Read The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective for Free Online Page A

five in the morning she had woken and seen that Saville was missing. 'I thought he was with his mamma, because he generally goes in there of a morning.' According to Mrs Dallimore, she added: 'This is done through jealousy. The little boy goes into his mamma's room and tells everything.'
    'No one would murder a child for doing such a thing as that,' said Mrs Dallimore. The nurse's characterisation of Saville as a tell-tale became, for many, the clue to the crime.
    Eliza Dallimore and Elizabeth Gough went down to the kitchen. 'This is a shocking thing,' Mrs Dallimore told the servants, 'and I think the whole house is responsible for the child.'
    When Fricker, the plumber, came in from the garden with his assistant, Gough asked, 'What have you been doing, Fricker?'
    'I've been opening the water closet,' he said.
    'And you haven't found anything?'
    'No.'
    'Then you won't.' Her remarks to the plumber, before and after his examination of the pipes, were later taken as indications that she knew more than she admitted about the crime.
    Mrs Dallimore strip-searched the female servants but, on Foley's instructions, did not ask the women of the Kent family to disrobe. Instead, she examined their nightdresses. She found bloodstains on the nightdress of Mary Ann, the eldest daughter, so she passed it on to the police. They showed the garment to Parsons, who attributed the stains to 'natural causes'. Stapleton agreed that the blood was menstrual. The nightgown was none the less given to Mrs Dallimore for safekeeping.
    At about four o'clock PC Urch asked two village women - Mary Holcombe and Anna Silcox - to wash and lay out the dead child. Mary Holcombe was the charwoman who had been cleaning the kitchen when Nutt and Benger found Saville's body. Silcox was a widow who used to work as a 'monthly nurse', tending a mother and her baby in the first weeks after a birth; she lived with her grandson, a carpenter, next to Road Hill House. Parsons told the women to 'do what was right to the poor boy'.
    Parsons was talking to Samuel Kent in the library at about five o'clock when a messenger called at Road Hill House with instructions for the doctor to conduct a post-mortem examination of the body. The coroner, on being informed by the police of the child's murder, had scheduled an inquest for Monday. With Samuel's agreement, Parsons asked Stapleton to help him examine the corpse.
    When he saw the body, Stapleton noted the 'expression of repose' on the child's face: 'Its upper lip, retracted slightly by the mortal spasm, had stiffened upon the upper teeth.' The doctors opened the boy's stomach and found the remains of his supper, which had included rice. To check whether he had been drugged, Parsons smelt for traces of laudanum or any other narcotic, but could detect none. The stab to his chest, a bit more than an inch wide, had pushed the heart out of place, punctured the diaphragm and grazed the outer edge of the stomach. 'It would have required very great force,' said Parsons, 'to inflict such a blow through the nightdress and to the depth to which it had penetrated.' This was a child of 'remarkably fine development', the doctor said. From the rips in the boy's clothes and his flesh, Parsons surmised that the weapon was shaped like a dagger. 'It could not have been done by a razor,' he said. 'It must have been, I think, a sharp-pointed, long, wide and strong knife.' He initially believed the cause of death was the cut to the throat.
    The post-mortem examination uncovered two oddities. One was the 'blackened appearance round the mouth' that Parsons had noted earlier; the mouth was 'such as we do not usually see in dead bodies, as if something had been pressed tightly against it'. This something, he suggested, might have been 'the violent thrusting of a blanket into the mouth to prevent it crying, or it could have been done with a hand'.
    The other mystery was the lack of blood. 'A sufficient quantity of blood . . . has not been accounted for,'