'I say that to drag this young lady from her home in such a way and at such a time, when her heart was already harrowed by the death of her dear little brother, is quite sufficient to excite in her favour the sympathy of every man in the county, and not only that, but every man in this land of unbiased mind, who has heard – and there are few who have not heard – of this horrible murder.'
At this point both Samuel and Constance Kent succumbed to tears, and hid their faces in their hands. Edlin continued:
'The steps you have taken will be such as to ruin her for life – every hope is gone with regard to this young girl . . . And where is the evidence? The one fact – and I am ashamed in this land of liberty and justice to refer to it – is the suspicion of Mr Whicher, a man eager in the pursuit of the murderer, and anxious for the reward that has been offered . . . I do not mean to find fault with Mr Whicher unnecessarily; but I think in the present instance, his professional eagerness in the pursuit of the criminal has led him to take a most unprecedented course to prove a motive; and I cannot help alluding to the meanness – I say the indelible meanness, I may say the discredit, and I was about to say the disgrace, but I do not wish to say anything that shall leave an unfavourable impression hereafter; – but I will say the ineffable discredit with which he has hunted up two schoolfellows and brought them here to give the evidence we had heard. Let the responsibility and disgrace of such a proceeding rest upon those who have brought the witnesses here! . . . It seems to me that he has allowed himself to be strangely led away in this matter. He was baffled, and annoyed by not finding a clue, and he has caught at that which was no clue at all.'
The barrister concluded: 'A more unjust, a more improper, a more improbable case, having regard to the facts elicited in evidence, was never brought before any court of justice in any place, as far as I know, upon a charge of this serious nature, and seeking, as it does, to fix that charge upon a young lady in the position of life of Miss Constance Kent.'
Edlin's speech was much interrupted by applause from the audience. He ended shortly before 7 p.m. The magistrates conferred, and when the spectators were let back into the hall Ludlow announced that Constance was free to go, on condition that her father put up £200, as a guarantee that she would appear in court again if required.
Constance left the Temperance Hall, escorted by William Dunn. The crowd outside fell back to let them pass.
When Constance reached Road Hill House, reported the Western Daily Press, 'her sisters and parents clasped her in the most passionate and exciting manner, embracing her most tenderly, and the sobbing and weeping and embraces were continued for a considerable time. At length, however, it subsided, and since then the young lady has presented a very subdued and contemplative demeanour.' She resumed her silence.
By any standards, Whicher's case had been weak. There were several practical reasons for his failure: he was called to the murder scene late, was thwarted by incompetent and defensive local police officers, was hurried into making an arrest, and was poorly represented in court – as he stressed in his report to Mayne, 'there was no professional man to conduct the case for the prosecution'. Samuel Kent, who in normal circumstances would have been expected to arrange the prosecution of the suspected murderer of his son, was hardly going to fund an attack on his daughter. Whicher felt sure that a professional lawyer could have better explained the theory of the missing nightdress, and persuaded Emma Moody to repeat what she had told him about Constance's dislike of Saville; these two things might have made all the difference. The magistrates did not need to decide on Constance's guilt, after all, but only whether there was enough evidence to justify sending her for trial.
What finally swung things against Whicher that day was Edlin's speech, his depiction of the detective as vulgar, greedy, rapacious in his destruction of a young woman's life. There was a sexual undertone, a suggestion that the policeman was a clumsy, lowerclass despoiler of a virginal innocent. The public were drawn to Edlin's analysis. Though the villagers of Road had been ready to believe that Samuel Kent's strange, unhappy adolescent children had killed their little brother, most Englishmen and women dismissed the idea as grotesque. It was almost inconceivable that a respectable girl could be possessed of enough fury and emotion to kill, and enough cool to cover it. The public preferred to believe in the detective's villainy, to attribute the moral pollution to him.
Jack Whicher's investigation had let light into the closed-up house, thrown the windows open to the air; but in doing so it had exposed the family to the prurient imaginings of the outside world. There was a necessary grubbiness to the police procedures: breasts were measured, nightclothes examined for marks of sweat and blood, indelicate questions asked of nice young ladies. In Bleak House, Dickens imagines the feelings of Sir Leicester Dedlock when his house is searched: 'the noble house, the pictures of his forefathers, strangers defacing them, officers of police coarsely handling his most precious heirlooms, thousands of fingers pointing at him, thousands of faces sneering at him'. While the crime fiction of the 1830s and 1840s had inhabited the rookeries of London, sensational crime in the 1850s had begun to invade the middle-class home, in fiction and in fact. 'Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families,' says Bucket. 'Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families . . . you have no idea . . . what games goes on.'
During Whicher's inquiries the Frome Times made 'an indignant protest against the conduct of some of the representatives of the press. We have been informed on reliable authority that one person penetrated into the house in the guise of a detective, – while another had the audacity to force himself into the presence of Mr Kent, and to ask of him the particulars of the murder of his son! In our opinion, this person's audacity and hard-heartedness can scarcely be equalled by the villain who perpetrated the dreadful crime.' This rhetoric, also deployed by Edlin, was made possible by the mid-Victorian sensitivity to 'exposure', to scandal and loss of privacy. The inquiries into a middle-class home, by the press and above all by the detectives, were felt as a series of assaults. Exposure could destroy, as murder made clear – when the lungs, airways, arteries, heart were suddenly opened to the air, they collapsed. Stapleton described Saville's death in these terms: the inhabitant of the 'house of life' had been 'rudely driven out by an unauthorised and violent intruder'.
The word 'detect' stemmed from the Latin 'de-tegere' or 'unroof', and the original figure of the detective was the lame devil Asmodeus, 'the prince of demons', who took the roofs off houses to spy on the lives inside. 'The Devil Asmodeus is the Devil of Observation', explained the French novelist Jules Janin. In his book about the Road Hill murder, Stapleton used the figure of Asmodeus, 'peering into the privacies' of the Kent family house, to embody the public fascination with the case.
'If every room of a house were seen into by a secret watcher,' wrote the Scottish detective McLevy in 1861, 'it would be a show-box even more wonderful than a travelling exhibition.' A plainclothes police officer was just such a secret watcher, a man licensed to pry. The detective hero might at any moment turn to reveal his grinning double, the voyeur.