'One of the most beautiful things that ever was done, perhaps,' said Field. 'Beautiful. Beau-ti-ful . . . It was a lovely idea!' The artistry of crime was a familiar conceit, most strikingly advanced in Thomas de Quincey's ironic essay 'On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts' (1827), but the artistry of the law enforcer was something new. In the early nineteenth century, the subject of a crime story was the daring, dashing crook; now he was more often the analytical detective.
Whicher, who was said to be Commissioner Mayne's favourite officer, was made an inspector in 1856, and his salary rose to more than £100. Charley Field had left the force to become a private investigator, and Whicher and Thornton were now in charge of the department. In 1858 Whicher caught the valet who had stolen Leonardo da Vinci's Virgin and Child from the Earl of Suffolk. In the same year he took part in the hunt for the Italian revolutionaries who had tried to assassinate Napoleon III in Paris – the terrorists had hatched their plot and built their bombs in London – and he led a reopened inquiry into the murder of a police constable in an Essex cornfield. In 1859 Whicher investigated whether the Reverend James Bonwell, rector of a church in east London, and his lover, a clergyman's daughter, had killed their illegitimate son. Bonwell had paid an undertaker eighteen shillings to bury the baby secretly by slipping him into someone else's coffin. The coroner's court cleared the couple of murder but censured them for their behaviour, and in July 1860 the Bishop of London sued Bonwell for misconduct.
A couple of months before he was dispatched to Road Hill, Whicher tracked down the perpetrators of a £12,000 jewellery heist near the Palais Royal, in Paris. The thieves, Emily Lawrence and James Pearce, used the trappings of gentility to work their cons in jewellers' shops, where Lawrence 'palmed' lockets and bracelets off the counters and into her handmuff (female thieves were well-equipped with places in which to stash their spoils – shawls, stoles, muffs, vast pockets in their crinolines). With his favourite sidekicks, Detective Sergeants 'Dolly' Williamson and 'Dick' Tanner, Whicher gained entry in April to the jewel thieves' house in Stoke Newington, just north of London. When he charged Emily Lawrence, he noticed her shuffle her hands, and asked to see what she was holding. A struggle ensued, during which her boyfriend threatened to smash Whicher's skull with a poker, and Lawrence let three diamond rings fall to the floor.
From his brief appearances in memoirs, newspapers and journals, Jack Whicher emerges as kind, laconic, alert to the comedy in his work. He was 'an excellent officer', said a fellow detective, 'quiet, shrewd and practical, never in a hurry, generally successful, and ready to take on any case'. He had a wry turn of phrase. If Whicher was certain of something, he was 'as sure as I'm alive'. 'That'll do!' he said when he found a clue. He was benevolent to his foes – he agreed to share a drink with one thief before taking him prisoner, and to spare him the handcuffs: 'I'm willing to behave as a man to you,' he said, 'if you are willing to behave as a man to me.' He was not above a practical joke: at Ascot in the late 1850s he and some fellow officers crept up on a sleeping inspector, who was known for the pride he took in his whiskers, and shaved the bushy black growth off his left cheek.
Yet Whicher was a reserved man, private about his past. At least one sadness attended him. On 15 April 1838 a woman who called herself Elizabeth Whicher, formerly Green, née Harding, had given birth in the borough of Lambeth to a boy named Jonathan Whicher. On the birth certificate she recorded the father's name as Jonathan Whicher, his occupation as police constable, their address as 4 Providence Row. She had been about four weeks pregnant when Jack Whicher applied to join the police force – it may have been the prospect of a child that prompted him to enlist.
Three years later, Whicher was living in the Hunter Place station house, Holborn, as a single man. Neither his son nor the child's mother seems to appear on a death register between 1838 and 1851, nor in any census taken that century. The certificate apart, there is no evidence that Jack Whicher ever had a child. Only the record of the boy's birth remains.
CHAPTER FIVE
EVERY CLUE SEEMS CUT OFF
16 July
On the morning of Monday, 16 July, Superintendent Foley drove Whicher to Road in a trap, taking the same lane by which Samuel Kent had returned to the village when he learnt that his son was dead. It was another dry day – no rain had fallen since Saville's murder. As the policemen rode further from the sooty town, the plains began to give way to hills, woods and pastures. There were sheep in the fields, dark birds in the trees: jackdaws, magpies, blackbirds, ravens and carrion crows. Smaller birds nested in the grass and gorse – olive chiffchaffs, chestnut-winged corncrakes – while swallows and swifts sailed overhead.
The village of Road sat smack on the border of two counties: though Road Hill House and the Reverend Peacock's Christ Church were in Wiltshire, most of the several hundred villagers lived down the hill in Somersetshire. In this part of England, people addressed each other as 'thee' and 'thou', and spoke with a guttural burr – a farmer was a 'varmer', the sun was the 'zun', a thread was a 'dread'. The district had a distinctive vocabulary: someone marked with smallpox scars, like Whicher, was 'pock-fredden'; to 'skummer' a piece of cloth was to foul it with dirty liquid; to 'buddle' a creature was to suffocate it in mud.
Road was a picturesque village, its cottages built of limestone cobbles or flat blocks of sandstone punched through with square windows. There were at least four pubs (the Red Lion, the George, the Cross Keys, the Bell), a brewery, two Anglican churches, a Baptist chapel, a school, a post office, bakers, grocers, butchers, blacksmiths, shoemakers, tailors, dressmakers, saddlers and so on. Trowbridge lay five miles north-east, and Frome, a Somersetshire wool town, the same distance south-west. A few of the villagers wove on handlooms in their cottages. Most worked in the fields or at one of the several mills in the neighbourhood. Shawford Mill was a specialist wool-dyeing works, with a water-wheel driven by the river Frome – among the local dyes were dark green, from privet; brown, from yew; and indigo, from woad. Next to Road Bridge was a mill devoted to 'fulling', a process of hammering wet wool until the individual threads vanished and the cloth became dense, tight, impossible to unravel.
The village was alight with speculation about Saville's death. His murder had aroused 'a spirit' among the people, said Joseph Stapleton in his book about the case, 'which it might be difficult to govern or suppress'. In the words of the Bath Chronicle:
There is a very strong feeling amongst the lower class of inhabitants in the village against Mr Kent's family, as well as against himself, and none of them can scarcely walk in the village without being insulted. The poor little innocent, the victim of this dark assassination, is spoken of generally throughout the village in terms of much endearment. He is represented as having been a sturdy, handsome little fellow, with a merry, laughing face, and curly, flaxen hair. The women speak of him with tears in their eyes, and . . . call to remembrance his many little engaging ways and innocent prattling.