The newspapermen who had been covering the case since July were flabbergasted by Saunders' inquiry. The reporter from the Morning Star, astounded at the 'absurd proceedings' of the 'crackbrained boggler', said he was caught between 'wonder at [Saunders'] audacity and contempt for his folly'. The Bristol Mercury described the magistrate as 'monomaniacal'. Saunders was an unintentional satirist, a caricature of the amateur detective who saw meaning in every banality, every trivial circumstance, who believed that he alone could unravel a mystery that had foxed the professionals. He felt a right to spy, a duty to speculate. He had a keen 'sense of the profound importance of immaterial statements', noticed the Somerset and Wilts Journal, and paid great respect to the letters he received from the public: 'each contains hints of great importance'. He read out several of these letters in court, including one from a fellow barrister who observed: 'You are an ill-conditioned meddling vain old idiot.'
Yet this inquiry uncovered one significant fact. A letter from James Watts, a police sergeant of Frome, prompted Saunders to examine several officers about a discovery the police had made at Road Hill House on the day of the murder, and then concealed. In the Temperance Hall on Thursday, 8 November, he questioned PC Alfred Urch on the matter, and on Friday he took evidence from Sergeant James Watts and Superintendent Foley.
At about five p.m. on 30 June, the audience heard, Watts had found a woman's shift, wrapped in newspaper, in the kitchen boiler hole, the fire-hole beneath the hotplate. Urch and PC Dallimore saw it too: 'It was dry, sir,' said Urch to Saunders, 'but very dirty . . . as if it had been worn a long time . . . It had some blood about it . . . I did not touch it myself. Sergeant Watts unfolded it, looked at it, and carried it to the coach house.' Was it coarse or fine, Saunders asked. 'I should think, sir, it was one of the servants' . . . We remarked, two or three of us who were there, that it was a small one.'
A shift was a linen garment worn under a dress in the day, or by itself at night. It could fall to the knee, the shin or the ankle; its sleeves were usually short, and its style plain. A nightdress was typically a fuller garment that reached to the floor, with sleeves to the wrists, strips of lace or embroidery at the collar, cuffs or hem. There was a borderland, where a shift and a simple nightdress might be confused. It was at least possible that the item in the boiler hole was the missing nightdress.
'Was it a night-shift or a day-shift?' Saunders asked Urch, to laughter from the audience.
'Well, sir, it was a shift.'
'Have you a sufficient knowledge of shifts?' At this the onlookers howled with merriment. 'Silence!' cried Saunders. 'Silence!'
Watts examined the shift in the coach house. It was 'very bloody', he said. 'It was dry then, but I should not think the stains had been on it a long time . . . Some of the blood was on the front and some on the back. I wrapped up the shift again, and as I was coming out I saw Mr Kent just outside the stable-door in the yard. He asked me what I had found, and said he must have it seen, and that Dr Parsons must see it. I did not let Mr Kent see it, but handed it over to Mr Foley.'
Foley immediately set to concealing the discovery of the shift. He 'shuddered', he explained to the court, 'to think the man who found it was so foolish as to expose it'. He was sure that the stains were innocent, and that the shift had been hidden, in shame, by a servant. A medical man – Stapleton – had confirmed his own view that the stains had 'natural causes' (that is, they were marks of menstrual blood).
Saunders asked Foley: 'Did he [Stapleton] look at it with a microscope?'
Foley replied indignantly: 'No, I should think he did not!'
The Superintendent had then given the garment to PC Dallimore, who took it back to the Stallard Street police station.
In September Watts had run into Dallimore at the Road Hill cheese and cattle fair, and asked what had become of the shift. Dallimore told him that he had returned the 'shimmy' (an Anglicisation of 'chemise') to the kitchen on Monday, the day of the inquest. He planned to put it back in the boiler hole but was surprised by the cook entering the scullery, and so thrust it down the side of the boiler. Straight afterwards the nursemaid, just back from walking the two little girls, suggested he search the roof above the kitchen, and he did so – he had to clamber through a window overgrown with ivy. When he returned to the kitchen half an hour later the shift had vanished, presumably retrieved by its owner.
If the distinction between types of shift was bewildering territory for the police officers, so were the distinctions between types of blood. The ways of identifying menstrual blood and female underwear were hazy, all the more so when the items to be examined were whisked away so quickly. Much of the confusion about the underclothes and their stains was caused by embarrassment.
On the Thursday that the boiler-hole story came out, by strange chance, the private investigator Ignatius Pollaky arrived in Road to sit in on Saunders' proceedings. Pollaky, a Hungarian, was 'superintendent' of an inquiry office run by Charley Field, friend to Charles Dickens and Jack Whicher, who had retired from the Metropolitan Police in 1852. Private inquiry agents, as they were known, were a new breed, some of them retired detective officers such as Field. (Field briefly had his police pension withdrawn in the 1850s for improperly continuing to use his former title, Detective-Inspector, in his private practice.) The agents' main business was the sleazy stuff of the divorce court – divorce had been legalised in 1858, but proof of adultery was required if a man was to rid himself of his wife; a woman needed to prove cruelty to end a marriage.
'The mysterious Mr Pollaky', as The Times described him, at first refused to speak to Saunders or to the police. Over the weekend he was seen in Bath and Bradford. The next week he visited Frome, Westbury and Warminster, made a trip back to London (probably to report his findings and take further instructions) and then returned to Road. 'There is good reason for believing that his direct object is not the detection of the murderer,' said the Bristol Daily Post; rather, this paper's reporter gathered, the agent was there to keep an eye on Saunders. Other newspapers confirmed this: his job was to intimidate rather than to investigate. Perhaps Field sent Pollaky down to Road as a favour to Whicher, whose findings Saunders was tending to undermine. Pollaky took notes whenever Saunders made particularly eccentric statements, and he succeeded in unnerving the magistrate. The Frome Times reported that 'we were informed that Mr Saunders had an interview with that gentleman . . . and asked if it were true that his mission was to collect evidence for a lunatico inquirendo against him. We understand that Mr Pollaky declined to reply.' Now even the investigators of the Road Hill murder feared accusations of insanity. Saunders' inquiry was suspended on 15 November.
Inadvertently, Saunders had furthered Whicher's case. When a report about the bloody shift appeared in The Times, Whicher sent Sir Richard Mayne a memorandum drawing his attention to the news item. 'Seen,' Mayne wrote on the memo the next day.
There was a danger that the investigations into the murder were now doing more to conceal than to reveal the solution. 'The consciences of those who may be privy to the secret are not likely to have become more sensitive or their invention less fertile in the course of the numerous proceedings which have already taken place,' observed The Times. 'Every futile investigation is a gain to the guilty party; it shows him what gaps should be stopped and what contradictions avoided.' The writer worried about the lack of method in detective work – its reliance on imagination, intuition, guesswork – and yearned for a more dispassionate procedure: 'it is well known that detectives begin by assuming the guilt of some one, and then try how far their hypothesis will fit the circumstances. There is still room for the application of a more scientific process, and it may be that the facts, more calmly and impartially interrogated, will tell their own story.' The Saturday Review echoed this, calling for a 'more severe Baconian process' of deduction from empirical facts: rather than start with a theory, the detective should simply make 'a rigid, impartial, and unimpassioned registration of phenomena'. The perfect detective, it seemed, was not so much a scientist as a machine.