The Wicked Boy (17 page)

Gill asked whether he had coughed as agreed.

‘I did not cough.'

Asked whether his brother had given any reason for the murder, Nattie said: ‘Yes. He wanted to go away to some place – to some island – and live.'

Gill asked why Robert had gone into his mother's room in the week after the murder.

‘He went to see if she was all right,' said Nattie.

Robert's counsel, Grantham, asked about the times that Robert ran away.

‘My brother ran away from home suddenly on two occasions, I think. He took me with him – he asked me to go with him.'

Grantham asked how their father had reacted.

‘Our father said nothing about it.'

Nattie confirmed that his brother had been ‘funny in the head', having suffered from headaches and excitability.

What was Robert's manner after the murder? asked Grantham.

‘He was quite calm,' said Nattie, ‘and knew what he was saying then.'

Sherwood examined Nattie on behalf of John Fox.

‘Mother was kind to Fox, too,' Nattie said. ‘He used to come to the house pretty often. Sometimes he was not there for a week, but sometimes he stopped for a good time.'

Fox leant forward in the dock, listening anxiously to Nattie's answers.

‘He used to saw up the wood and brush up the garden,' continued Nattie. ‘When he worked in the house I and my brother talked to him from time to time. We knew him pretty well. I used to go out with Fox sometimes before Mother died. Sometimes I just went to the top of the street with him to see him off.'

Nattie said that he and Robert had spoken to Fox about twice since the arrest. ‘He doesn't talk much. When he was staying in the house with us he did not talk very much. He is not very sharp. Sometimes we teased him.'

Horace Avory re-examined Nattie on behalf of the Crown. Avory was forty-four, the son of an Old Bailey clerk, and a sterner, more austere figure than his colleague Gill: he was wiry in build, with a small head on a long neck, pinched features and thin lips. He inquired further about the conversations between Fox and the boys, asking ‘the most insidious' questions, said the
Sun
, in an attempt to prove that Fox knew about the murder, but Nattie gave him no satisfaction.

‘We talked to him when we were generally playing cards,' said Nattie. ‘We used to talk about who would win the game and that, nothing else. He used to tell us a tale sometimes.'

Avory asked if Nattie and his brother had discussed the murder in that period.

‘After that Monday when Mother was killed my brother never talked about her. We never said a word to each other about it.'

‘What was Robert going to do with your mother's body?' asked Avory. ‘Did he ever say?'

Robert wanted to ‘keep her', Nattie said. ‘He said he was going to leave her up on the bed there, and put some quicklime over her. He said that soon after he did it, on the Tuesday, I think. After the Tuesday nothing further was ever said about it.'

The revelation that Robert had planned to preserve his mother's body with quicklime caused a stir in the courtroom. Avory sat down and Nattie left the witness box.

The rest of the afternoon's evidence turned principally on what John Fox knew of the crime. The K division police surgeon, Alfred Kennedy, described the condition of Emily Coombes's body when it was found, and the multitude of maggots in the bedroom: ‘on the bed alone there was quite a bushel of them, I should say'. A bushel was the equivalent, in dry goods, of eight gallons, or sixty-four pints. Dr Kennedy said that when he reached Cave Road on Wednesday 17 July, he could smell the decomposing body from the street. ‘I am not asserting that the smell was equally diffused some days before,' he said, under cross-examination from Sherwood. Both the room door and the front door had been open when he reached the house, the doctor agreed, and the odour would have been much less intense before then.

The court heard evidence from several of the other witnesses who had testified in the West Ham court. Sherwood, in an effort to convince the jury that it was plausible that Fox had not been aware of the decomposing corpse, asked the Robertsons of 37 Cave Road if they had smelt anything odd.

James Robertson said: ‘When I was in my garden I did not notice any smell coming from the house. I should not, because there are market gardens there at the back coming up to the Coombes' garden, and manure is often put there, and there are often large quantities of manure and smells there.' His wife, Rosina, testified that she had not noticed a bad smell either. The Coombes' and Robertsons' front doors were adjacent, she said, though their kitchen doors faced in opposite directions – the garden door of number 35 looked on to that of number 33. She had seen Fox playing cricket with the boys in the yard most evenings. ‘They seemed pretty cheerful,' she said.

