Book review: The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

In 1860, the Kent family of Road, Wiltshire, was struck by a fearful blow. Their three-year-old child, Francis Saville, was taken out of his room during the night, and only missed when the family awoke. Searchers found Francis's body in a servants' privy, his throat cut. Detective-Inspector Jonathan Whicher was sent up from London to investigate.

While initially it was thought to have been done by an intruder, it quickly became apparent that the murderer or murderers must have been inmates of the house. Suspicion fell on three people. Constance and William Kent were two of the children from Samuel Kent's first marriage, and were resentful of their stepmother and of the doted-upon younger children. Francis's nursemaid Elizabeth Gough slept in the room from which he had been removed, and there were rumors that Francis saw Gough and his father Samuel Kent in compromising circumstances; according to this idea, one or both of them killed Francis to cover up the affair. Clues pointed in many different directions, but public opinion and the local magistrates fixed on Gough while Whicher settled on Constance Kent as his prime suspect. Neither investigation was successfully concluded, and the case became a highly visible failure of law enforcement.

Usually such famous cases remain a mystery forever, but not in the case; the culprit confessed five years later. (I won't say who it turns out to be, because the book's revelation of it is an effective twist.) Failing to solve the case at the time dogged Whicher for the rest of his career, and he made mistakes on other cases. Summerscale turns the Road Hill case into a page-turning mystery, and also into an examination of the Victorian fascination with detectives, the history and internal tensions of the Kent family, and their lives afterwards.