The Wicked Boy (10 page)

John appeared first. He said that he had been alone in his mother's store when Robert Coombes had come in about three weeks earlier and pointed to a dagger among a set of knives displayed on a card in the window. ‘Johnny,' he had said, ‘how much do you want for that knife in the window?' John said that the knife cost sixpence. Robert said: ‘I will come tomorrow and see Mrs Brecht about it, and ask what will be the lowest you will take.' John told the court that he remembered Robert as a fellow pupil at the North Street board school in Plaistow.

Since Robert still had no solicitor to represent him, Baggallay gave him a chance to put his own questions to the witnesses: ‘Do you wish to ask any questions, Robert Coombes?'

‘Yes, sir,' said Robert. ‘I never went to North Street school, and I never knew his name.' Robert had attended three West Ham schools, but North Street was not among them. This was irrelevant to the case: Robert was not disputing that he had been to the shop and enquired about the knife. By correcting John Brecht, he was acting like a schoolboy eager to score a point. He seemed to have little sense of what was at stake for him in this hearing.

Baggallay addressed the witness. ‘Have you seen the prisoner before?'

‘Yes,' said John Brecht.

‘Where?' asked Baggallay.

‘I have seen him in the Broadway,' said John, abandoning his claim that they had been schoolmates, ‘near my mother's other shop.' This was Plaistow Broadway, where Mrs Brecht had a second store, just north of Cave Road.

Mary Ann Brecht, fifty-two, the daughter of a dairyman and the wife of a house painter, was next to testify. She said that Robert had entered her shop in the Barking Road on Wednesday 3 July or Thursday 4 July and asked her: ‘How much do you want for that knife in the window?' ‘Which one?' she said. He pointed to the knife and she told him it was sixpence. ‘Is that the lowest you will take for it?' asked Robert. ‘Yes,' she replied; ‘it is very cheap.' Robert accepted the price and Mary Ann Brecht fetched the knife for him, asking if he wanted it wrapped up. ‘Yes please,' he said. Mrs Brecht wrapped the knife and handed it to him. He gave her a sixpenny piece and she, relenting, gave him a penny in change. ‘It will make your mother a fine breadknife,' she said. ‘Oh yes,' said Robert as he left.

The police produced the blood-stained knife in evidence. It was a sailor's sheath knife with a curved, beak-like point, which had been made to look like a dagger by a cross-guard of brass between the four-and-a-half-inch blade and the black handle. The
News of the World
observed that it was nothing like a kitchen implement, but rather ‘a terrible dagger', ‘the kind of knife one sometimes sees in the possession of a Malay sailor or a swarthy coolie hanging about the docks'. In assuring Robert that it would make his mother a good breadknife, Mrs Brecht may have been trying to assuage her unease about selling him just the kind of sharp, showy weapon that a boy might like to brandish.

The court heard evidence from the pawnbrokers with whom Fox had pledged goods. William White of George Fish's pawnshop in the Commercial Road remembered taking a gold-plated American watch from a short, dark man who gave the name Robert Coombes. He showed the watch to the court. Henry Goldsworthy of Ashbridge & Co produced a silver watch, which he said had been pledged by a short, dark man wearing a sailor's peaked cap. Richard Bourne, who ran the pawnbrokers by Plaistow station, showed the court Robert's mandolin.

Aunt Emily, who had given evidence the previous week, was called back to answer questions about the pawned goods now laid out in the courtroom. The mandolin was Robert's, she confirmed. The gold watch was his father's, but his mother used to wear it when her husband was at sea. The silver watch was bought for Robert, she said, though she was not sure whether it had been given to him. She knew that he used to wear the watch when his father was away.

Stephenson asked her how old Robert was.

‘He is thirteen years of age,' Emily said.

Baggallay interrupted to point out that they had a better authority for Robert's age. ‘You have the certificate,' he said to Stephenson. ‘Put it in.'

Stephenson handed over a copy of Robert's birth certificate, which Detective Inspector Mellish had obtained from the Registry for Births, Marriages and Deaths at Somerset House the previous day.

