Joseph Pritchard—Anna Wetherell

Joseph Pritchard’s relationship with Anna Wetherell is a study in divided feeling: he watches her as a possible source of deception, condemns her as a woman in prostitution, and nevertheless admits that he wishes he could love her. Their connection is neither a settled romance nor a simple alliance. It emerges through Pritchard’s anxious investigation of Emery Staines’s disappearance and his efforts to direct surveillance during a séance, before turning, in a brief confession, into an unmistakably personal attachment that he cannot claim as love.

Suspicion and the missing man

Pritchard’s concern about Anna becomes explicit while he speaks with Charlie Frost before the séance. He insists that Staines must be somewhere and reasons from what he believes is known: Anna was the last person to see Staines alive, and her account of taking an ounce of opium herself was, in Pritchard’s view, a lie. He treats the proposed attempt to call Staines from the dead as another reason to suspect her. His focus is not merely on Anna’s conduct in isolation; he frames it as a puzzle whose solution depends on connecting her statements, her drug use, and Staines’s disappearance.

That certainty has limits. The account establishes Pritchard’s conviction that Anna lied, not that she did so, and his suspicions are presented through his own insistence rather than confirmed as fact. He urges Frost to keep both eyes open during the séance, assigning Harald Nilssen to watch Anna while Frost watches Lydia Wells. His practical scheme assumes that the women may divert the watchers’ attention. Pritchard himself has no invitation to the gathering, yet he attempts to organize its surveillance from outside it. That intrusion makes his concern feel controlling as well as investigative: he wants Anna observed, but cannot simply enter the room and watch her himself.

Judgment and uneasy attachment

When Charlie Frost asks what Pritchard thinks of Anna’s integrity, Pritchard answers with contempt for the idea that a prostitute should be credited with integrity. The outburst exposes the moral judgment built into his suspicion. He does not approach Anna as a neutral investigator would; her position as a sex worker already shapes how readily he dismisses her credibility. At the same time, when Frost presses him to speak personally, Pritchard’s answer complicates that harshness. He says that he does not trust Anna at all and does not even love her, but wishes that he did.

The confession does not resolve the contradiction. Pritchard offers no account of what he wants from Anna, whether she knows of his feelings, or whether she reciprocates them. Instead, his words define a desire separated from trust and from any acknowledged bond of love. The admission is striking partly because it follows his attempt to catalogue reasons against her: his feelings do not erase his suspicions, and his suspicions do not erase his longing. He remains unable to turn either into a secure relationship.

Drugs, evidence, and the surrounding case

The wider account gives Pritchard’s attention to opium a concrete setting. Harald Nilssen found a partly empty laudanum phial in Crosbie Wells’s cottage; it had been purchased at Pritchard’s Drug Hall. This detail links Pritchard’s workplace to the evidence surrounding Wells’s death, but it does not establish that Pritchard personally supplied the phial or knew how it was used. In the séance conversation, his claims about Anna’s opium use similarly remain claims he presents to Charlie Frost, not an independent verdict on what happened.

Pritchard’s remarks are delivered amid a larger effort to piece together a tangled chain of events. Thomas Balfour has told the assembled men a disjointed story, and Walter Moody attempts to put its incidents into chronological order. Against that background, Pritchard’s approach reflects the room’s broader uncertainty: he tries to convert scattered details into a case against Anna, while his own admission reveals that his judgment is personally entangled. The relationship matters less as a fully narrated courtship than as a pressure point where suspicion, social stigma, and desire meet.

What the relationship reveals

The exchange with Frost gives Pritchard a conflicted characterization. He is forceful when directing others to watch Anna, quick to condemn her, and unusually candid when asked about his personal feelings. His wish that he loved her is not proof of tenderness in action; the scene shows no reciprocal intimacy or dependable care. Rather, it makes visible the distance between wanting an emotional bond and treating the desired person with trust or respect.

Anna, meanwhile, is chiefly present in this relationship through what Pritchard says and seeks to monitor. The scene supplies his account of her supposed lie and his suspicion of her connection to Staines’s disappearance, but does not settle those questions through his testimony alone. That imbalance is important: Pritchard’s confidence cannot stand in for Anna’s own explanation. His attachment is therefore inseparable from the limits of his perspective. He wants a feeling he cannot claim, while continuing to interpret Anna through distrust and surveillance.