The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

Samuel Kent, circa 1863

The second Mrs Kent, circa 1863

Sketch of Elizabeth Gough in 1860

Constance Kent, circa 1858

Edward Kent, early 1850s

Mary Ann Windus in 1828, a year before she became the first Mrs Kent

Road Hill House, front view

Road Hill House, back view, with the drawing-room windows to the right

Engraving of Road Hill House in 1860, bird's-eye view

Engraving of Road Hill House in 1860, back view

Adolphus 'Dolly' Williamson, police detective, in the 1880s

Richard Mayne, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, in the 1840s

A view of Trowbridge, Wiltshire, in the mid-nineteenth century

The centre of Trowbridge in the late nineteenth century

Gravestone in East Coulston churchyard, Wiltshire

* That month, according to the News of the World, a worker at a crinoline steel factory in Sheffield was killed by her crinoline when it caught in the revolving shaft of a machine and pulled her to her death.

* Though his name did not appear on the census of 1861, there are indications that Whicher was living in this house by 1860. In a police circular of 1858 he asked fellow officers to inform him, at Scotland Yard, if they saw a twenty-four-year-old gentleman who had gone missing, 'mind supposed affected'; two weeks afterwards a private advertisement appeared in The Times requesting news of this same young man, with his 'rather pale full face', and offering a ?10 reward – it was presumably placed by Whicher, but it asked that information be passed to 'Mr Wilson' of 31 Holywell Street. The pseudonym concealed the fact that the police were looking for the wan gentleman. 'The tricks of detective police officers are infinite,' observes the narrator of The Female Detective. 'I am afraid many a kindly-disposed advertisement hides the hoof of detection.' A year later, in 1859, the Commissioner's office put out a request for information about a white, wolf-breed dog that had gone missing from 31 Holywell Street. A lost dog was not usually a matter for Scotland Yard – maybe the white wolfhound belonged to Whicher's landlady (Charlotte Piper, a widow of forty-eight with a private income) or to the detective himself.

* In the next decade Road Hill House was renamed Langham House (after the neighbouring farm). By 1871 the head of the house-hold was Sarah Ann Turberwell, a widow of sixty-six, who employed six staff: a butler, a lady's maid, a housekeeper, a housemaid, a kitchen maid and a footman. In the twentieth century the county boundaries were altered, so that the house now falls within Somerset, like the rest of the village, and the name of the village itself was changed, from Road to Rode.

* To demonstrate the weird logic of homicidal monomania, Stapleton recounted a horrible story about a mild- mannered young man who was so obsessed with windmills that he would gaze at them for days on end. In 1843 friends tried to distract him from his fixation by moving him to an area with no mills. There the windmill man lured a boy into a wood, then killed and mutilated him. His motive, he explained, was the hope that as punishment he would be taken to a place where there just might be a mill.

* James Willes separated from his wife in 1865 and moved to a house on the banks of the Colne, in Essex. Over the next few years, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, he walked his three dogs by the river and fed the trout. Though he had been a keen fisherman in his youth, he developed such a fondness for the fish that he banned the sport in his waters. In 1872, on becoming sleepless, forgetful and depressed, he shot himself in the heart with a revolver.

* In the event, Madame Tussaud's did not put the Constance Kent waxwork on show until after Samuel Kent's death – perhaps out of respect for his feelings. According to the museum catalogues, it was displayed from 1873 to 1877.

* Six years later, in 1887, Arthur Conan Doyle created the first of his hugely successful Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Unlike Jack Whicher, Conan Doyle's fantasy detective is an amateur and a gentleman, and he is always right – 'the most perfect reasoning and observing machine the world has seen', says his sidekick Dr Watson in 'A Scandal in Bohemia'.

* Mary Amelia had married an orchard-keeper in Sydney in 1899, and given birth to Olive, her only child, the