The Wicked Boy (6 page)

The inspectors examined the corpse of Emily Harrison Coombes. Her body was on the left-hand side of the bed and inclined slightly to the left. She was dressed in a chemise, a petticoat, drawers and stockings – on the night of her death she had gone to bed in her underwear rather than a nightdress. There were two gaping wounds near her heart, each about an inch and a half deep. These were infested by maggots, and maggots had also destroyed her thighs, calves and genitals, her eyes and her nose. Her chemise and bedclothes were stained with dried blood. A blood-soaked ‘diaper' – a cloth of fine white fabric with a raised diamond pattern – was lying on the left-hand side of the bed, near the washstand. The maggots had wriggled across the bedclothes and dropped on to the floor.

The police discovered
a bloodied wedding ring and two purses on the bed. The leather purse was empty. The white purse, a seaside souvenir constructed from two shells joined by a hinge, contained four threepenny pieces and two foreign coins. Elsewhere in the bedroom were an empty jewel case and a quantity of loose jewellery: a gold bracelet, a brooch, shirt studs, two more wedding rings, a pair of silver earrings. The chest of drawers had been ransacked and its contents strewn on the floor. On top of the chest was a pawnbroker's ticket and a locked cash box with a smashed base.

In the back parlour downstairs the police found Robert's collection of penny dreadfuls, which they gathered up as evidence. They also discovered the key to Emily Coombes's bedroom, tucked under a sofa cushion, and the torn-off date of the medical certificate that Robert had shown John Hewson. From the scullery they took a boy's flannelette nightshirt, which had been hanging on a line over the fireplace, as well as two full-size blue serge jackets, a pair of serge trousers and a waistcoat.

On a table they found three unsent letters on a blotting pad, two by Robert (to his father and to the
Evening News
) and one by his mother, written to her husband on the day before she died. They found the rent book – paid up to 8 July, but missing the 15 July payment – as well as an IOU for £5 and a post office savings book with a balance of £35. Robert's father had left £10 in cash to tide the family over during his five-to-six-week absence, of which the boys had spent about £7 in ten days.

There was a knife on the bed in the front bedroom, as Robert had said. Mellish and Gilbert saw the truncheon on the bedroom floor, as well as an empty revolver in the front parlour and a new hatchet in the back bedroom. They thought that the truncheon might have been kept as protection against intruders, or as a stick to pound washing. The presence of the gun was unexplained – perhaps it was a souvenir brought back from America by Robert and Nattie's father, like the silver watch and the mocking bird. The hatchet was probably used to chop wood; the police inspectors thought that this one might also have hacked open the cash box in the bedroom.

Inspectors Mellish and Gilbert summoned an undertaker to transfer Emily Coombes's corpse to a coffin shell and transport it to the public mortuary on the Barking Road.

PART II

THE CITY OF THE DAMNED

4

THE MACHINE AND THE ABYSS

Robert, Nattie and John Fox stayed overnight in the Barking Road police cells and on Thursday morning were taken to the magistrates' court in Stratford for a preliminary hearing.
The courthouse in West Ham Lane
had been built eleven years earlier to designs by the architect also responsible for the Stratford town hall, which was next door, and the Barking Road public hall and library. It was a three-storey yellow-brick building, Italianate in style and adorned with Portland stone carvings of the Royal Arms. There was no separate court for young defendants. Though both Robert and Nattie were children – defined by the Children's Act of 1889 as a boy under fourteen or a girl under sixteen – they were considered criminally responsible if they could tell right from wrong, and would be tried in the same way as adults.

A huge crowd had assembled outside the courthouse.
The
Sun
, a Liberal halfpenny paper, observed that the excitement generated by the recent election in West Ham ‘had given place to an excitement of a very different kind'. The court opened when the district's stipendiary magistrate,
Ernest Baggallay
, reached Stratford from his home in Kensington, an affluent neighbourhood near the centre of London. ‘West Ham Police-Court depends for its opening on whether Mr Baggallay has caught his train or not,' said the radical evening paper the
Star
. ‘To-day it was half-past eleven before he arrived to deal with public business.' The police cleared him a path through the crowd.

