One of the curious overlaps between real-life murder mysteries and the works of fiction that are devoured by the reading public every single year, is the recurrence of three archetypal settings. First, there is the attractive country house. Indeed, the country house murder mystery is a genre woven deep into the fabric of British culture, instantly identifiable anywhere around the world, and unfailingly popular.
The second setting very often lies within that country house, although it also turns up within office buildings, in medieval towers and sometimes in old-fashioned boarding houses. This is the locked room: that chamber in which the body is found, with the door mysteriously and bafflingly secured from the inside. This is such a staple of detective fiction that it is deemed to be a genre in its own right: the Locked Room Mystery. The best examples of these can be found in Chapter 8. But such enigmas have occasionally popped up in reality as well, as we shall see a little later with one particular case that unfolded in the East End of London in 1860.
The third setting that also turns up with remarkable regularity both in fiction and real life is the murder mystery that takes place on a train. In novelistic terms, the most famous is Agatha Christie’s 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express but there are so many recent examples, including The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins.
Here is the curiosity: these settings have in part risen out of real-life Victorian cases that seriously vexed Scotland Yard and completely mesmerised the newspaper-reading public. And so the puzzles in this section have a twist of that very traditionalist flavour; rambling country mansions with libraries and ballrooms, elegant sleeper trains crossing countries and continents, and a variety of logic challenges that require you to imagine being the detective approaching crimes that seem perfectly impossible.
In the wet summer of 1860, in a small Wiltshire village called Road, there was a murder that, in its own macabre and tragic way, set out the structure of what would become the classic mystery story. In the outside privy of a grand country house the body of a three-year-old child, Francis Savile Kent, was found. His parents, his siblings and the house servants were not only grief-stricken, they were also perplexed. The house had been securely locked that night and there was no sign of a break-in. Yet it could only be assumed that the killer had been an intruder because the other possibility, that the child had been murdered by someone within the household, was unthinkable.
Before the involvement of Scotland Yard, the local Wiltshire police worked upon another theory. They thought that the child’s nursemaid, in whose room he slept, had a lover, and that in the middle of the night the child had awoken in a panic seeing the lover enter the room. The nursemaid and her lover had murdered the child to keep him quiet and their secret safe. In pursuit of this theory, the police found a bloody nightgown stuffed up inside a chimney. The idea was to keep it there but maintain a furtive watch over the room to see who would come and retrieve the incriminating evidence, and destroy it. The plan went wrong when one night, two constables got accidentally locked in the kitchen. When they got out, they found that the gown had gone and there was no indication as to who could have taken it.
The nursemaid, Elizabeth Gough, was arrested, but there was not even a scintilla of circumstantial evidence that could have pointed towards her. She was released shortly afterwards.
There was seething local speculation about another theory, again centring on Elizabeth Gough. It was thought that Gough was having an affair with the master of the house, Samuel Kent, and that it was he who had murdered the waking child during one of their trysts. This idea seemed to have been sparked by other rumours that Kent was a serial adulterer. Again, there was not a speck of proof. What it did show, however, was that a puzzling crime seemed a public invitation to open grand homes wide for all to peer inside, like some gigantic dolls’ house, or the ever-popular game, Cluedo.
And so, the police concluded that greater expertise was needed. Inspector Whicher, a Scotland Yard detective who had already achieved a certain level of fame, was assigned to the case. He had solved other child murders, and used brilliant misdirection techniques in order to trap a gang of jewel thieves. Charles Dickens wrote of Whicher that his manner was that of a man ‘engaged in deep mathematical calculations’. In travelling down to Road, it was the lot of Inspector Whicher to consider all possibilities, however hideous. And the responsibility for solving this ghastly mystery became enormous; for as well as the popular newspapers, there was serious scrutiny of the crime from politicians too.
This was the first great test of the perspicacity of Scotland Yard’s still relatively new detective department, but this was also a time before any proper forensics. Inspector Whicher was forced on his wits to spot tiny logical inconsistencies and misplaced items that could point to the perpetrator.
The case brought with it exposure of the intimate history of the Kent family, the marriages and remarriages, the stepchildren. This was a case in which such knowledge could prove key, and yet–especially in the Victorian age when private domesticity was almost fetishized–the further agony this public scrutiny caused the family was intense.
Here, then, was the inspiration for generations of authors to come: a large house, with all the attractive comforts of wealth; a family that is serene and well-ordered on the surface, but with a less than serene history; loyal servants who witness in silence the private passions of the household. Added to this is the sense that the grand house becomes a hermetically sealed community. So much so that when it is locked up securely at night, there is no chance that whatever happens within can be blamed upon outside forces. Therefore, the detective faces many challenges; he has to disentangle personal secrets, solve the logical puzzle of the house layout, and comprehend how a murderer might move undetected, concealing any trace of bloodstains that would otherwise incriminate them.
