seven Years (1893) by Ex-Chief-Inspector Timothy Cavanagh.

xxi 'shorter and thicker-set' . . . smallpox scars. In 'A Detective Police Party', House-hold Words, 27 July 1850.

xxi William Henry Wills . . . of the Detective police.' In 'The Modern Science of Thief-taking',