The Wicked Boy (9 page)

‘He kissed me on the docks in London two weeks ago Thursday,' said Coombes, ‘and then to think he went back and killed his mother!'

Coombes was quick to clear Nattie of any part in the crime, and eager to implicate John Fox. ‘The younger boy was not to blame,' he said. ‘He acted entirely on the command of the older boy. He was only eleven years old, and if the older boy told him it was all right he would believe it.' Nattie was in fact twelve.

‘The half-witted man, John Fox, who is associated with the boys in this terrible crime, is responsible for it, I believe,' said Coombes. ‘He was formerly employed on the National Line of steamers, but had become so irresponsible that he was not permitted to go to sea again. He frequently loitered around my premises doing chores and running errands. Latterly I have forbidden him to come to my house.'

Captain Hadley, who had been master of the
France
for more than ten years, endorsed Coombes's suspicions. Fox, he told the
New York Times
reporter, used to sail with him but had become so useless that he was not allowed to come on board the steamer. On one occasion he was found ‘lurking' in a dark gangway with a long knife, lying in wait for a shipmate against whom he bore a grudge. Captain Hadley said Fox was what he called a ‘softy'. The captain spoke highly of the Coombes boys, both of whom he said that he knew well; Mrs Coombes, he said, had been particularly proud of the intelligence of her elder son. Hadley expressed his belief that Fox was to blame for the crime.

A reporter from the
Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette
noted that Mr Coombes was evidently under great mental strain. Coombes told him that he had lived on the best of terms with his wife and sons. ‘My wife had always been a good and kind mother to her children, and I am at a loss to understand how they could attempt this dreadful crime. I am positive that John Fox had some hand in the deed. It is evident that both boys have been influenced by him.'

The reporters spoke to other members of the crew. Those who knew the family described the chief steward's wife as ‘extremely handsome' and his sons as good-looking. They said that they had noticed nothing queer about Robert, but agreed that he had considerable influence over his younger brother.

A
New York Tribune
reporter who spoke to Coombes in his cabin found him a self-possessed and ‘intelligent-looking' man. Coombes elaborated on Robert's diagnosis. ‘The physicians who examined him said that when he arrived at the age of fourteen his skull would have become large enough for his abnormally developed brain.' He explained that he had had no inkling that Robert might be violent. ‘While peculiar, he never did anything to lead us to believe that he might become dangerous. He appeared to be developing a morbid sentiment, which at times gave us uneasiness. If he happened to read of a ghastly or horrible murder, his whole mind appeared to become taken up by it, and nothing could divert him. During these morbid spells he would read all the literature of that character that he could obtain. When the spell wore off he would become natural again and play with his companions as innocently as any child.' Coombes recalled once more how on his last day in London, ‘Robert came down to the dock to see me off, and kissed me good-by.'

It would have been costly for Coombes to rush back to London rather than complete his round trip on the
France
. He told the reporters that he would stay in New York until the next Saturday, and return with his ship as planned.

In Holloway Road, north London, half a mile from Holloway prison, a widowed cooper (or barrel-maker) read a newspaper report about the murder of Emily Coombes and wondered whether the man who had been charged as an accessory to the crime was the same John Fox who had once been apprenticed to him. He visited Fox in gaol.

‘
I found him to be my apprentice
of many years ago,' wrote the seventy-one-year-old John Lawrence in a letter to the
West Ham Herald
. ‘I feel it my bounden duty to do all I can on behalf of the poor fellow in the very serious and dreadful position that he has unwittingly placed himself in.'

6

THIS IS THE KNIFE

Fox, Robert and Nattie waited in Holloway gaol for a week.
At six o'clock
each morning, they were woken by the sound of keys grinding in locks as the warders opened the cell doors. At 7.30 they were given breakfast (a saucerful of porridge) and at ten taken to the exercise court, a large high-walled yard around which they walked in single file. They were returned to their cells after an hour. At midday they had dinner – meat or soup or ‘stirabout' (corn and oatmeal) served in a tin pot – and at five a tea of bread and gruel or cocoa. Smoking was prohibited. Apart from the daily exercise hour and two chapel services on Sunday, they remained alone in their separate cells. The doors were locked for the night at seven.

Those prisoners charged with murder or attempted suicide – on average two new admissions a day – were placed under the observation of George Walker, the Holloway medical officer, so that he could report to the Treasury on their mental condition. Dr Walker interviewed Robert, Nattie and John Fox soon after their admission.
In the prison register
, he listed Robert's occupation as ‘errand boy', his level of education as ‘imperfect' and his mental state as ‘unsound'. He observed that Fox seemed very slow-witted.

In the afternoon of Sunday 21 July two violent thunderstorms broke over London, unleashing the heaviest fall of rain in eight months. The streets and buildings were pelted with hailstones. After the downpour, noted the
London Standard
, the city looked ‘a fortnight younger', its parks and gardens refreshed, its birds singing out in relief. The
Evening News
reported that an inch of water had fallen into the Lea, the river that divided West Ham from the rest of London, ending the longest drought in a hundred years.

Robert, Nattie and John Fox were recalled to the West Ham magistrates' court on Thursday 25 July. A magistrates' court could not try capital crimes, but the hearing before Baggallay would determine whether the prisoners were to be committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey. The boys and Fox were taken by three police constables from Holloway to Stratford, where they were met by Detective Inspector Mellish. It was a grey, warm morning, the air close and still. The prisoners alighted at the courthouse to find about a thousand people gathered on West Ham Lane in the hope of catching sight of them.