One of Inspector Whicher’s insights, for instance, revolved around the routines of the household laundry, not knowing of the previous bungle involving the nightgown. Yet he was subliminally aware that some item was missing, like an itch at the back of his mind. Meanwhile, for the family, there was that slightly uncomfortable sense of dirty laundry both real and metaphorical being examined.
The other intriguing strand of the case reflected less in fiction but key to the public’s perception of Scotland Yard detectives as the years wore on, was that of class. The Kents, as well-to-do upper-middle-class people, were (as the old phrase went) the social superiors of Inspector Whicher, who hailed from humbler roots in Camberwell, south London. From the start, there was a public fascination for the idea that a man of working-class stock could exert his will on a grand figure such as Samuel Kent.
But perhaps there was also a public sense that Mr Whicher’s perceptions might be distorted a little by this reverse of power because his theory, upon which he made his arrest, was one that the reading public did not care for. The Inspector, after careful reflection on his conversations with all members of the household, had a growing conviction that the murderer was the little boy’s older stepsister Constance. He had been alerted to suggestions of tension between the 16-year-old girl, her father and her stepmother; the mother of the little boy.
Constance was arrested, but without the nightgown, there was not even any circumstantial evidence. Mr Whicher’s case collapsed, and with it–temporarily–his reputation. The newspaper reading public recoiled from the idea that a charming 16-year-old girl could commit such an unthinkably savage act. This was some years before Freud, and the idea of the unconscious.
But Inspector Whicher had been right, and Constance Kent eventually confessed to a High Anglican priest five years later, before handing herself over to the authorities. Now, of course, there would be a great deal of focus upon her mental health and surprisingly, even back then, there was some judicial understanding in that direction. There might have been those who would have expected Constance Kent to hang and indeed the original sentence was the death penalty. But this was quickly rethought with the judge and the authorities wisely revising their impulsive reaction. Instead, she went to prison, and twenty years later she was released. Upon gaining her freedom in 1885, aged 41, she emigrated to Australia to join her brother William who had moved there some years beforehand.
According to award-winning author Kate Summerscale, who explored the case so vividly, there was a terrible secret shared between these two close siblings. Constance had taken the weight of the responsibility for the murder completely onto her own shoulders when in fact the crime had been committed by both of them. Constance Kent lived until 1944, dying at the age of one hundred. Even by then, the case was alive in public memory, and ever more so, not just for the ghastly murder, but also for the element of class conflict that could not reconcile the seamy suspicions of a working-class police detective with the graciousness of an upper-middle-class 16-year-old girl.
Curiously, that same dismal summer of 1860 saw another real-life murder case, this time in East London, that provided a template for many fictional mysteries thereafter. The slaying of a wealthy, miserly and thoroughly unsympathetic slum landlady in her own rather smart and secure house was notable because no one could understand how the killer could possibly have got in. This was the prototype Locked Room Mystery. And it was–as we shall see–a story that captured the imagination of the creator of Sherlock Holmes. For within it, Arthur Conan Doyle detected the strong possibility of a miscarriage of justice.
Mary Emsley was a 70-year-old widow who owned countless squalid properties all over the East End of London, near the docks. By contrast, her own three-storied house near the elegant Victoria Park was pristine and spacious with a pleasant back garden big enough for pear trees. Mrs Emsley lived alone and unlike her neighbours she had no domestic staff other than a lady who came by on Saturdays to clean. More than this, though gregarious during the day, Mrs Emsley refused to allow anyone into her house after sunset. And anyone who knocked on the door after hours would face a full interrogation from the widow, leaning out of her first-floor window.
Her garden–and the neighbouring gardens–were enclosed in a square of houses. The only way into them was through one of those houses. And Mrs Emsley was careful about locking up at night. She also refused to keep much money in the house, ensuring her takings from rent were deposited with the landlord of the pub around the corner, prior to being taken to the bank. Some of this rent she collected herself; the rest she left to her trusted property managers.
So how then could the police have been greeted with such a scene of horror one grey morning in August 1860? One of her worried employees, having not seen the old lady for days, alerted her solicitor, and he in turn alerted some local constables. None of the neighbours had seen her come or go, or seen anyone else approaching the house. The thought was that Mrs Emsley might have taken ill.
There was no way in through the front door; no-one had spare keys. So, making their way through a neighbour’s house, the solicitor and the police climbed into her back garden, and they found the back door of the house open.
Concern gave way to foreboding. They found the old lady in her lumber room, facedown, holding a roll of wallpaper. The walls around were spattered red. Someone had smashed the back of her head in.
The hideous ferocity of the crime was one thing, but the only clue left behind was a boot-print, made in blood on the landing. There was nothing to suggest how the killer got into the locked house–or indeed got out again.