In his examination of Charles Pearson, the National Line officer, and John Hewson, the National Line cashier, Sherwood attempted to establish that Fox was both trustworthy and simple-minded. Pearson said that he had known Fox for three years: ‘I have always found him honest, but he is not very bright as to intellect; I should think he is half-witted. He would not be put to do anything difficult, or any message that required much thought. I knew the Coombes knew him, and that he was in the habit of going to them and doing odd jobs there.'

Hewson said that Fox had lived in the docks for more than twenty years. ‘Everybody knows him. He carried sailors' and officers' bags, and fetched things for persons from their houses, and posted letters. We are under the impression that Fox is half-witted, but otherwise well-behaved.' He told the court about Fox being caught in the fire on the
Egypt
. ‘I think he was scared then.'

From the pawnbrokers, Sherwood elicited that there had been nothing shifty about Fox's behaviour when he had pledged the watches and mandolin. He ‘appeared to be like a sailor', said Henry Goldsworthy of the Commercial Road. ‘He did not seem very bright,' noted Richard Bourne of Plaistow. Many pawnbrokers were practised at giving testimony in court, since they frequently found themselves in possession of stolen goods. Goldsworthy had appeared at the Old Bailey as recently as the previous Monday, to testify to having been pledged an overcoat that formed part of a cargo stolen from a Jewish furrier at the Victoria Dock in 1893.

Justice Kennedy announced that the trial would be adjourned until the following morning.

At the close of the first day of the trial, the warders led Robert and John Fox back through the door in the dock and down the stairs to the Old Bailey basement, then along Birdcage Walk to the prison.
Newgate
had until 1882 been London's main gaol, but was now used only to house prisoners waiting to be tried at the Old Bailey, or to be executed in the courtyard. Even when sessions were in progress, the gaol lay half-empty. If a prisoner were to meet anyone while being walked through its corridors, the Newgate rules stipulated that he should turn to face the wall, put his hands behind his back, and wait until the other person had passed.

Robert and Fox were admitted through a thick iron door to a long stone corridor beneath tiers of cells. ‘It was as if you were walking at the bottom of the hold of some great petrified ship,' observed the journalist
W. T. Stead in 1886
, ‘looking up at the deserted decks.' Wire netting had been stretched across the well between the cells, to prevent prisoners from jumping to their deaths. The warders took Robert and Fox up the iron staircases to the balustraded walkways and into the cells in which they would spend the night.

The
Saturday Review
, commenting on the evidence presented in the Old Bailey, objected to Dr Kennedy's allusion to the ‘bushel' of maggots in Emily Coombes's room: ‘Why not two bushels, good doctor, or a dozen?' it asked. ‘Give your evidence as to the cause of death directly, and leave the natural details to the charnel-house alone; there is enough for the jury to gape at.' The doctor's specificity had some relevance, though. The quantity and distribution of grubs helped to date the murder. A blowfly's egg took a day to hatch into a maggot, which fed for four days before moving away to find a dark nook in which its soft body could stiffen into a cocoon. Ten days later it would break out as a fly. Since the maggots in Cave Road had strayed far beyond their breeding and feeding grounds in the body's cavities, spilling on to the bed and the floor, it was evident that they had been alive for a week or more. Kennedy's evidence about the extent of the decomposition was pertinent to John Fox's claim that he had no notion that anything was wrong in the house; and it seemed proof of the callousness of the boys. Robert and Nattie had left their mother to rot, allowing the blowflies' offspring to consume her as if the insects were their proxies. It was an additional desecration.

Yet the court had also heard that after Thursday 11 July, when the corpse began to smell and the blowflies' eggs began to hatch, Robert only once stepped inside the room. He chose to pawn his beloved mandolin, to write begging letters and to doctor documents rather than venture into the chamber and renew his pillage of the family valuables. He had already covered his mother's face with a sheet and a pillow. Perhaps he failed to fetch more jewels or apply the lime because he could not bear to go near her changing body.

