The Wicked Boy (7 page)

The inquest into Emily Harrison Coombes's death opened the next day – Friday 19 July – at the Liverpool Arms, a large public house at the southern end of the Barking Road. The coroner was
Charles Carne Lewis
, sixty-two, who had succeeded his father as coroner for Essex in 1882. The most notorious death he had investigated to date was that of Florence Dennis, the young woman who had been murdered by James Canham Read in Southend the previous summer. His most recent case, which had concluded the day before the Emily Coombes inquest, was an inquiry into a series of deaths at the East Ham sewage works. On 1 July an employee at the sewage pumping station had become dizzy with fumes as he climbed down a ladder into a well; he lost his balance and fell in. One of his workmates descended the ladder to try to help, but collapsed and fell into the pit as the sewer gases overtook him; three more men attempted rescues, and every one fainted and fell. All five drowned in the filth at the bottom of the well. Their deaths were attributed in part to the putrid conditions created by the drought.

Lewis took his place at the head of a big dining table in a bright, square room in the Liverpool Arms.
The room was furnished
with bronze urns and large-leafed plants, which were reflected in a long gilt-framed mirror on the mantelpiece. The walls were covered with rich paper and hung with oil paintings. Next to Lewis sat his clerk, surrounded by parchments and legal volumes, passages of which were marked off with strips of blue paper. The jury of twelve men sat round the table; their foreman was Joseph Horlock, a forty-nine-year-old master builder who lived opposite the pub. Detective Inspector Mellish and Inspector Gilbert were present on behalf of the police.

The coroner's inquest and the magistrate's hearing were to run concurrently: the chief task of the coroner's court was to establish how Emily Coombes had died, and that of the magistrates' court to decide who, if anyone, should be charged with causing her death. Yet there was room for overlap and even conflict in their deliberations. If a coroner's jury found that the cause of death was murder, they could name suspects and order their arrest.

A crowd of about 500 people had assembled outside the Liverpool Arms, and when a closed cab drew up just after 11 a.m. they made a rush at its doors. The police managed to hold back the mob, allowing John Fox and two Holloway warders to enter the pub. Robert and Nattie had been spared the ordeal of attending the inquest because of their youth. Fox was given a seat in the coroner's court, where he sat for a few moments, his head leaning against the wall, before Lewis announced that he did not intend to examine him and did not consider it advisable that he be present. A member of the jury asked whether Fox should at least be allowed to hear the evidence, and Lewis replied that this was exactly what he did not want. The warders took Fox away. Several hundred people chased the cab that carried him off.

Lewis swore in the jury and called Alfred Kennedy, who had now completed the post-mortem on Emily Coombes's body.

‘The whole of the brain has been consumed by vermin,' Dr Kennedy told the coroner and jury, ‘and the right lung nearly destroyed by maggots. Through the base of the heart, which is partly eaten away, there is a clear stab, and one also through the extreme right side. There is a notch on the spine corresponding with this wound.'

The doctor said that Emily Coombes's bedding and underclothes had been stained with dry blood, which indicated that she had been alive when she was stabbed. ‘There is no doubt,' he said, ‘that death was instantaneous.'

The jurors were invited to leave the pub for the mortuary on the other side of the Barking Road. They had to make their way through a crowd to enter the building. Emily Coombes's body was in
a double coffin
, designed to contain the smell of a corpse and to slow its decomposition. The internal shell, which held the body, was usually filled with melted pitch and sealed shut. The upper part of the shell was fitted with plate glass so that mourners (or, in this case, jurors) could see the face of the dead person. Emily Coombes's features had been mutilated by maggots. The jurors completed their inspection as quickly as they could.

When the coroner and jury returned to the pub, Lewis called Robert and Nattie's Aunt Emily to give evidence. She was dressed in deep mourning, with a broad-brimmed black hat sitting horizontally on her high bun of dark hair. Her voice broke as she described the ‘offensive smell' that assailed her as she entered 35 Cave Road on Wednesday, to find her nephews playing cards and Fox puffing on his pipe. She repeated Robert's confession to her, quoting him as saying: ‘I kicked about and Ma pushed me. I then got out of bed and stabbed her.'

