288 It emerged in the 1950s . . . under the name Emilie King. From Saint – with Red Hands? (1954) by Yseult Bridges. Bridges said that she obtained the information first-hand, from a woman who was twenty-two when she met Constance in 1885. When Bridges wrote her book, the story of what subsequently became of Constance was unknown.
288 In the 1970s . . . Miss Kaye died. Constance's Australian exile was disclosed in Cruelly Murdered (1979) by Bernard Taylor.
290 In her will . . . the first Mrs Kent. In this will, written in 1926, Constance bequeathed the nurses' home she had established to a fellow nurse, Hilda Lord, and left her money to the Joseph Fels Fund. Fels (1853–1914) was a Jewish-American soap magnate, social reformer and philanthropist who established model communities for the unemployed and for craftsmen in England and the US. He believed that taxation should be based solely on land ownership. The account of the discovery of the family portraits left to Olive is from correspondence in Bernard Taylor's archive.
CHAPTER 20
291 In 1928. . .the origins of his death. Rhode quoted and discussed this letter in an essay in The Anatomy of Murder: Famous Crimes Critically Considered by Members of the Detection Club (1936). The original letter was destroyed by enemy action in the Second World War, but Rhode's typed version survived.
294 At boarding school. . . gas leak is a convincing detail.) The gas leak was mentioned in the Somerset and Wilts Journal in 1865. Constance was boarding at a school in Bath, according to the newspaper, when 'being offended with her teacher, she deliberately turned on the gas throughout the house, making no secret of the fact that her intention was to cause an explosion'.
294 The letter claimed that Constance read Darwin. This was plausible, since The Origin of Species received a huge amount of attention when it was published in 1859. There was an impossibility in the letter, though – the author claimed that the young Constance used to shock people by referring to 'La Divine Sara' Bernhardt, but the actress – who was born in the same year as Constance – did not become famous until the 1870s.
295 Like the heroine . . . absorbed by the past. In an essay of 1949 the psychoanalyst Geraldine Pederson-Krag suggested that the murder in a detective novel is a version of the 'primal scene', in which a child witnesses or imagines his or her parents having sexual intercourse, and interprets the act as violent. The victim represents one of the parents, the clues represent the nocturnal sounds, stains and jokes that the child observed but only dimly understood. The reader of a detective novel, says Pederson-Krag, satisfies his or her infantile curiosity by identifying with the detective and thus 'redressing completely the helpless inadequacy and anxious guilt unconsciously remembered from childhood'. See 'Detective Stories and the Primal Scene' in Psychoanalytic Quarterly 18. In 1957 the psychologist Charles Rycroft argued that the reader was not only the detective but also the murderer, playing out hostile feelings towards the parent. See 'A Detective Story' in Psychoanalytic Quarterly 26. These approaches are discussed in Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel – a History (1972) by Julian Symons.
296 The letter from Sydney threw out . . . corruptions of his own body. Information on syphilis from Pox: Genius, Madness and the Mysteries of Syphilis (2004) by Deborah Hayden, and from Alastair Barkley, a consultant dermatologist in London.
298 the book by John Rhode. The Case of Constance Kent (1928).
299 The person best placed to solve a crime . . . its perpetrator. In Sophocles' Oedipus the King, sometimes cited as the original detective story, Oedipus is both the murderer and the detective; he commits and he solves the crimes. 'In any investigation, the real detective is the suspect,' wrote John Burnside in The Dumb House (1997). 'He is the one who provides the clues, he is the one who gives himself away.'
299 The holes in her story left the way open . . . the main players in the case had died. In Murder and its Motives (1924) Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse accepted Constance's guilt but lamented that the girl was born into an age unable to understand and accommodate her complex psychology. In The Rebel Earl and Other Studies (1926) William Roughead regretted that the alienists had not recognised that Constance had 'a mind diseased'. In Saint – with Red Hands? (1954) Yseult Bridges argued that the true killers were Samuel Kent and Elizabeth Gough, and that Constance confessed in order to protect them. In Victorian Murderesses (1977) Mary S. Hartman agreed that Constance probably made a false confession to conceal her father's guilt. In Cruelly Murdered (1979) Bernard Taylor proposed that Constance killed Saville, but that Samuel, who was having an affair with Gough, mutilated the body to conceal his daughter's crime and his own misdemeanour.
Among the fictional versions of the story is a scene in the British horror film Dead of Night (1945), in which a girl encounters the ghost of Saville Kent in a remote corner of a country house – he speaks of Constance's unkindness to him. Two years later Mary Hayley Bell's play Angel, directed for the London stage by her husband, Sir John Mills, so confused audiences with its sympathy for Constance that it closed within weeks and almost ended Bell's career as a playwright. Eleanor Hibbert, who as Jean Plaidy produced historical novels, fictionalised the case in Such Bitter Business (1953), under the pseudonym Elbur Ford. Two characters in William Trevor's Other People's Worlds (1980) become obsessed by the Road Hill murder, with horrible results. Francis King's Act of Darkness (1983) set the story in colonial 1930s India, and had the boy accidentally killed by his sister and his nursemaid when he surprises them in a lesbian embrace. James Friel's Taking the Veil (1989) placed the case in 1930s Manchester, and had the boy killed by his father and his aunt-cum-nursemaid after he witnesses them having sex; his teenage half-sister mutilates the body and makes a false confession of murder to protect the father, who has sexually violated her. In 2003 Wendy Walker compressed the story into a book-length poem, Blue Fire (as yet unpublished), which used one word from each line of Stapleton's The Great Crime of 1860.
299 his confidential reports to Sir Richard Mayne. In MEPO 3/61.
AFTERWORD
303 Stapleton's explanation . . . cut into his neck. Joshua Parsons, who was in charge of the post-mortem, disagreed with this interpretation of the cuts to Saville's finger. The incisions had not bled, he told the magistrates' court on 4 October 1860, which meant that they must have been made after death, probably by accident. In any case, he said, he thought the cuts were on the right hand, not the left. His reading of the body supported the theory that the child was suffocated, a finding that Stapleton was determined to disprove. The doctors' dispute returns Saville to the realm of riddle and debate. The image of the live child dims.
303 'The detective story . . . a happy ending.' In a letter of 2 June 1949 to James Sandoe. From The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Non-Fiction, 1909–1959 (2000), edited by Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane. Chandler argued in the same letter that a detective story and a love story could never be combined, because the detective story was 'incapable of love'.