Kate Summerscale - The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher - A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective

It might be as Poe suggested in 'The Man of the Crowd' (1840): 'There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told . . . mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burthen so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave.'

Joseph Stapleton was gathering material for his book in defence of Samuel. In February he wrote to William Hughes, the Chief Superintendent of the Bath police, asking him formally to refute the rumours that Mr Kent 'led a life of habitual debauchery' with his female servants. On 4 March Hughes replied, confirming that he had examined more than twenty people on this matter: 'they all most emphatically assert that there is not the slightest foundation for any such rumour. From all I could glean on the subject, I feel convinced that his conduct towards his female servants was the very reverse of familiar , and that at all times he has treated them rather with undue haughtiness than familiarity.'

Later that month, Samuel applied to the Home Secretary to take early retirement from the civil service - he was by now more than halfway through his six months' leave. He asked to be granted a pension of PS350, his full salary. 'In June 1860 I was overtaken by that great calamity, the murder of my child,' he explained, 'a calamity which has not only embittered the rest of my life, but has overwhelmed me with popular prejudice and calumny through the confounded representations of the public press . . . My family is large my income limited and I cannot without much deprivation resign upon my official pension.' In response, Cornewall Lewis observed that this was 'a strange proposal as ever I heard of - inform him that his request cannot be acceded to'. The newspapers reported a rumour that Constance had in March confessed to a relative that she had killed Saville, but the detectives who had worked on the case found it 'unadvisable' to reopen the investigation.

On Thursday, 18 April 1861 the Kents left Road. Constance was sent to a finishing school in Dinan, a walled medieval town in northern France, and William returned to his school in Longhope, where he boarded with about twenty-five other boys aged between seven and sixteen. The rest of the family moved to Camden Villa in Weston-super-Mare, a resort on the north coast of Somersetshire. Mrs Kent was again pregnant.

The Kents instructed a Trowbridge auctioneer to dispose of their belongings. Two days after their departure he opened Road Hill House to the public for viewing. He had already had so many enquiries that he had taken the unprecedented step of selling the catalogues, at a shilling apiece, and limiting them to one per person - seven hundred were purchased. At 11 a.m. on Saturday, the crowds swarmed over the building. In the drawing room the visitors took turns at lifting the central bay window to test its weight, and in the nursery they made their own appraisals about whether Elizabeth Gough could have seen into Saville's cot from her bed (the consensus was that she could). They minutely examined the staircases and doors. Superintendent John Foley, who had been enlisted to keep order, was besieged by requests from young ladies to see the privy, where spots of blood were still visible on the floor. The visitors took less interest in the furniture up for sale. In his opening address the auctioneer conceded that the contents of the house were 'not of a very elegant character', but argued that they were well-made, 'and I would observe that the effects have not only an artificial, but an historical value attached to them. They have been witnesses to a crime which has astonished, terrified, and paralysed the civilised world.'

The sums achieved on the paintings were disappointing - an oil of Mary Queen of Scots by Federico Zuccari, for which Samuel Kent claimed to have been offered PS100, went for PS14. But Mr and Mrs Kent's splendid Spanish four-poster fetched an impressive PS7.15 s., and the washstand and ware from their bedroom PS7. The auctioneer also sold 250 ounces of silver plate, more than five hundred books, several cases of wine, including golden and pale sherries, a lucernal microscope (when used with a gaslight, this could project enlarged images onto a wall), two telescopes, some pieces of iron garden furniture and a fine yearling. Samuel's 1820 port (an exceptionally rich, sweet vintage) went for eleven shillings a bottle, his mare for PS11.15 s ., his carriage for PS6 and his pure-bred Alderney (a small, fawn cow that yielded creamy milk) for PS19. The Kents' chamber organ was acquired for the Methodist chapel in Beck-ington. A Mr Pearman of Frome paid about PS1 each for Constance's bed, Elizabeth Gough's bed and Eveline's cot, which Saville had used as a baby, bringing the total raised by the sale to PS1,000. The cot from which Saville had been abducted was not put up for auction, in case it found its way to the 'Chamber of Horrors' in Madame Tussaud's waxworks museum.

During the sale a pickpocket stole a purse containing PS4 from a woman in the crowd. Though Foley's men locked the doors to Road Hill House, conducted a search and arrested a suspect, the culprit was not found.*

Samuel and Mary Kent's last child, Florence Saville Kent, was born in their new home on the Somersetshire coast on 19 July 1861. Over the summer the factory commissioners discussed where they could send Samuel. Posts came up in Yorkshire and Ireland, but they feared that he would be unable to exercise his authority in these areas, where the hostility towards him was great. In October, though, a job fell vacant for a sub-inspector of factories in north Wales, and the Kent family moved to Llangollen in the Dee valley.

An Englishwoman who lived in Dinan in 1861 later wrote to the Devizes Gazette about Constance Kent: 'I never saw her, but everyone I know did, and all describe her as a flat-faced, reddish-haired ugly girl, neither stupid nor clever, lively nor morose, and only remarkable for one particular trait, viz, her extreme tenderness and kindness to very young children . . . In the whole school in which she was a pupil she was the one who would probably be the least remarked if all were seen together.' Constance did her best to become invisible, and was known at the school by her second name, Emily, but the other girls were aware of her identity. She was the object of gossip and bullying. By the end of the year Samuel had removed her to the care of the nuns of the Convent de la Sagesse, on a cliff above the town.

For several months Whicher withdrew from the public eye, working only on cases unlikely to attract attention. Just one was covered in any depth by the newspapers - his capture of a clergyman who had obtained PS6,000 by forging his uncle's will. Whicher's young colleague Timothy Cavanagh, then a clerk in the Commissioner's office, claimed that the Road Hill murder had undone 'the best man the Detective Department ever possessed'. The case 'almost broke the heart of poor Whicher' - he 'returned to head-quarters thoroughly chapfallen. This was a great blow to him . . . the commissioner and others losing faith in him for the first time.' According to Cavanagh, the Road Hill case changed Dolly Williamson as well. When Williamson came back from Wiltshire, he put away his playfulness, his penchant for practical jokes and dangerous games. He became subdued, detached.

In the summer of 1861 Whicher was given charge of a murder investigation for the first time since Road Hill. It was an apparently straightforward case. On 10 June a fifty-five-year-old woman called Mary Halliday was found dead in a rectory at Kingswood, near Reigate, Surrey, where she had been keeping house while the vicar was away. Mrs Halliday seemed to have been the victim of a botched burglary - a sock stuffed into her mouth, probably to silence her, had suffocated her. The intruder or intruders had left clues: a beech cudgel, some lengths of unusual hemp cord tied around the victim's wrists and ankles, and a packet of papers. These papers included a letter from a famous German opera singer, a begging letter signed 'Adolphe Krohn', and identification documents in the name of Johann Karl Franz of Saxony.