Kate Summerscale by The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder & the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

Author:The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder & the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, History, General
ISBN: 9780802717429
Publisher: Walker & Company
Published: 2009-02-17T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

WOMEN! HOLD YOUR TONGUES!

November–December 1860

In the first, cold days of November, the strangest inquiry yet opened at the Temperance Hall. Thomas Saunders, a barrister and magistrate of Bradford-upon-Avon, Wiltshire, had become convinced that the villagers of Road were in possession of important information about the murder, and he took it upon himself to elicit it from them. Though he was acting entirely on his own initiative, his status as a Wiltshire magistrate gave him an apparent authority, and no one at first challenged his right to investigate the case.

From 3 November onwards, Saunders summoned an array of local people to offer their thoughts and observations, some of it illuminating about the life of the village and of Road Hill House, but nearly all of it utterly irrelevant to the murder. This was the stuff that Whicher had sifted through during his fortnight in Road, the huge bank of rumour and peripheral detail that a police investigation threw up, and that usually never reached the public. Saunders aired these bits and bobs in a distinctly haphazard fashion: 'evidence, if evidence it may be called, was adduced in a most singular and undignified manner', said the Bristol Daily Post. 'On several occasions those present were at no pains to conceal the laughter which the proceedings were calculated to give rise to, and all throughout they seemed to consider that the whole affair was got up for their special amusement, rather than for the elucidation of a mysterious and terrible crime.'

The next two weeks in Road resembled a comic interlude in a tragic play, with Saunders as the buffoon who stumbled onstage to mangle and misunderstand all that had preceded him. He opened and closed the proceedings at whim, forgot the witnesses' names and puffed himself up with mysterious allusions to 'the secrets within my breast', while wandering in and out of the Temperance Hall with a bottle of liquid that according to the Bristol Daily Post 'had very much the appearance of brandy'. Saunders said it was medicine to treat a cold he had caught from a window draught on the premises (he castigated the hall's caretaker, Charles Stokes, for the poor insulation). The magistrate gulped at his potion during the proceedings, and nibbled on biscuits. He frequently interrupted his witnesses by issuing demands that squalling babies be removed from the hall or women silenced: 'Women! Hold your tongues!'

A typical witness was Mrs Quance, an old lady who lived in the cottages by Road Hill House. On Tuesday Saunders examined her about a rumour that she had said that her husband, who worked in the mill at Tellisford, saw Samuel Kent in a field at 5 a.m. on 30 June. She flatly denied it, complaining that the police had already questioned her on the matter.

'I think it is done too clever to be found out,' she added, 'except one of the party "peaches" [informs on another].'

'What has been too cleverly done?' asked Saunders.

'The child-murder.' Then Mrs Quance abruptly rose, shuffled about,

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