Baggallay had accepted the position of salaried magistrate for West Ham eight years earlier, after surrendering his seat as Conservative MP for Brixton, south London. He was a slender, moustachioed man of forty-five, neatly turned out, who leant forward pertly in his seat as he heard the cases brought before him. He was sometimes dismissive of witnesses.
In Canning Town police court
that week, he had listened to two women testify against a neighbour accused of having neglected and beaten three of his children. One woman told the court that the children had come to her starving, saying that their father was giving them no food; the other said that she had heard the father knocking them against the wall. Baggallay was impatient with their testimony. ‘Let us have the doctor's evidence,' he suggested. ‘These women do so exaggerate.' The doctor confirmed that he had treated members of the defendant's family for bruises and black eyes. An engine driver then testified to having heard the children screaming and begging for mercy. Even after this, Baggallay declined to find against the accused.
Despite the passage of the Children's Act
, which made it possible to prosecute a parent for neglect or cruelty and even to remove a child from his or her family, many magistrates were reluctant to intervene in such matters. Corporal punishment was commonplace, and the popular presumption remained that a parent's authority over a child was close to sacrosanct.

Fox, Nattie and Robert were led into the courtroom together. Fox slouched towards the dock in Mr Coombes's grey suit, which looked several sizes too large for him. Robert walked in coolly and stood upright in white flannel trousers, brown boots and a blue tennis jacket braided with gold. Nattie also held himself erect, but was so small that he could barely see over the dock's top rail. He wore knickerbockers and a light tweed jacket. Both boys stood with their hands clasped behind their backs, as they had been taught to do at school. Their father was not present: the older Robert Coombes was halfway across the Atlantic, unaware that his wife was dead and his sons were in court for her murder.

The law barred defendants from testifying, but since Fox, Robert and Nattie had no legal representation they were entitled to question the witnesses that Baggallay called. The first was Alfred Kennedy, forty-eight, the police surgeon who had visited Cave Road on Wednesday. He had run a practice since the 1870s in Balaam Street, and he served as surgeon for the K division of the Metropolitan Police. After the doctor's evidence about the condition of the corpse, Baggallay turned to Fox and asked: ‘Fox, do you wish to ask the witness any questions?'

Fox stammered softly, ‘All I know is . . .' and tailed off.

‘Well,' said Baggallay, ‘you need not make a statement; nothing is said about you by the witness. The same applies to you boys. The witness simply refers to what he found.' Alfred Kennedy then left the courtroom for the mortuary, where he was due to conduct the post-mortem on Emily Coombes's body.

Aunt Emily gave her evidence. She said that she had last visited her sister-in-law on Saturday 6 July, and had arranged to see her again two days later. On Monday, she said, she knocked several times at the door of 35 Cave Road but received no reply – this was the first day on which Robert and Nattie were at Lord's. She related how she had tried the house again the following Monday, when Fox opened the door to her, and how she finally forced her way in on Wednesday, with Mary Jane Burrage, and discovered the crime. When she described how Robert had confessed to her, she broke down in tears, and she sobbed through the rest of her testimony.

Baggallay asked Fox, ‘Do you wish to ask any questions, Fox?'

‘You found me in the parlour,' Fox said to her.

‘Yes,' said Baggallay. ‘She says so.'

‘That was the only place I was,' said Fox.

Aunt Emily was led weeping from the court.

James Robertson took the witness stand and told the court that he had changed a sovereign for Robert on Monday 8 July and that his wife had then paid the rent for 35 Cave Road.

PC Twort gave evidence about the arrest of the boys. Fox asked him: ‘Did I tell you I was sleeping in the parlour?'

‘Yes,' said Twort.

‘Did I say it was done two and a half days before I came there?'

‘No,' replied Twort. ‘You said nothing about it.'

Fox did not get a chance to question PS Baulch, as the sergeant fainted in the witness box while describing his visit to Cave Road on Wednesday. He was carried out of the court. Two or three women in the public gallery had already collapsed during the hearing and been removed from the room.

