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

Samuel put on a black overcoat and set out in his phaeton, a dashing, four-wheeled carriage with a skimpy body and high back wheels, pulled by the red mare. 'He went away in a great hurry,' said Holcombe. As Urch and Morgan approached the drive at about 8 a.m., they met him turning left onto the Trowbridge road. Morgan assured Samuel he need go only to Southwick, a mile or so away, from where a Wiltshire police officer could send a message on to the town. But Samuel wished to ride the full five miles to Trowbridge: 'I shall go on,' he said. He asked Urch and Morgan to join the search for his son.

At Southwick turnpike gate, Samuel pulled up his carriage and, as he was paying the toll (41/2 d .), asked the keeper of the gate, Ann Hall, to direct him to the local policeman's house.

'I have had a child stolen and carried off in a blanket,' Samuel told her.

'When did you lose it?' asked Mrs Hall.

'This morning,' replied Samuel.

She pointed him towards Southwick Street, where Samuel gave a boy a halfpenny to show him the house of PC Henry Heritage. Ann Heritage answered the door and told Samuel that her husband was in bed.

'You must call him up,' said Samuel, without getting out of his carriage. 'I have had a child stolen out of my house tonight . . . a little boy aged three years and ten months . . . wrapped up in a blanket . . . I am going to Trowbridge to give information to Foley.'

Mrs Heritage asked him for his name and residence.

'Kent,' he replied. 'Road Hill House.'

* * *

When PC Urch and parish constable Morgan reached Road Hill House, they found Sarah Cox in the kitchen and asked her how the child had been taken away. She showed them the open window in the drawing room. Elizabeth Gough took them into the nursery and turned back the bedclothes in Saville's cot: Morgan noticed 'the mark where the little boy had lain on the bed, and on the pillow'. Gough told the constables that when she joined the Kent house-hold, eight months earlier, the nurse she replaced had mentioned that the boy's mother sometimes fetched him to her room in the night. Morgan asked: 'Have you lost anything from the nursery besides the child?' She hesitated, he said, before replying that 'there was a blanket taken from the cot, or drawn from the cot'.

Urch and Morgan asked to see the cellar, but found it was locked. One of the elder Misses Kent held the key but the constables chose not to involve the family in their inquiries. They returned to the drawing room to look for 'foot-tracks', as Morgan referred to them - to Urch they were 'footmarks' or 'footprints'; the science of detection was young, and its vocabulary still unsettled. Soon afterwards Elizabeth Gough looked for footmarks there, and found the imprints of two large hobnailed boots on the white drugget, a coarse woollen rug that lay over the carpet by the window. It turned out that these had been made by PC Urch.

Mrs Kent sent her stepdaughter Constance to ask the Reverend Peacock to come to Road Hill House. Edward Peacock lived in a three-storey gothic parsonage next to Christ Church with his wife, their two daughters, two sons and five servants. He and Samuel were friends, and the parsonage was only a few minutes' walk from the Kents' house. The vicar agreed to help with the search.

William Nutt, a shoemaker with six children who lived in the tumbledown cottages by the house, was at work in his shop when he overheard Joseph Greenhill, an innkeeper, talking about Master Saville's disappearance. Nutt headed for Road Hill House: 'Having an affection like for the father, I said, "I must go and hear further about this." ' Nutt was 'a strange-looking person', reported the Western Daily Press: 'sallow, thin, and bony, with prominent cheek bones, pointed nose, receding forehead, and a cast in one eye; while he is what is called "bumble-footed", and has a habit of placing his attenuated arms in front of his chest, with his hands drooping'. Just outside the gates, Nutt came across Thomas Benger, a farmer, driving his cows. Benger suggested to Nutt that they join the search. Nutt hesitated to go on the lawn without permission, and told Benger he 'did not like to go on a gentleman's premises'. Benger, who had heard Samuel Kent offer Urch and Morgan a PS10 reward if they found his son, persuaded Nutt that no one could reprimand them for looking for a lost child.

As they searched the thick shrubbery to the left of the front drive, Nutt remarked that they would find a dead child if the living one was not found. He then struck off to the right, towards a servants' privy hidden in the bushes, and Benger followed. They came to the privy and looked in: a small pool of clotted blood lay on the floor.

'See, William,' said Benger, 'what we have got to see.'

'Oh, Benger,' said Nutt. 'It is as I predicted.'

'Get a light, William,' said Benger.

Nutt went to the back door of the house and along the passage to the scullery. There he found Mary Holcombe, the gardener's mother. She was employed by the Kents as a charwoman for two days or so each week. Nutt asked for a candle, and she looked at him.

'For God's sake, what's the matter, William?'

'Don't alarm yourself, Mary,' he said. 'I only want a candle for a minute to see what we can see.'

While Nutt was gone, Benger lifted the lavatory lid and peered in until his eyes adjusted to the darkness. 'By steadily looking down, I could see better, and saw a something like clothing below; I put my hand down and raised the blanket.' The blanket was soaked with blood. About two feet under the seat, on the wooden 'splashboard' that partly blocked the descent to the pit beneath, was the boy's body. Saville was lying on his side, one arm and one leg slightly drawn up.

'Look here,' said Benger as Nutt appeared with the candle. 'Oh, William, here it is.'

CHAPTER TWO

THE HORROR AND AMAZEMENT

30 June - 1 July

As Thomas Benger lifted Saville's body from the privy, the boy's head tipped back to expose the clean cut through his neck.

'Its little head fell off almost,' said William Nutt, when he gave his account of the day's events in the Wiltshire magistrates' court.

'His throat was cut,' said Benger, 'and blood was splashed over his face . . . he was a little dark about the mouth and eyes, but he looked quite pleasant, and his little eyes were shut.' Pleasant, here, meant peaceful.

Nutt spread the blanket on the privy floor and Benger placed the body upon it. They wrapped the corpse together, Benger at the head, Nutt at the feet, and Benger, as the stronger of the two, took it in his arms and carried it to the house. Urch and Morgan watched him walk through the yard. The farmer bore the boy's body along the passage and into the kitchen.

Saville's corpse, already stiff, was laid on a table beneath the kitchen window; upstairs the shape of his sleeping self was still indented on the sheets and pillow of the cot. Mary Ann and Elizabeth Kent, the two older sisters, entered the kitchen, Elizabeth holding the one-year-old Eveline in her arms. 'I can't describe the horror and amazement they seemed to be in,' said Nutt. 'I thought they would fall and I took them both round the waist. I went through with them into the passage.'

The nursemaid was also in the kitchen. Nutt said to her 'that she must have slept very soundly to have admitted of any one taking the child from her room. She answered me, I thought rather harshly, by telling me I knew nothing of the matter.' Gough claimed that it was only now, when she saw the blanket wrapping Saville's corpse, that she realised it had been taken from his bed. Yet PC Urch, James Morgan and Mrs Kent all claimed that Gough had told them of the blanket's loss before Saville's body was found. The nursemaid's contradictory statements about the blanket were to make her a suspect.