cut through the clothes and the cartilage of two ribs, but had produced little blood.
'The mouth of the child had a blackened appearance, with the tongue protruded between the teeth,' he said. 'My impression was that the blackened appearance had been produced by forcible pressure on it during life.'
Mrs Kent was sitting downstairs at the breakfast table when her husband came in to tell her that their son was dead.
'Someone in the house has done it,' she said.
Cox, the maid, overheard her. 'I have not done it,' Cox said. 'I have not done it.'
At nine, as usual, Kerslake put out the fire beneath the kitchen hotplate.
Superintendent John Foley reached Road Hill House from Trow-bridge between 9 and 10 a.m. He was taken to the library and then the kitchen. Cox showed him the open window in the drawing room; Gough showed him the empty crib in the nursery. The nurse told him, he said, that 'she never missed the blanket till the child was brought in wrapped up in it'. Foley said that he asked Samuel Kent whether he had known that the blanket was missing before he set out for Trowbridge. 'Certainly not,' Samuel replied. Either Foley's recollection was at fault ('My memory is not as good as some persons',' he admitted), or Samuel was lying or seriously confused: his wife, the turnpike keeper and the wife of PC Heritage all testified that he knew of the blanket's loss before he left for Trowbridge, as did Samuel himself when asked about it by others.
Foley looked over the premises with the help of Parsons, who had finished his preliminary examination of the corpse. They inspected the house-hold's clothing, including a nightgown on Constance's bed – 'It had not stains on it,' said Parsons. 'It was very clean.' The bedclothes on Saville's cot, he noted, were 'very neatly folded, as if by a practised hand'. In the kitchen the doctor examined the knives, and found no traces of blood. In any case, he said, he did not believe that any of those knives could have inflicted the injuries he had seen.
John Foley went to the laundry room to study Saville's body, taking with him Henry Heritage, the constable whom Kent had roused at Southwick and who had reached Road Hill House at ten. These two then examined the privy in which the body had been found. When Foley looked down into the vault beneath the privy seat, he thought he could see 'some linen substance' lying in the dirt. 'I sent for a crook, which I attached to a stick, and pulled up a piece of flannel.' The cloth was ten or twelve inches square, its edges neatly bound with narrow tape. At first Foley thought it a man's chest flannel, but it was then identified as a woman's 'breast or bosom flannel', a pad tied inside a corset to cushion the chest. The strings to this one seemed to have been cut off, and the flannel was sticky with thickening blood. 'There was blood upon it, which appeared to be recently there,' Foley said. 'It was still fluid . . . The blood had penetrated the flannel, but it appeared to have dropped so gently that it had congealed drop by drop as it fell.'
Late in the morning two professional men, acquaintances of Samuel Kent, arrived from Trowbridge to offer their services: Joseph Stapleton, a surgeon, and Rowland Rodway, a solicitor. Stapleton, who lived in the centre of Trowbridge with his wife and brother, was a certifying surgeon to several of the factories that Kent supervised. He assessed whether workers, particularly children, were fit enough to work in the mills, and reported on any injuries that befell them. (The following year Stapleton was to publish the first book about the murder at Road Hill House, which became the principal source for many accounts of the case.) Rodway was a widower with a son of twenty- one. He said he found Samuel in a 'state of grief and horror . . . agitation and distress', insisting that he wanted to telegraph at once for a London detective, 'before any traces of the crime could disappear or be removed'. Superintendent Foley resisted the suggestion – it could cause difficulty and disappointment, he said – and instead sent to Trowbridge for a woman to search the female servants. He expressed 'some hesitation in intruding on the family privacy', according to Rodway, 'and in adopting those measures of surveillance which the case required'. Samuel told Rodway to tell Foley that he must 'not feel under the slightest restraint'.
Foley then put on his spectacles, got down on his hands and knees, and, he said, looked 'minutely at every step and every spot' between the nursery and the front and back doors. 'I viewed the posts, the sides of the stairs and passage, and even the grass minutely, the gravel and steps in front of the door, and the matting in the hall, and I could see nothing.'
In the afternoon Foley interviewed Gough in the dining room, in the presence of Stapleton and Rodway. She appeared tired, Stapleton said, but her answers were simple and consistent. She seemed 'a person of considerable intelligence'. Rodway, too, found that she answered questions 'frankly and fully, and without embarrassment'. When Foley asked her if she had any suspicions about who had killed Saville, she said she had not.
Samuel Kent asked Rodway whether he would represent him at the inquest. The solicitor replied that it might look bad, because it could suggest that Samuel was himself a suspect. Samuel later said he was prompted to ask for Rodway's help not on his own account, but to protect William, about whom rumours were circulating in the village: 'I did not know what might transpire there, as it was reported my son William had committed the murder.'
Benger and a group of other men emptied the ten-foot vault beneath the privy. When only six or eight inches of water remained they felt carefully with their hands all along the bottom, but found nothing. Fricker, the plumber and glazier, offered to examine the pipes, and went to the kitchen to fetch a candle. He met Elizabeth Gough, who asked him why he wanted a light. To check the cistern, he explained. She said she was sure he would find nothing there.
Several more police officers turned up at Road Hill House in the course of the day, as well as Eliza Dallimore, the 'searcher' employed by the police to examine the bodies and belongings of female suspects. Mrs Dallimore was married to William, one of the constables already on the premises. She took Gough to the nursery.
'What do you want with me?' Gough asked her.
'You must undress yourself,' Mrs Dallimore replied.
'I cannot,' said the nursemaid. Mrs Dallimore insisted that she must, and led her to the adjacent dressing room.
'Well, nurse,' said the searcher as Gough took off her clothes, 'this is a very shocking thing about the murder.'
'Yes, it is.'
'Can you give any account of it, do you think?'
Gough reiterated that at five in the morning she had woken and seen that Saville was missing. 'I thought he was with his mamma, because he generally goes in there of a morning.' According to Mrs Dallimore, she added: 'This is done through jealousy. The little boy goes into his mamma's room and tells everything.'
'No one would murder a child for doing such a thing as that,' said Mrs Dallimore. The nurse's characterisation of Saville as a tell-tale became, for many, the clue to the crime.