Because of the old lady’s unkindness to so many of her East End tenants–any suggestion of arrears and they were evicted quite without pity–there was no shortage of suspects. But Scotland Yard, and the Home Office, thought there might have been more to it than some act of furious revenge. For the point was that Mary Emsley had been dazzlingly rich and there was the possibility that the culprit might have been rather closer to home.
Mrs Emsley had been married twice, she had lost a child very early and had no more, but she had several nephews. One was a soldier in Portsmouth who Scotland Yard described as having ‘a very bad character’, chiefly because of his habit (before her murder) of writing to other family members asking if the old lady was dead yet.
Added to this were two stepdaughters from her second marriage, and their husbands. Their late father, Samuel Emsley, had made a vast amount of money from corset-making, and so they were comfortably provided for. But Mary Emsley, most unusually for the time, had kept all her own financial dealings completely separate from her husband. The question that occurred to Sergeant Thornton at the Yard was: who stood to inherit the old lady’s vast wealth? She had left no will of any kind, so was the murder perhaps prompted by her reluctance to name benefactors?
As with the Road case, the Mile End Murder became a newspaper sensation across the country. And it seemed speedily solved after an apparent attempt by one of Mrs Emsley’s property managers to frame a colleague for the killing with an incriminating package of small items taken from her house. The package in question was hidden in an alcove behind Walter Emm’s house, with a man called James Mullins leading the police to it. Yet it was gimlet-eyed Inspector Thornton who spotted that the string that held the paper package together was the same as those lacing the boots of James Mullins.
Inspector Thornton was certain he had his killer. And the fact that James Mullins, who had worked with Mrs Emsley for a year, was himself a former policeman pensioned out of the force in disgrace, appeared to add weight to Thornton’s theory. This was an intelligent man, reduced to obeying the whims of an unpleasant old lady, and in his frustration he had caved her head in.
Mullins protested his innocence consistently. But the jury found him guilty. He was hanged at Newgate, in front of a crowd of 30,000 people. There are still many questions concerning the safety of this conviction: because even though Mullins had done a very wicked thing by trying to frame another man, it was clear to many that his motivation for doing so was the substantial financial reward that had been offered by the stepfamily of Mrs Emsley. In 1860, the £300 offered was a life-changing sum, equivalent to about £35,000. Mullins might also have been convinced–as a former policeman–that he had solved the crime, and that Walter Emm really was the guilty party. In addition to this: the evidence that was gathered against Mullins himself was described by the judge as circumstantial. Mullins would have known the old lady had no valuables kept in the house. So, what would he have gained by killing her?
And more importantly, how did he get in? The old lady never opened her door to anyone after sunset and since her watchful neighbours had seen nothing untoward in the day, she could only have been murdered at night. Although Mullins was one of her more reliable employees, she would never have tolerated his presence in candlelight. This element of the locked house was to be refined by countless authors; not least by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His early Holmes adventure The Sign of Four is a fine example of the locked room sub-genre. But in this real-life instance, he was troubled by the conviction and execution of Mullins.
Writing for the Strand Magazine, he brooded upon the timing of the murder and the inconsistencies of the case persecuting Mullins. Conan Doyle himself did not speculate any further, save to conclude that the conviction was unsafe. But the implication of his reasoning was that the killer was a confidant of Mrs Emsley, one with whom she was socially at ease. Someone so familiar that the neighbours would scarcely have noticed his presence at her door. And more than this, the killer would have had to have stayed in the house all night, and throughout the following morning.
Even with all the doubts, the murder was deemed sufficiently ghastly for a waxwork of James Mullins to be placed in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds. Meanwhile the sergeant on this case, Richard Tanner, was promoted, and several years later as a Detective Inspector he was assigned to a gruesome and perplexing railway mystery that again seized the national imagination. For this was the first murder ever committed on a train.
It was the 9.45 p.m. Fenchurch Street to Chalk Farm line, a service running through new middle-class suburbs in east and north London in a loop. A 70-year-old chief bank clerk called Thomas Briggs boarded the train and sat in one of the train’s first-class compartments. He was travelling to his home in the leafier part of Hackney. The journey was short, a matter of twenty minutes; viaducts over the cramped, dark housing of Stepney thence heading north towards more prosperous locations.
At Hackney Wick station, just a little after 10 p.m., two gentlemen boarded the train and walked into the same first-class compartment. In the carriage gaslight, they could see a number of curious dark, moist patches on the seating and the walls. There were pools on the floor. There were also some discarded items lying about: a walking stick, a leather bag, and a black felt hat. Very quickly, the men ascertained that the dark moisture was blood. At the next station, they alerted the train guard and other staff.
As arrangements were quickly being made to isolate the carriage, a train running in the opposite direction came to a very sudden halt between Hackney and Bow, on a stretch of line fringed with terraced houses. The train’s stoker and driver had seen a body on the side of the tracks. At that point, Thomas Briggs was still alive, though unconscious. He had apparently been attacked, then hurled from the train.
