The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective (38 page)

Syphilis is an affliction easy to suspect in retrospect, and difficult to prove - Isabella Beeton and her husband, Thomas Hardy and his wife, Beethoven, Schubert, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, van Gogh have all been identified as possible sufferers. The illness was widespread in the nineteenth century - there was then no cure - and was known as the 'Great Imitator' for its capacity to mimic other afflictions, taking on their colours like a chameleon. Since it was usually contracted through illicit sex, its victims hid its existence. Those with the money to buy confidential medical care often succeeded in keeping their secret.

Supposing Samuel caught syphilis in London, the symptoms might have forced his resignation from the dry-salters company and his flight to Devonshire in 1833: the disease manifests itself in painless chancres, usually on the genitals, for the first few weeks, but then produces a fever, aches, and an unsightly rash all over the body. Samuel may have needed to escape from view. If he had 'the pox', his desire for seclusion and secrecy is easier to understand, as is his apparent failure to find another job until 1836.

In the first few months, syphilis is wildly infectious - when Samuel had sex with his wife, the bacteria issuing from the chancres on his body are almost certain to have swarmed through a tiny cut or tear in hers. (These bacteria, which were identified under the microscope in 1905, are known as spirochetes, a name derived from the Greek for 'turning threads'.) The first Mrs Kent would unwittingly have passed the illness on to the babies in her womb. A foetus with congenital syphilis was likely to be miscarried or stillborn, and if it survived birth was typically puny, wizened, feeble, barely able to feed, and prone to die in infancy. Syphilis could have accounted for the several miscarriages that Mrs Kent suffered, as well as the four infants in succession that she saw die. Some children of syphilitic mothers showed no signs of the illness in their youth but grew up to develop notched teeth, bowed legs or other of the symptoms identified by Hutchinson. Perhaps Joseph Stapleton suspected syphilis when he alluded to how a man's 'intemperance' - alcoholic, financial or sexual - could damage his children.

If Samuel had syphilis, he was presumably one of the lucky majority of sufferers who after a year or two showed no obvious further symptoms. But his wife seems to have been one of the unlucky minority who after some years (typically between five and twenty) developed tertiary syphilis, a condition not understood until long after her death: this often manifested itself in personality disorders and then paresis, 'general paralysis of the insane', a steady, incurable deterioration of the brain. As well as explaining her mental illness and frailty, tertiary syphilis could account for her early death (at forty-four) from intestinal blockage - gastrointestinal problems were among the many possible symptoms, and death usually took place between fifteen and thirty years after the initial infection.

It is tempting to blame syphilis for the similarly early death of the second Mrs Kent, who became paralysed and almost blinded before dying in Wales at forty-six - her symptoms are characteristic of tabes dorsalis, also a manifestation of tertiary syphilis - but she could only have caught it from Samuel if he became re-infected. This was possible. Samuel would have thought himself cured once his chancres and rashes subsided. Mid-Victorians believed that the pox could not be caught twice - a myth that arose because re-infection was not accompanied by lesions or spots.

The evidence is circumstantial and inconclusive. Even the author of the Sydney letter was probably not sure. But if we hypothesise backwards from the Hutchinsonian teeth, the beginning of the story of the Kent family's tragedy may have been a sexual encounter between Saville's father and a London prostitute in the early 1830s. The clue may have ended in the almost invisible world by which William Saville-Kent was so enthralled, in a thread-like, silvery, twisting creature so tiny that it could be seen only through the glass of a microscope.

The connection between syphilis and diseases such as tabes dorsalis and paresis was not recognised until the late nineteenth century, so it is only with hindsight that we can suspect Samuel of causing his wives' ill-health. When he publicised the insanity of the first Mrs Kent, or the paralysis and blindness of the second, Samuel Kent had no idea that he might be leaving clues to the corruptions of his own body.

Strangely, the letter from Sydney in no way cleared up the implausible elements in Constance's confession of 1865, even though the book by John Rhode that provoked the letter had described that confession as 'frankly incredible' and so 'utterly unsatisfactory' that there were grounds for doubting the girl's guilt. 'Her psychology appears so amazing that almost any speculation based upon it is justified,' wrote Rhode. 'It is indeed possible that, in the intensively religious atmosphere of St Mary's Hospital, she conceived the idea of offering herself as a sacrifice, in order to clear away the cloud that rested upon her family.' The person best placed to solve a crime ought to be its perpetrator. As
The Times
observed on 28 August 1865: 'The previous failure of all investigation had shown that the mysteries of the murder could never be unravelled but by the person who had committed it.' Constance had proved an imperfect detective, in her confessions and in the anonymous letter in which she seemed to bare her soul: her solution was flawed. Did this mean she was not the murderer?

The holes in her story left the way open for other theories about the murder, which were formulated in private from the start, and in public once all the main players in the case had died. Long before these, Whicher himself had a theory that could account for the gaps in Constance's evidence. It was never made public, but was outlined in his confidential reports to Sir Richard Mayne.

In his first surviving report, Whicher noted that Constance 'was the only person who slept alone except her Brother, also home for his holidays (and who I have some suspicion assisted in the murder but at present not sufficient evidence to apprehend him)'. Back in London, after Constance had been bailed, Whicher observed that both Constance and William had come home a fortnight before the murder: 'Supposing Miss Constance to be the guilty party and to have had an accomplice, that accomplice in my opinion would in all probability be her brother "William" . . . judging from the close intimacy existing between the two.' Whicher added to this report:

as far as I am able to form an opinion that the murder was committed either by Miss Constance alone while in a fit of insanity or by her and her brother William from motives of spite and jealousy entertained towards the younger children and their parents, and I am strongly impressed with the latter opinion judging from the sympathy existing between the two, the fact of their sleeping in rooms alone, and especially the dejected state of the Boy both before and after his sister's arrest, and I think there would not have been much difficulty for the Father or some of the relatives to have obtained a confession from him while his sister was in Prison, but under the peculiar circumstances of the case I could not advise such a course.

