Free The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale

whose existence was a secret. The English public had a horror of surveillance. There had been outrage in the early 1830s when it came to light that a plainclothes policeman had infiltrated a political gathering. In this climate, the detectives had to be introduced by stealth.
    Magistrates' court records indicate that Whicher was working undercover in April 1842, when he noticed a trio of crooks in Regent Street. He followed them until he saw one of them stand in the path of Sir Roger Palmer, an Anglo-Irish baronet who owned a house in Park Lane, while another gently lifted Sir Roger's coat tails and the last picked a purse from his pocket. Professional pickpockets such as these typically worked in teams of three or four, shielding and easing one another's work. Many were extraordinarily adroit, having been trained since childhood in the art of 'dipping' or 'diving'. Though one of the three escaped, Whicher spotted him in another part of town a fortnight later and hauled him into a police court, reporting that the fellow had compounded his offence by trying to buy him off with silver.
    The Metropolitan Police files show that Whicher was again operating incognito later that month, when he took part in the hunt for Daniel Good, a Putney coachman who had killed and dismembered his lover. Whicher and his Holborn colleague Sergeant Stephen Thornton kept watch on the house of a female friend of Good's in Spitalfields, east London (Dickens later described Thornton, who was eleven years older than Whicher, as having 'a ruddy face and a high sunburnt forehead . . . He is famous for steadily pursuing the inductive process and, from small beginnings, working on from clue to clue until he bags his man'). Daniel Good was eventually caught in Kent, but by good luck rather than deft police work.
    In June 1842 the commissioners asked the Home Office for permission to set up a small detective division: they argued that they needed a centralised, elite force to coordinate murder hunts - such as the search for Good - and other serious crimes that crossed different police districts. If these officers could wear plain clothes, they said, the force would be all the more efficient. The Home Office agreed. That August, Whicher, Thornton and the other six men picked as detectives formally abandoned their beats, shed their uniforms, became as anonymous and ubiquitous as the villains they sought. Jack Whicher and Charles Goff of L (Lambeth) division were the most junior, but both were made sergeants within weeks (Whicher was only a month short of having served five years as a constable, usually the minimum required for promotion). This brought the number of sergeants in the division to six, serving under two inspectors. Whicher was given a pay rise of almost 50 per cent, from about PS50 to PS73 a year - PS10 more than a regular sergeant's salary. As before, his wages were supplemented with bonuses and rewards.
    'Intelligent men have been recently selected to form a body called the "detective police",' reported Chambers's Edinburgh Journal in 1843. 'At times the detective policeman attires himself in the dress of ordinary individuals.' The public wariness persisted - a Times editorial of 1845 warned of the dangers of detective police, explaining that there 'always will be, something repugnant in the bare idea of espionage'.
    The detectives' headquarters were a room alongside the commissioners' offices in Great Scotland Yard, by Trafalgar Square. The men technically became part of the A, or Whitehall, division. Whicher was designated A27. His job, now, was to disappear, to slip noiselessly between the classes - the detectives were to blend, eavesdrop, merge into 'flash-houses' (pubs frequented by criminals) and into crowds threaded with thieves. They were untethered. While an ordinary policeman circled his beat like the arm of a compass, passing each point every hour, the detectives crisscrossed the city and the country at will. In the London underworld