The coroner pointed out that Robert's account of the murder was confusing. ‘I don't quite see,' said Lewis, ‘how this part of the story tallies with the other part, in which he said the blow was to be struck after Nathaniel's signal from an adjoining room. It will probably, however, be cleared up later.'

The foreman of the jury asked Aunt Emily if she had not thought it strange that her sister-in-law seemed to have vanished.

‘All through I thought it was strange,' said Emily, ‘but Mrs Coombes had some funny ways. She would not write for weeks at times.'

After hearing two further witnesses, Lewis adjourned the inquest. It would reconvene in ten days, on 29 July.

Now that the post-mortem and the viewing of Emily Coombes's corpse were complete, arrangements were swiftly made to inter the body. Emily had paid a couple of pence a week to a
burial insurance
scheme, as was common practice among working-class people who wished to spare their families the financial burden of an unexpected death. The undertaker, Richard Wortley of 269 Barking Road, was instructed to keep the costs of her funeral low so that her husband could retain some of the pay-out. In the morning of Saturday 20 July, Wortley transferred Emily Coombes's body to a plain wooden coffin, screwed down the lid and conveyed it by hearse and carriage to the Tower Hamlets and East London Cemetery, three miles west. Bow Cemetery, as it was known locally, had since its establishment in 1841 been the chief burial ground for the poor of East London. A third-class interment here cost about fifteen shillings. By 1895 the cemetery contained more than a quarter of a million bodies, most of them in shared public graves, and had become neglected and overgrown.
Many of the headstones had fallen down
and were half-covered by weeds and grass.

At 1 p.m. Emily's body was lowered
into a long trench of public graves in a section of the cemetery adjacent to Lockhart Street, where Robert and Nattie's grandmother Mary Coombes lived. Since the police had kept the details of the funeral a secret, only two or three members of the family were present. Robert and Nattie were not invited to attend. The mourners cast earth on to the coffin and the priest – a Reverend Yates – stood over the grave and read the words of committal.

That day four policemen, led by Inspector Gilbert and Detective-Sergeant Don, went to 35 Cave Road to burn the filthy bedding from the front bedroom. Despite the disinfectants with which the room had been doused three days earlier, both Gilbert and Don reported that the stench was almost unbearable. After their visit, they left a constable at the gate to make sure that sightseers were kept out.

Ever since the discovery of Emily Coombes's body, local men and women had been visiting Cave Road to see the house and to discuss the case with whoever was passing. West Ham was so full of people, and the people so avid for entertainment, that spontaneous gatherings were commonplace. A few weeks earlier
a fourteen-year-old boy had climbed a tree
in The Grove, near Stratford Broadway, and started dropping twigs and bits of bark on to the hats of people walking below. He refused to budge when the police ordered him down, and it was reported that nearly 3,000 people turned up to watch the constables remove him from the tree with the aid of a fire ladder. The inhabitants of West Ham looked for their drama, whether comedy or tragedy, in the streets.

The penny paper
Lloyd's Weekly
, which had a circulation of more than 750,000, sent an artist and a reporter to Cave Road. The artist sketched the house: the arched doorway and bay window on the ground floor, the two open windows of Emily Coombes's bedroom above, the low fence and the metal gate bounding the front yard. The journalist interviewed the locals who had gathered nearby. He was told that Robert and Nattie had a very bad reputation, and that their mother had been too lenient with them, ‘always allowing them to have their own way'. Robert was said to have been a constant source of trouble to the school officials: he had frequently been late and had often played truant. Three years earlier, the reporter heard, the brothers had run away to Liverpool to visit an aunt, using money stolen from their mother's cashbox. The police had been informed but when the boys were found their mother interceded and managed to hush up the affair. Over the past ten days, the
Lloyd's
man was told, Robert and Nattie had led a ‘fast' life in the West End of London, riding about in cabs and watching shows at the theatre.

One neighbour said that Robert was a talented mandolin player. ‘This love of music,' the
Lloyd's
reporter observed, ‘is not infrequent among the bad folk of criminal history.'