Baggallay looked at the certificate. ‘He was thirteen last January,' he observed. ‘It is not important as a matter of evidence, but it is important as a matter of fact.'

Rosina Robertson of 37 Cave Road came forward to testify. Mrs Robertson, twenty-eight, was the wife of James, the painter and decorator who had changed Robert's sovereign on 8 July. The couple had three boys, aged between one and six, and had recently moved to Plaistow from Canning Town. She and her husband had last seen Emily Coombes standing at her front door on the Saturday evening before her death, she said, and had stopped to chat to her for a few minutes.

‘On the evening before the discovery of the body,' she said, ‘at about ten o'clock or a quarter past, I heard voices in the front bedroom of number 35.'

She was asked if they were men's or boys' voices.

‘I could not say,' she replied. ‘I called my husband's attention to them.'

She said that she had seen a swarm of flies at the two upper front windows of number 35, and had noticed that the blinds of the room were raised on Wednesday 10 July. She first saw Fox at the house on the same day.

Charlie Sharman, on behalf of John Fox, questioned Mrs Robertson about the voices she had heard on the night before the body was discovered.

‘I was in bed at the time I heard the voices,' she said – her bedroom was adjacent to Mrs Coombes's bedroom next door. ‘The voices sounded as if they were in the front room, or on the little landing, I could not say which. The landing was at the top of the stairs.'

Sharman asked Mrs Robertson exactly when the blinds had been raised and when she first saw Fox.

‘The blinds were up on Wednesday morning. It was not until the evening that I saw Fox.'

Baggallay asked her how she came to notice him.

‘I was on the look,' said Mrs Robertson, ‘like everyone else was.'

John Hewson, the National Line cashier, told the court how Robert visited his office with the medical certificate attesting to Emily Coombes's illness. Hewson said he had noticed that the top had been torn off the certificate, and he was not inclined to trust the boy in any case. A year or two earlier Robert had called on him and said: ‘My mother is very ill in bed – will you let me have £2?' On that occasion, Hewson had given him the money and then discovered his story to be false.

Stephenson asked him: ‘And two days later did the mother come and see you? What did she say?'

‘No, no,' interrupted Baggallay, ‘we can't have that. It is a fact that the boy called, and that he got the money.'

Constable Twort testified that Robert's letter to Hewson had been found in Fox's jacket after his arrest.

Inspector Gilbert produced the letters that he had found at 35 Cave Road. Baggallay glanced through them, and read out to the court Robert's letter to the
Evening News
and then the letter that he had written to his father, in which he claimed that his Ma's hand was hurt.

Robert was calm throughout, occasionally letting a slight smile pass over his lips but otherwise betraying no emotion. The reporter from the
Evening News
noticed that he was none the less keenly aware of the journalists in the room. ‘Of all the people in this Court none seems so cool and unconcerned as this boy,' he wrote. ‘He stands easily in the dock, his hands crossed on the rail in front of him, his eyes sometimes following the movements of the witnesses, but more often straying to the right, where the busy pens of the reporters are at work on their table.'

As each witness prepared to leave the box the magistrate asked Robert: ‘Have you any questions to put?' and Robert replied briskly: ‘No, sir.'

‘Even when evidence of the most fatal kind is being given against him he does not lose his indifferent air,' noted the
Evening News
, ‘or the unconcerned smartness of his negative reply. He might be a confident pupil, sure of his answers to the teacher, so little does the tragedy in which he is the central figure move him.'

Fox, on the other hand, seemed scared out of his wits. His face, said the reporter, was ‘almost blank in its expression of stupidity, straining to follow the thread of evidence. He keeps his hands clenched behind his back, the fingers ceaselessly shifting their grasp of each other in the effort to fix and retain a steady grip.'

Nattie, too, looked terrified. Having been brought back into the courtroom to await his turn in the witness stand, he sat on a bench leaning against the shoulder of a ‘motherly woman'. He struck the
Evening News
reporter as ‘a poor little puny fellow. . . with a white face and eyes that bear traces of recent tears'. Though he had now been discharged from custody, ‘his little pale face is more full of fright and concern than that of the lad who stands in the dock'.

