In the wake of the Road Hill murder, detectives were, in Robert Audley's words, 'stained with vile associations, and unfit company for honest gentlemen'. Audley was disgusted at the detective persona he himself had adopted: 'His generous nature revolted at the office into which he had found himself drawn – the office of spy, the collector of damning facts that led on to horrible deductions . . . onward upon the loathsome path – the crooked by-way of watchfulness and suspicion.'
In the feverish figure of Robert Audley, compelled to seek what he fears, 'sensation' and 'detectivism' were fused. The detective could be understood as a sensation-addict himself, hungry for the shudder and thrill of crime. James McLevy, the Edinburgh detective whose two volumes of memoirs were bestsellers in 1861, confessed to the unsettling excitement of his work. He depicted his desire to retrieve stolen goods as an animal urge, like the thief's desire to steaclass="underline" 'It is scarcely possible to imagine a detective's feelings on pulling out of a mysterious bag the very things he wants. Even the robber, when his fingers are all of a quiver in the rapid clutch of a diamond necklace, feels no greater delight than we do when we retract that watch from the same fingers now closed with a nervous grasp.' McLevy said that he was drawn to danger, to mystery, to 'places where secret things have been done'. The yearning he felt for a 'wanted' man was physicaclass="underline" 'every look . . . seemed to send a back energy down through my arm, imparting something like a crave in the fingers to lay hold of him'. With a creepy eroticism, McLevy compared capturing a villain to seizing a lover: 'what a glorious grip that was I got of him . . . I would not have exchanged it for the touch of a bride's hand, with the marriage ring upon her finger . . . such was my weakness, that when I saw Thomson struggling ineffectually in the grasp of the officer, one whom I had so often sighed for in secret, and eyed in openness . . . I absolutely burned to embrace the dauntless leader of the gang.' McLevy portrayed himself as a solitary man whose energies were diverted and his emotions warped by his obsession with the cases he worked on, the crooks he craved. Like Jack Whicher, and most fictional detectives since, he was unmarried, his solitude the price of his excellence.
The press stepped up its assaults on Whicher and his colleagues. 'The modern detective is generally at fault,' stated the Dublin Review – the Road Hill case had 'justly shaken' public confidence in his 'sagacity and long-headed-ness . . . The detective system in this country is essentially low and mean.' The word 'clueless' was first recorded in 1862. Reynolds magazine compared the Metropolitan Police to 'a cowardly and clumsy giant, who . . . wreaks all the meanness and malignity of his nature on every feeble and helpless creature who comes in his way'. There were echoes here of the 'meanness' Whicher showed in arresting the helpless Constance Kent. A parody in Punch in 1863 referred to 'Inspector Watcher' of the 'Defective Police'. In the Saturday Review, James Fitzjames Stephen attacked the romantic presentation of police in fiction – 'this detective worship' – arguing that in reality they were useless at solving middle-class crimes.
In the summer of 1863 Samuel and William Kent visited Constance in Dinan, and on 10 August she returned to England to become a paying boarder at St Mary's Home in Brighton. This establishment, founded by the Reverend Arthur Douglas Wagner in 1855, was the closest thing to a convent that the Church of England could offer. A band of novice nuns, led by a Lady Superior, ran a lying-in hospital for unmarried mothers, assisted by about thirty penitents. Wagner was a disciple of Edmund Pusey, a leader of the nineteenth-century Tractarian or Oxford Movement that advocated a revival of vestments, incense, candles and sacramental confession in the Anglican Church. By joining the community that Wagner had founded at St Mary's, Constance was replacing her natural family with a religious family, freeing herself of the ties of blood. Having adopted the French spelling of her middle name, she was known as Emilie Kent.
In London, Jack Whicher's life had emptied out. There was little sign of the former 'prince of detectives' in the newspapers. His friend Detective-Inspector Stephen Thornton dropped dead of apoplexy at his house in Lambeth in September 1861, aged fifty-eight, leaving the way clear for Dolly Williamson to be promoted Inspector in October. Williamson was put in charge of the department.
After Kingswood, Whicher only once appears in the Metropolitan Police files on important cases. In September 1862 he and a colleague, Superintendent Walker, were sent to Warsaw at the request of the Russian rulers of the city to give advice on how to set up a detective service. The Russians were worried about the Polish nationalist insurgents, who had made assassination attempts on the Tsar's family. 'Everything seems very quiet,' the English officers reported from the Hotel Europe on 8 September, 'and no further attempts at assassination have been made, altho' . . . the government seems to be in constant apprehension. Our mission here is being kept entirely secret . . . as our personal safety might be endangered by a wrong construction being placed on the object of our visit.' Afterwards the Russians were polite about their guests – 'the two Officers . . . have entirely satisfied his Highness's expectations by the justice and sagacity of their remarks' – but did not take up their suggestions. In March 1863, when Russian soldiers were shooting insurgents in Warsaw, questions were asked in the House of Commons about the ethics of the detectives' secret mission.
On 18 March 1864 Jack Whicher left the Metropolitan Police, aged forty-nine, with an annual pension of £133.6s.8d. He returned to his rooms in Holywell Street, Pimlico. On his discharge papers he described his marital state as single and his next of kin as William Wort, a Wiltshire coach proprietor who in 1860 had married one of the detective's nieces, Mary Ann. The discharge papers gave the reason for Whicher's early retirement as 'congestion of the brain'. This diagnosis was applied to all sorts of conditions, such as epilepsy, anxiety, vascular dementia. An essay of 1866 described the symptoms as throbbing headaches, a flushed, swollen face and bloodshot eyes, and argued that its cause was 'protracted mental tension'. It was as if Whicher's thoughts had run too obsessively on the conundrum of the Road Hill murder and his mind had become as 'over-heated' as Robert Audley's. Perhaps congestion of the brain was what happened when the detective instinct went unanswered, when the hunger for resolution was not satisfied, when the truth could not be disentangled from the seeming.
'Nothing in the world is hidden for ever,' wrote Wilkie Collins in No Name (1862). 'Sand turns traitor, and betrays the footstep that has passed over it; water gives back to the tell-tale surface the body that has been drowned . . . Hate breaks its prison-secrecy in the thoughts, through the doorway of the eyes . . . Look where we will, the inevitable law of revelation is one of the laws of nature: the lasting preservation of a secret is a miracle which the world has never yet seen.'
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
BETTER SHE BE MAD
April–June 1865
On Tuesday, 25 April 1865 Constance Kent, now twenty-one, took the train from Brighton to Victoria station, under a fierce sun, and then a cab to Bow Street magistrates' court, Covent Garden. She was accompanied by the Reverend Wagner, in his vicar's garb, and by Katharine Gream, the Lady Superior of St Mary's, in full regalia (a long black cloak with a high white frill). Constance wore a loose veil. She appeared 'pale and sorrowful', said the Daily Telegraph, 'but perfectly composed'. When she reached the court shortly before four o'clock, she told the officials inside that she had come to confess to a murder.