It would seem natural for William to be 'dejected' after the death of his brother; for Whicher to note it, the form this dejection took must have been peculiar - a turning inwards, a curdling guilt or fear. Whicher made clear the alternatives he discerned: either Constance was crazy, and killed Saville alone; or she was sane, and killed Saville with William's help. From the start, Whicher suspected that William and Constance had planned and carried out the killing together. By the time he left Road, he was almost certain of it.

Whicher believed that Constance, as the older, odder and more determined of the two, had instigated the murder plot, but he believed she had done so on her brother's behalf and with his help. William had the clearer motive for murder: Saville had supplanted him in his parents' affections, and his father often told him that he was inferior to the younger boy. If both he and Constance had plotted to kill Saville, the fact that the plan came to fruition was less surprising: the two children together, isolated and embittered, may have inhabited a fantasy world secured by the other's belief, both imagining that they were acting in defence of each other and of their dead mother. Their resolve would have been strengthened by the determination not to let one another down.

Samuel Kent may have encouraged the police to suspect Constance in order to shield his son. He may have been protecting William when he told Stapleton the story of the children's escape to Bath, twisting the narrative to suggest the boy's sensitivity and the girl's unshakeable nerve. At the time of the investigation, William was often dismissed as a suspect on account of his timidity. Yet Whicher believed that he was capable of taking part in a murder. The press reports of the Bath escapade suggested that the boy had a strong-willed, inventive nature, and his later life bore this out.

Throughout the investigation into Saville's murder many had argued that two people must have participated in the crime. If William helped Constance, this would explain how the bedclothes had been smoothed down when Saville was taken out of the nursery, how Saville was kept hushed as the windows and doors were negotiated, how the evidence was destroyed afterwards. Constance may have mentioned only the razor in her confession because she herself used only a razor, while William wielded the knife. The letter from Sydney avoided any reference to the murder itself; perhaps this was because there was no explanation that could fail to implicate her accomplice.

Several of the stories that drew on the case seem haunted with the possibility that Constance and William were still hiding something. In
The Moonstone
, the heroine protects the man she loves by allowing herself to be a suspect. The runaway brother and sister in
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
share a dark history. The enigma of
The Turn of the Screw
lies in the silence of two children, a brother and sister locked together by a secret.
*

Whether William had been her accomplice or simply her confidant, Constance worked at all times to shelter him. As soon as she confessed, she insisted that she had committed the crime 'alone and unaided'. She told her lawyer that she refused to plead insanity because she wanted to protect William, and she tailored her statements about the murder and its motive to the same end. In none of them did she mention him. Though she had complained to her schoolfriends about how he was treated by Samuel and Mary - the humiliating comparisons to Saville, the way he was made to push a perambulator around the village - she made no reference to this in 1865. She said of her father and stepmother, 'I have never had any ill will towards either of them on account of their behaviour to me,' carefully avoiding the ill will she might bear them on anyone else's account. The answer to the mystery of Saville's murder might lie in Constance's silence after all; specifically, her silence about the brother she loved.

Constance gave herself up in the year before William's twenty-first birthday, when he was due to inherit a PS1,000 bequest from their mother. He hoped to use the money to fund a career in science, but was still hampered by the uncertainty and suspicion surrounding the family. Rather than both of them live under the cloud of the murder, Constance chose to gather the darkness to herself. Her act of atonement liberated William, made his future possible.

AFTERWORD

The third chapter of Joseph Stapleton's book on the Road Hill murder is devoted to the post-mortem examination of Saville Kent's body. Among the doctor's many observations about the corpse is a description, in characteristically florid prose, of two wounds on the boy's left hand.

But upon the hand - that left hand, that beautifully chiselled hand, hanging lifeless from a body that might, even in its mutilation, furnish a study and a model for a sculptor - there are two small cuts - one almost down to the bone; the other just a scratch - upon the knuckle of the forefinger. How came they there?

Stapleton's explanation for these injuries briefly, violently, pulls Saville back into view. From the nature and position of the wounds the surgeon deduces that the child woke just before he was killed, and raised his left hand to fend off the knife striking at his throat; the knife sliced into his knuckle; he lifted his hand a second time, more feebly, and the blade grazed his finger as it cut into his neck.

The image makes Saville suddenly present: he wakes to see his killer and to see his death descend on him. When I read Stapleton's words I was reminded, with a jolt, that the boy lived. In unravelling the story of his murder, I had forgotten him.

Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional - to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death.

NOTES

PROLOGUE

xix
On Sunday, 15
July 1860 . . . for is.6d.
From Whicher's expenses claims in the Metropolitan Police files at the National Archives - MEPO 3/61.

xix
The day was warm. . . into the seventies.
Weather reports in the July, August and September 1860 issues of
The Gentleman's Magazine.

xix
At this terminus in 1856 . . . excelled at untangling.
From reports in
The Times,
7 & 12 April 1856; and 3, 4 & 12 May 1858.

xx
Dickens reported that 'in a glance' . . . 'chronicled nowhere'. In 'A Detective Police Party', parts one and two, House-hold Words, 27 July 1850 and 10 August 1850.