After Inspector Gilbert's evidence, Nattie was called to the stand. He seemed very anxious, and unprepared for his role as a witness. As a defendant, he would not have been called on to testify at all.

Nattie answered some simple questions from Stephenson, giving his address and the names of the schools he had attended. His last day at Cave Road school, Nattie said, was ‘on the Friday before this was done'.

‘You say “before this was done”,' said Stephenson. ‘Now I want you to tell us all you know about it.' Nattie spoke a few indistinct words and then started to sob. He took out a handkerchief.

Baggallay intervened, and began to question the boy more gently, taking him step by step through the events surrounding the murder.

‘You went to school last on Friday?' asked the magistrate.

‘Yes,' said Nattie.

‘That was the day your father went to sea?'

‘I could not tell.'

Nattie's father had left home on the Thursday and had spent the night on board the
France
before sailing for New York on Friday.

‘Which room did you sleep in?' tried Baggallay.

‘The other room.'

‘Was that the room at the back?'

‘Yes.'

‘Which room did Robert sleep in?'

‘He slept with mother.'

‘In the front room?'

‘Yes.'

Baggallay indicated the knife. ‘Did you know he bought that knife?'

‘The next day after he showed it me.'

‘Which day did he show it you?'

‘The next day after he bought it.'

Nattie said that Robert had been cleaning knives when he showed him the dagger, saying, ‘I've got a little one here.'

‘And what did he tell you about it?'

‘He said, “This is the knife I've got and intend to do it with.”' At these words, the spectators gasped and murmured. Coupled with the testimony of the Brechts, it seemed the starkest proof of premeditation.

‘Did he say what he was going to do?' asked Baggallay.

‘He said he was going to keep it.'

‘Did he say what for?'

‘No.'

‘When did you first know your mother was dead?'

‘The day it was done.'

‘How did you know?'

‘He came and told me.'

‘Where were you when he came and told you?'

‘In bed.'

‘In the back room?'

‘Yes.'

‘What morning was that?'

‘It was Monday.'

‘What time?'

‘Between 4 and 5.'

‘Was it daylight?'

‘Yes.'

‘Do you remember what he said when he told you that?'

‘He said, “I done it”, and I said, “You ain't done it”.'

‘Why did you say, “You ain't done it”? Had he said anything about it? Had you said anything about it?'

‘Yes I had, and said, “Are you going to do it?”'

‘To do what? Had you talked to him about it?'

Nattie did not reply. He covered his face with his hands.

‘Did you talk to him before?' asked Baggallay. ‘When did you talk to him about it?' The magistrate and the boy were circling round the murder – or ‘it', as both referred to it – Nattie evasively, Baggallay so as neither to lead nor distress the child.

‘I think it was the week before.'

‘Was that before he bought the knife?'

‘Yes, sir.'

At this point Nattie began to cry again.

‘Now, what did you say to him?' continued the magistrate. ‘Did you ask him to do it?'

‘Please, sir. I said, “Are you going to do it?”'

Here Stephenson, the prosecutor, interjected: ‘Was he the first to speak about doing it, or were you?'

Nattie continued to avoid the question. ‘He said he had bought a knife, and was going home to do it. It was not this knife here. It was one like what we use for dinner. He said, “There is a knife just by the Barking Road that will do it.”' It seemed that Robert had bought two knives: an ordinary kitchen knife, which he had told Nattie about when they were both out of the house one day; and then the dagger-like knife from Mrs Brecht's shop, which he showed his brother back at Cave Road.

None of the lawyers pressed Nattie on whether it was he who had urged Robert to kill their mother on the weekend of her death.

Baggallay asked: ‘When your brother came in to the room, as you say, early in the morning and told you, what did you do after that?'

‘He said, “Come and look if you don't believe me.”' Again gasps of horror ran round the courtroom.

‘Did you go and look?'

‘Yes; but I never went close to the bed. I went into the room and looked and heard a groan, and then I went back to bed again.'