A Very British Murder (19 page)

‘I fancy that step by step I can trace the crime,’ wrote one lady, who lived in Westbourne Grove, London. ‘The murderer is the brother of [local resident] William Nutt, and the son in law of Mrs Holly the laundress.’ Her letter was just one among many. And so Mr Whicher is to be found writing that, no, he did not think that chloroform had been used, because no trace of it was found in the victim’s body, and that, yes, he had indeed considered the possibility that the nursemaid and the master had been having an affair.

When I interviewed Kate Summerscale, the author of the bestselling
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
, about these letters, she pointed out a fascinating trend among them. The most popular solution to the crime, the one mentioned most often by members of the public, was indeed the theory that Samuel Kent had been having an adulterous relationship with his nursemaid (just as he had done previously with his children’s governess before he married her). People were quick to suggest that the murdered child had seen something that he shouldn’t, and had been silenced permanently so that the secret should not come out.

Our popular image of Victorian life, to this day, is of sexual secrets buried beneath hypocrisy, the head of a respectable household with a double life, the vulnerability, and the silencing, of his
women. Many historians have sought to overturn, or at least to nuance, such a bald view of Victorian domestic life. And yet, as Summerscale suggests, the letters written to Mr Whicher suggesting that Samuel Kent was sleeping with his nursemaid really do place the very worst construction that the writers could imagine upon events and relationships. The cliché exists because it was – and remains – powerful. The strangers who wrote these letters show that our stock image is how Victorian society indeed saw itself. Detective fever involved assuming the worst, trusting no one and ferreting about for dirt. No wonder the residual middle-class fear and dislike of the professional detective lingered on, even while people came reluctantly to admire his achievements.

What did this mean for professional detectives like Jack Whicher? Like Inspector Field, his fellow member of the original Detective Branch of the Metropolitan Police, Whicher was far from well born. He was the son of a gardener, and worked as a labourer before he joined the police. This lowly background is one of the reasons he was looked upon askance by the family at Road Hill House.

As was the case for Inspector Field, working for the police allowed Whicher to better himself through using his brains. He was regarded with high esteem by journalists: Dickens described him as possessing ‘a reserved and thoughtful air, as if he were engaged in deep arithmetical calculations’. Another journalist simply labelled him as ‘a man of mystery’. He was considered to be the best, and was certainly the best-known, detective on the force when he was sent down to Road Hill House. Yet his failure to pin the blame firmly on Constance Kent would gravely bruise Whicher’s reputation. Many of the letters in the National Archives criticize Whicher personally,
for failing to make the pieces fit together, for a lack of subtlety in his investigations, even for originating from the wrong social class.

Dickens had done much, in journalism and fiction, to boost the image of the Detective Branch. But Jack Whicher’s failure and public humiliation at Road Hill House did even more to set back their cause. So, too, did a great scandal uncovered in 1877, when most of the detectives on the force were discovered to have been complicit in a betting racket they were supposed to be investigating.

Kate Summerscale points out that the damage done to the standing of the professional policeman in the 1860s and 1870s was transferred to their image in literature as well. All the great fictional detectives until the Second World War – Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot, Albert Campion – are amateurs or private investigators. And, indeed, the Detective Branch had not replaced the private sector – far from it. A boost to the private eye business was provided in 1857 when an Act was passed ‘to amend the Law relating to Divorce and Matrimonial Causes’. This made divorce a matter for the civil, rather than the ecclesiastical, courts, and – for the first time since the seventeenth-century Commonwealth period – marriage was made a contract between two citizens as well as a divine sacrament. Before this, if you’d wanted a divorce you either had to seek a religious annulment, or a Private Bill in Parliament. This had effectively limited divorce to the wealthy and well connected. In the year before the passing of the Act, there had been three requests for divorce. In the year after it, there were 300.

The so-called ‘Matrimonial Causes Act’ meant that marriages could now be dissolved on the production of ‘evidence’ of adultery,
and an army of private investigators would be kept busy hunting it down on behalf of wives with adulterous husbands. In Wilkie Collins’s novel
Armadale
(1866), the characters spend an awful lot of time spying upon each other, often using a paid inquiry agent, and exchange views illustrating that detection was still seen as a dirty business: ‘the Confidential Spy of modern time … There he sat – the necessary Detective attendant on the progress of our national civilisation … a man professionally ready on the merest suspicion (if the merest suspicion paid him) to get under our beds, and to look through gimlet-holes in our doors.’

Meanwhile, Whicher himself was fictionalised by Collins in his next novel,
The Moonstone
(1868), as Sergeant Cuff, the unsuccessful detective. Like Mr Whicher, Sergeant Cuff is a man of mystery who lacks the social status to mingle easily with the family he is investigating. Nobody knows what he is really thinking as he prattles on about his beloved hobby of growing roses. Like so many fictional detectives, Sergeant Cuff is given a hobby to cover up this essential blankness at his centre. Just as Inspector Morse is really little more than a hyper-intelligent and grumpy collection of hobbies (beer-drinking, opera and crossword puzzles), Sergeant Cuff’s central preoccupation is gardening. He is treated as a mere mechanic by the snooty household who have called him in. And yet, at the same time, they don’t understand him and fear the searching beam of his gaze. His eyes ‘of a steely light grey, had a disconcerting trick when they encountered [you] of looking as if they expected something more from you than you were aware of yourself’.