Several other journalists turned up to interview the bystanders. The
Forest Gate Gazette
was informed that Robert had treated his friends to lavish quantities of ginger beer and ice cream in the days after his mother's death. The
News of the World
heard that Fox was a ‘semi-lunatic' and a religious fanatic – the paper ran its report under the headline:

HORROR ON HORROR'S HEAD

THE MOST DREADFUL MURDER OF THE CENTURY

TWO PLAISTOW BOYS SLAY THEIR MOTHER

AND PLAY CARDS BENEATH THE CORPSE WITH A MANIAC

The
West Ham Herald
was told – also incorrectly – that Nattie had continued to go to school after the killing, and had been found once or twice with tears streaming down his cheeks. When his playmates asked him what was wrong, he said: ‘I am crying about Mother.' Nattie was said to have told a friend that he wanted to kill himself. The
Herald
reported that Aunt Emily arrived at 3.30 p.m. on 17 July to find Nattie alone in the house, sobbing as he informed her that his mother was lying dead in her bedroom.

Several of the stories relayed by the newspapermen depicted Nattie as vulnerable, powerless, distraught, and Robert as the insouciant mastermind who took pleasure in the plunder of his mother's house. These accounts suggested that one boy, at least, had traces of conscience, even if the other was thoroughly bad.

An editorial in Saturday's edition of the
Stratford Express
, which had the highest circulation of any West Ham paper, described the murder at Plaistow as ‘the most horrible, the most awful and revolting crime that we have ever been called upon to record. In the wildest dreams of fiction, nothing has ever been depicted which equals in loathsomeness this story of sons playing at cards in a room which the dead body of their murdered mother filled with the stench of corruption.' The ‘Plaistow Horror', it said, ‘is a story which must depress all who are longing for the improvement of mankind. It will pain public feeling to an extent which has rarely been equalled. It seems to plunge us back at once into the Dark Ages.'

The newspaper was alluding to the popular belief that the human race was in crisis. ‘We stand now in the midst of a severe mental epidemic, a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria,' wrote the Hungarian author Max Nordau in
Degeneration
, a work of 1892 published in English early in 1895. As evidence, Nordau pointed to the prevalence of madness and criminality among the poor, as well as the publication of decadent literature by such artists as Henrik Ibsen and Oscar Wilde. ‘The day is over,' he warned, ‘the night draws on.' Nordau's tract was much discussed in the British press. Its feverish tone was mocked in some quarters, and its apocalyptic ideas treated with scepticism by many, but its pessimism was commonplace. ‘A wave of unrest is passing over the world,' warned
the British author Hugh E. M. Stutfield
in the summer of 1895: ‘Revolt is the order of the day. . . ours may be an age of progress, but it is progress which, if left unchecked, will land us in the hospital or the lunatic asylum.'

Darwin's theory of evolution was widely accepted by the end of the nineteenth century, but with it had come the possibility that the human organism could develop backwards as well as forwards. The atrophy of the species was attributed to the speed and pressure of modern life – telegrams, railways, big business, a craving for instant pleasure – and to an increasingly urban, industrial environment. ‘The close confines and foul air of our cities are shortening the life of the individual, and raising up a puny and ill-developed race,' wrote James Cantlie in
Degeneration amongst Londoners
. ‘It is beyond prophecy to guess even what the rising generation will grow into, what this Empire will become after they have got charge of it.' In
The Time Machine
, published in 1895, H. G. Wells imagined a future in which the workers had degenerated into pale, ape-like Morlocks living in darkness underground, toiling on machines to make goods for the frail, decaying Eloi on the Earth's surface.

The far east of London was the ultimate industrial wilderness. Where the German visitor to Plaistow in 1886 had seen brass bands and fat-cheeked children, most journalists and novelists saw only pinched, degraded lives.
An
Illustrated London News
reporter
described West Ham's lines of ‘little hideous slate-roofed houses of stucco and pale brick. Row follows row, all dreary, all mean.'
The French novelist Emile Zola
said that he had never seen such miles of soulless brick and mortar.
The English writer Ford Madox Hueffer
(later known as Ford Madox Ford) described West Ham as a featureless fog, ‘a vast cloud beneath a cloud as vast', while
Walter Besant
saw it as a ‘sea of the working class': ‘its history is mostly a blank, making no more mark than the breezes of yesterday have made on the waves and waters of the ocean'. It was a city without a centre, said Besant, ‘a city without art or literature, but filled with the appliances of science'. To a passing visitor, he wrote, it seemed a ‘joyless' region, ‘the City of dreadful Monotony', ‘a vast city without a heart'.