At the conclusion of the evidence, Detective Inspector Mellish asked for the boys and Fox to be remanded in gaol while the investigation continued. He suggested that Robert be examined by the prison's medical officer. Baggallay said he hardly knew what to do with boys of their age – he had never sent lads so young to prison, but he could see no alternative. He remanded them and Fox to Holloway gaol.

As such a big crowd had assembled outside the court house, Baggallay asked the police to avoid walking Fox and the brothers through the streets in handcuffs, but instead to find a cab to take them to the railway station. Mellish said that he would arrange a conveyance. The boys were both seen laughing as the police hustled them into a horse-drawn cab in West Ham Lane.

The
Stratford Express
approved of how Ernest Baggallay had protected the boys from being paraded through the district on their way to the station. The magistrate had saved them from becoming a piece of street theatre, shielding them from the ‘vulgar gaze', the ‘vulgar derision or – still more stinging – vulgar sympathy' of the public.

At 4.30 that afternoon
a street vendor in Northern Road
, Plaistow, was selling copies of the
Evening News
, the right-wing halfpenny paper in which Robert had planned to advertise for a loan. The edition of Thursday 18 July carried reports that the Tories had routed the Liberals and radicals throughout the metropolis in the early stages of the general election: ‘Bravo, London!' the headline ran. ‘A glorious victory!' The vendor was calling out to passersby that the issue contained reports of the Coombes hearing. A disgruntled customer notified a passing police constable from the Barking Road station that he had found no mention of the case in his copy of the paper. The constable warned the newspaper salesman to stop defrauding the public, at which the vendor punched the policeman in the eye, knocking him down, and then kicked him repeatedly as he lay on the ground.

Holloway gaol
, which lay seven miles west of Stratford, was the city's main remand prison and the largest such institution in the country. An average of seventy men and boys were admitted each day to be held within its walls until called for trial. The gaol was constructed in the 1850s on the panopticon principle, with a hub radiating out to six wings. From the entrance on Parkhurst Road, it looked like a castle, its central arched gateway flanked by crenellated turrets and statues of stone griffins clutching leg irons and keys. ‘May God preserve the City of London,' read the foundation stone in the prison wall, ‘and make this place a terror to evil-doers.'

Robert was familiar with stories of crime and punishment. As well as having seen James Canham Read appear before the magistrates in Southend, he had read many penny dreadfuls that featured Cockney villains. In
Joe Phoenix's Unknown; or, Crushing the Crook Combination
, the East End criminals dream up ‘dodges' to acquire ‘a tidy bit of swag'. They then ‘cover their tracks', ‘lie low' and if unlucky enough to be caught by ‘bobbies' or ‘peelers' are put in ‘bracelets' and brought before the ‘beak'. They will try to ‘brazen the thing out' but may end up ‘doing time' in ‘stone jug'. On no account will they ‘peach' or ‘split on their pals'.

The police rang the bell at the Holloway entrance. A grate opened in the heavy oak door, an eye peered out, and the iron bolts were drawn back to admit the new prisoners. They were directed to the left, where the 350 men being held on remand were housed in five wings, supervised by forty warders. A single wing to the right accommodated sixty-five female convicts.

New arrivals were taken across a courtyard to the inner entrance of the prison, and into a long passage with reception cells on either side. They waited until summoned by a warder, who informed them of the prison's rules, then told them to strip to the waist in order to be weighed and measured. A warder cropped the prisoners' hair, sent them to bathe, bundled up and stored their clothes, and issued them with dark grey uniforms.

Robert, Nattie and John Fox were led through the central hall, beneath a glass roof in a massive iron frame, to individual cells in the three-storey blocks. Each cell measured thirteen by seven foot and was nine foot high, with an asphalt floor, whitewashed walls and a small window. Pinned to one wall were the prison regulations, a copy of the prison timetable and a card detailing the prisoner's name, number and age. The cells also contained hymn books and copies of the Prayerbook and the Bible. The boys and John Fox took to their pallet beds for the night.