Briggs was carried to a nearby pub, where a doctor attempted to revive him with stimulants. It was to no avail; and anyone gazing upon the extent of his horrific head injuries would not have been surprised. His skull had been cracked. Thomas Briggs was borne to his home a few streets away. And there, not long afterwards, he died.
Events must have happened as the train had been speeding from Bow up to Hackney, and the two stations were barely five minutes apart. The police were swift and decoupled the carriage in question from the rest of the train and it was taken to sidings at Bow. Meanwhile, it was ascertained that certain items had been stolen from Mr Briggs, specifically his gold watch, with gold chain and a pair of gold eyeglasses.
It could not be known precisely where Mr Briggs’s assailant had boarded or indeed alighted but what did seem certain is that a robber had beaten him brutally, stolen his valuable belongings and then pushed him on to the tracks. Inspector Tanner of the Yard was swift to see the one anomalous detail that stood out in its oddness. The hat that had been found in the carriage did not belong to Mr Briggs. His distraught family were absolutely certain of it. So, if it did not belong to him, was it possible that after the murderous assault, his attacker had picked up the wrong hat and disappeared into the night with it?
The mystery gripped the public because here was a confluence of two sources of unease; the possibility that violence could strike anyone in the rapacious city and the occasionally unsettling nature of the railways themselves. A dim, gaslit carriage on an especially dark evening, stations near the black expanses of the Hackney Marshes, respectable and well-to-do gentlemen and ladies suddenly finding their first-class worlds invaded by malevolent ruffians.
For Inspector Tanner, there were two trails to follow: the hat, and the stolen gold watch and chain. A label inside the hat revealed it to have been made in a shop in Marylebone. Meanwhile, in response to hefty publicity, a cabman called Matthews and a jeweller with the rather striking surname of Death came forward. The trails were leading back to a young man of German heritage called Franz Müller. Various people, including his landlady, could identify the distinctive hat. And he had been to Mr Death the jeweller to exchange a gold watch and chain. In addition to this, Müller had been paying romantic visits to the daughter of the cabman, who saw him with the gold chain.
Unlike the Mullins case, there seemed to be no ambiguity, especially as Inspector Tanner discovered that the young man had already made his escape. He was, the Inspector ascertained, on board a sailing ship to America that had embarked a day or two previously. Sail was cheaper than steam, but steam was faster than sail. Inspector Tanner had a brainwave.
He and his assistant Sergeant Clarke made their way to Liverpool and from there embarked upon a much faster steam ship to New York. Their voyage took three weeks, and Müller was still at sea when they made land. From there, it was a question of interception and then extradition. Müller was brought back, convicted and, just at the point when the noose was around his neck and before the trapdoor beneath him swung back, the young man told the priest: ‘I did it’.
As a direct result of the case, railway companies felt under pressure to respond to middle-class unease because prior to this, there had been many other (non-fatal) robberies carried out on train journeys. Passengers in dim compartments had no way of raising the alarm. There were two innovations, one rather more long-lived than the other. Peep holes were drilled into the walls of compartments, so that if there were any curious noises from the adjacent compartment, passengers could look through to ascertain what was going on. These peep holes, however, were soon felt to be rather creepy in themselves; no-one much cared for the idea of being furtively spied on by strangers. The other innovation, though, was the emergency cord. One sharp yank and the train driver would bring the locomotive to a halt, while the guard investigated.
This was not the last railway murder, though. For instance, at the turn of the century, a signalman witnessed a blurred struggle on board a London-to-Brighton train and later the body of a finely dressed woman was discovered in the Merstham Tunnel–the murderer was her lover. Then there was the curious case of Arthur Mead in 1936, en route to Paddington Station. Several stops beforehand, the train guard passed through and thought that Mead looked extremely ill. So he had him taken off the train to be seen by a doctor.
The doctor very quickly found that the now barely conscious man had been shot. The weapon appeared to be a gun specifically for use on horses. In his dying breath, Mr Mead declared that a stranger had boarded and done this to him. Yet the logistics did not quite fit his story. No passenger could have boarded at the station where he had claimed because the train was not timetabled to stop there.
The truth was sadder, as forensic scientists established. Mead had had a troubled history of mental health and had used the gun on himself. No one knew why he had chosen to blame a fictitious assailant.
So this was how railways, country houses and locked rooms became essential staples in the general public’s appetite for sensational whodunnits and thrillers. From Agatha Christie’s 4.15 to Paddington to her 1949 classic Crooked House, to the more recent The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin, these are settings synonymous with a certain kind of Englishness and they are mysterious locations that evoke fear and foreboding as much as they evoke the logic and detection of the Scotland Yard.