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

Outside, the servants and a growing gaggle of villagers began to search for traces of the murderer and the weapon. Daniel Oliver, the jobbing gardener, showed Urch some footmarks on the lawn near the drawing-room windows: 'There's been someone here.' But Alloway said he had made the footprints the previous evening: 'I had been using the wheelbarrow.'

By the privy door Alloway found a piece of bloody newspaper, five or six inches square, folded and still moist. It looked as though a knife or razor might have been wiped upon it. The date of the newspaper was legible - 9 June - but not its title. Edward West, a farmer, advised Alloway: 'Don't destroy the paper; pick it up; take care of it - it will be the means of bringing about a discovery.' Alloway handed it to Stephen Millet, a butcher and parish constable, who was inspecting the privy. Millet estimated that there were two tablespoons of blood on the floor, and a pint and a half had soaked in to the blanket. West described the blood on the floor as 'about the size of a man's hand. I saw it in quite a coagulated state.'

Upstairs, Elizabeth Gough was arranging Mrs Kent's hair - her last position had been as a lady's maid, and in Road Hill House she tended to her mistress as well as to the children. Samuel had left orders that his wife be given no news of the boy, so Gough did not mention that Saville had now been found dead, but when Mrs Kent wondered aloud where her son could be, she said, 'Oh, ma'am, it's revenge.'

As soon as the Reverend Peacock reached Road Hill House he was told that Saville had been found, and was shown the body in the kitchen. He went home, saddled his horse and set off after Samuel. He passed through Ann Hall's turnpike at Southwick.

'Sir,' she said to the vicar, 'this is a sad affair at Road.'

'But the child is found,' he replied.

'Where, sir?'

'In the garden.' Peacock did not explain that he was dead.

Peacock caught up with Kent. 'I am sorry to tell you I have had bad news for you,' he said. 'The little boy has been found murdered.'

Samuel Kent headed home: 'I was not long; I went as fast as I could.' When he passed the turnpike gate, Ann Hall asked after Saville.

'Then, sir, the child is found?'

'Yes, and murdered.' He did not stop.

Since his father was away it fell to William Kent to fetch Joshua Parsons, the family physician. The boy hurried down the narrow lane to the village of Beckington and found the doctor at his home in Goose Street. He told him that Saville had been discovered in the privy, his throat cut, and Parsons set off for Road Hill House, taking William with him in his carriage. When they arrived, the doctor recalled, 'I was taken round the back way by Master William, because he was not aware whether his mother knew what had occurred, so I went into the library.'

Samuel was now home. He greeted Parsons and gave him a key to the laundry room, opposite the kitchen, to which Saville's body had been moved. 'I went in by myself,' said Parsons. The corpse was entirely rigid, he noted, which indicated that the boy had been killed at least five hours earlier - that is, before three o'clock that morning. 'The blanket and the nightdress [were] stained with marks of blood and soil,' he reported - by 'soil', he meant excrement. 'The throat was cut to the bone by some sharp instrument, from left to right; it completely divided all the membranes, blood vessels, nerve vessels, and air tubes.' Parsons also noticed a stab to the chest, which had 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'.