In the ten days that Robert and Nattie shared the house with their mother's corpse, reality was provisional for them; time was suspended. For as long as no adult knew about the murder, it had not quite happened. The boys continued to play: in the yard, at the park, in the parlour, in the street. They inhabited a make-believe world, in which Emily Coombes might be ‘all right'; she might be ‘kept'; she might even come back, as John Fox warned, to chastise her sons for making too much noise in the yard. The brothers tacitly agreed not to speak of the killing, and they chose the trusting, kindly Fox to sanction their pact. In this dreamlike moment, their lives had not yet been transformed, and their mother's had not been ended. As Nattie had said to his brother on 8 July – in awe, in horror, in simple disbelief – ‘You ain't done it.'

The lawyers in the Old Bailey were presenting the court with opposed narratives: the prosecution told of a boy who was all head and no heart, a callous killer, while the defence depicted a boy whose reason had been utterly overthrown by his crazed emotions. There was no room for a story in which Robert was both scheming and desperate, ruthless and lost, in which he both knew and did not know what he had done and why he had done it.

Outside the Old Bailey in the evening of 16 September, newsboys were touting papers that carried the first reports of the Coombes trial. The
Spectator
noted, with disapproval, that they were being snapped up as quickly as if they had carried updates on a political crisis, a military battle or an important sporting event. In Islington, north London,
a wax worker was offering models
of the Coombes boys' and John Fox's heads for sale to showmen. Across the Thames, on the south bank, a penny theatre was staging
a melodrama about the murder
. Already the narrative of Robert Coombes's crime had been published throughout the country, illustrated by artists, and adapted for the stage. The appetite for news of the case, said the
Spectator
, ‘reveals a strange and bad condition of feeling'. The
Saturday Review
's distaste for the lurid detail supplied by Dr Kennedy was also a revulsion at the journalists and dramatists and wax modellers, the readers and audiences of London descending like vermin on the story of Emily Coombes's death.

10

THE BOYS SPRINGING UP AMONGST US

A light fog settled on London on Tuesday morning, but once it had cleared the day proved bright and very warm. In the Old Bailey, Charles Gill QC continued to make the case against Robert Coombes and John Fox. He called PC Twort to the witness box.

The constable described the events of Wednesday 17 July and read out Robert's confession to murder. In reply to questions from Robert's counsel, he confirmed that the boy was ‘very frank and open' when he interviewed him: ‘he told me all he knew without my asking him questions'. Nor had Robert tried to hide the murder weapon, said Twort, or to dispose of all the valuables in the house.

When Sherwood questioned him on behalf of Fox, Twort testified that Fox had sat in silence in the back parlour on the Wednesday afternoon. ‘There was a good deal of talk amongst the women,' said Twort. ‘Fox took no part in it. He took no notice. He did not seem to take any interest or appreciate the situation.'

Harriet Hayward of number 39 gave her evidence about the events of Wednesday 17 July. On cross-examination by Grantham, she declined to describe Robert as ‘excitable'. ‘I always looked on Robert as a bright, intelligent boy,' she said. ‘I did not see any excitability about him.' She agreed that he had behaved honourably towards Fox when the crime was discovered: ‘He took the blame off Fox and incriminated himself.'

When Sherwood asked her about his client, she said that she had seen Fox often at 35 Cave Road, chopping wood. She insisted on Fox's integrity and kindness, as she had in the magistrates' and coroner's courts. ‘I always looked upon him as being very simple and good-natured,' she said. ‘I don't believe he would hurt anyone. Mrs Coombes always spoke of him as being very trustworthy. When she went out she could always trust him in the place. I could see that the Coombes liked him. They all liked him. He was fond of playing with the boys.'

Inspector Gilbert described his search of the house and listed the items that the police had collected. A bloodstained piece of rag – the cloth left on Emily Coombes's bed – lay on the desk in front of him as he gave his evidence. In reply to a question from Grantham, Gilbert confirmed that he had found items on which Robert could have raised money. He handed Robert's nightshirt to the jury for inspection. The shirt had twenty or thirty spots of blood on the front and arms. Gilbert gave Robert's collection of penny dreadfuls to the judge.