He is an ambiguous, incomprehensible, possibly dangerous character, and, as such, he reflects the status of the detective himself
in society in the 1860s. Although Jack Whicher is today the most celebrated detective of the Victorian age, it took him many years (and Constance’s eventual confession) to recover anything like the standing he had held before Road Hill House.

‘We look upon the detective officer as the magician of modern life.’

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

A RESPECTABLE FAMILY,
a country house, a limited number of suspects, a lower-class investigator lurching in from outside: the crime and setting of the Road Hill House Murder seemed like a real-life equivalent of a rather thrilling new form of literature: the ‘sensation’ novel. And as this new genre developed, details of the Road Hill House Murder would crop up time and time again in its plots.

In the 1860s, the ‘sensation’ novel would come to supersede both the ‘Newgate Novel’ and melodrama as the nation’s favourite form of crime story. Instead of featuring lowlifes and criminals, black and white passions and interventions by Providence, ‘sensation’ novels were set in ordinary domestic situations, often involving the middle- and upper-middle-class families who believed themselves to be too grand to be investigated by the police.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, one of the ‘sensation’ novel’s greatest authors, pinned down a definition of the type of murder that would now arouse maximum interest in the reading public. It has to be ‘uncommonly cruel, cowardly, and unmanly,’ she wrote, but, most importantly, it had to take place ‘in a respectable rank of life’. The implication that even the best families might have secrets was a pleasantly scandalous notion, and there was something more than a little shocking and improper about a good ‘sensation’ novel. ‘Indications of widespread corruption,’ the philosopher Henry Mansel called these books in 1863, ‘called into existence to satisfy the cravings of a diseased appetite.’

But perhaps the best known of the ‘sensation’ novelists was Wilkie Collins. Henry James later described Collins as ‘having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries that are at our own doors’. ‘Instead of the terrors of “Udolpho”,’ he continues, ‘we were treated to the terrors of the cheerful country-house and the busy London lodgings.’ Collins’s first success,
The Woman in White
(published in serial form, 1859–60), has many of those telltale sensational qualities: a country house, a conspiracy and a mystery solved by an amateurish alliance between the hero and a friend, first-time detectives both.

It was
The Moonstone
eight years later, however, that became his best-known work, and his first to feature a professional detective. Even though it lacks an actual murder,
The Moonstone
has nearly everything else one might require from a detective story: a substantial country property as a setting, a closed circle of suspects, a professional investigator, hidden clues, even a style of writing that reads like the presentation of a file of evidence to a court. The solution to the
puzzle will defeat all guesses, but it is in fact scrupulously signposted by clues that you will pick up on rereading. This is why T. S. Eliot made the claim that
The Moonstone
is ‘the first, the longest, and the best of the modern English detective novels’.

Wilkie Collins, opium addict and ‘sensation’ novelist.

It also has the special
domestic
quality that Henry James saw as the secret of Wilkie Collins’s success. The theft of a famous jewel, the Moonstone itself, took place in a country house in Yorkshire. The exact layout and decoration of each of its rooms is conjured up for us by Collins, down to the painted door and Indian cabinet in the young female heroine’s boudoir.

At the same time, though, the country house could have been in any county of England. It was the archetypal, comfortable, prosperous Victorian home. And the wellspring of the plot was a very everyday domestic detail. The hero of the story, Franklin Blake, wishes to give up cigar smoking, because the girl he loves dislikes the smell. Deprived of nicotine, he feels uncomfortable and cannot sleep. The solution to this minor inconvenience will come as no surprise: of course, it is that Victorian cure-all, laudanum. The opiate helps Franklin Blake to get through the night, and ultimately, it explains the whole mystery of
The Moonstone
.

Yet what people remember most from their first reading of
The Moonstone
is its addictive, page-turning, brain-teasing, feverish quality. ‘Sensation’ when applied to novels had two meanings. Firstly, the subject matter was ‘sensational’ in the sense of lurid and gripping. But the ‘sensation’ novel was also supposed to arouse real ‘sensations’ in the reader. The style was hard-hitting and jagged. ‘Sensation’ writers often employed characters’ first-person recollections, scraps of conversation, or their transcribed letters or diaries. Ideally, a ‘sensation’ novel will accelerate the heart, quicken the breath and constrict the blood vessels so the reader grows pale – experiences to be had today watching a horror film at the cinema.

The Moonstone
also has much in common with the case at Road Hill House. In both, a maidservant becomes the chief suspect, but the detective prefers to think it was the respectable daughter of the house. In both cases, a nightgown provides an important clue. Even the style of the nightgown is similarly important: in
The Moonstone
, it is notably plain, as a servant’s would be, and at
Road Hill House the item’s simplicity showed it belonged to one of the older, less loved children. And, in both cases, the detective was treated by the family as somebody rather like a tradesman. He still was not quite yet a professional, socially acceptable person in middle-class circles. Geraldine Jewsbury, a contemporary critic for the
Athenaeum
magazine, noted that the strength of
The Moonstone
was the ‘wonderful construction of the story’ rather than the ‘sordid detective element’.