Robert and Nattie had no legal representation, but a friend of Fox – probably his former master John Lawrence – had engaged a Stratford solicitor, Charles Crank Sharman, to defend him. Sharman met his client at the courthouse that morning.

Charlie Sharman
, forty-five, was a flamboyant, charismatic figure in the West Ham courts, known for sporting exotic flowers in his buttonhole and for mounting bold and often successful defences. In 1894 he secured the acquittal of a Walthamstow church verger, who had been charged with assaulting a seven-year-old girl, by arguing that it was ‘highly unlikely' that he would risk his position by committing such an act. Sharman had been almost undone as a lawyer four years earlier, when a former clerk wrote a letter accusing him of attempted sexual assault. Sharman retaliated by prosecuting the clerk for blackmail and his case was supported in the West Ham court by Baggallay – a fellow Conservative Party activist, and therefore a political ally as well as a colleague. But when the case reached the Old Bailey in May, the court heard evidence that Sharman had a history of indecent assaults on men and women; the jury not only acquitted the clerk on the charge of blackmail but said that they believed him to have been justified in sending his letter. The disgrace to Sharman should have been devastating – the penalty for a homosexual assault was life imprisonment – but he was practising again in the East London courts by the end of the month. A call in the press to have him struck off the rolls went ignored, and though he resigned his post as Conservative agent for the constituency of West Ham North, by 1895 he had been reappointed even to this.

Sharman had spent the summer of 1895 working as election agent for Ernest Gray, the Tory candidate in West Ham North, and his efforts paid off when, on 15 July, Gray took the seat from the Liberal incumbent. Since Gray had been absent through illness during the campaign, Sharman claimed the credit for the win. He seemed to be riding high when he took on John Fox's defence, thoroughly restored to his position of influence in the district.

Ernest Baggallay reached the courthouse before 10 a.m., much earlier than he had done on the previous Thursday. The reporters and the public pushed in to find their seats as soon as the court opened. When the usher called ‘Silence!' they rose to their feet and Baggallay entered to take his place on the bench. He began by dealing with the charges against the men and women who had been arrested the previous day and held overnight at police stations in West Ham. The Coombes brothers and John Fox were called at 11.15 a.m.

The court was hushed as Fox, Nattie and Robert walked in. They climbed the steps to a raised platform in the middle of the room, enclosed on three sides by iron rails and guarded on the fourth by a burly police constable. Fox looked even scruffier than before. He was no longer wearing Mr Coombes's Sunday best, and instead had put on a greasy, ragged blue serge suit – it was ‘the sort of thing one expects to see on engine cleaners and stokers', said the reporter from the
Star
. The
Evening News
correspondent described Fox as ‘a short squat man, clad in loose, wrinkled garments that hang flabbily from his sloping shoulders. He is limp and dingy looking, his hair tumbled, and a weedy growth of dark moustache and beard showing against the soiled pallor of his face.'

Robert, by contrast, was a picture of composure and wellbeing. He was ‘a slim, active-looking lad of average height, healthy, and browned with open air and sunshine', reported the
Evening News
: ‘such a boy as we see in scores on any playground of the people on a summer's afternoon, wearing a dark blue tennis coat, piped with silk cord, white flannel trousers, turned up at the end, and brown leather shoes. He is cleaner than most boys of his class, his turn-down collar white, his sunburnt face well washed, his close cropped dark hair brushed off his forehead.'
To wear a shirt with a collar
was a mark of respectability – the labouring classes usually went collarless – and the cricket flannels and tennis blazer also smacked of social aspiration: whereas football was a predominantly working-class game, both cricket and lawn tennis were preferred by the middle and upper classes.

The
Evening News
reporter allowed himself a brief meditation on how Robert's mother might have troubled herself over the burst of hair lifting off his forehead: ‘There is no curl in the bunch of it that rises stiffly from his brow,' he wrote; ‘it is such obstinate hair as mothers labour at in the hope to coax it into a neat parting, and one thinks that a dead hand has often wrestled with its stubbornness when the church bells were ringing on a Sunday morning.'

Nattie was wearing pale breeches, dark stockings, and a jacket with a white sailor collar. Though there was only a year between the brothers, he was dressed in the clothes of a schoolboy and Robert in those of a young man. Robert seemed quite the Cockney dandy, a worldly Dodger to Nattie's wide-eyed Oliver Twist.

Guy Stephenson, aged thirty-three, the son of the Director of Public Prosecutions and a barrister who practised at the Old Bailey, was first to address the court. As the junior lawyer in the legal team that would prosecute the case if it were tried, he was preparing the case for the Crown. He had performed a similar role in the trial of the murderer James Canham Read the previous year.

‘After very careful consideration,' said Stephenson, ‘I wish to ask Your Worship to discharge the younger boy. I then intend putting Nathaniel Coombes into the witness box and asking him to tell us the whole story. He has not been approached, and would be merely asked to tell his story.'

‘Do you propose to offer any further evidence against the lad Nathaniel?' said Baggallay. ‘At present I must say I see no evidence against him at all.' Either the magistrate had not understood Stephenson's request, or he was trying to claim the idea of dismissing Nattie as his own, because he asked him exactly the question that had just been put to him: ‘Would it not be as well if he should at once be discharged?'

‘If you please, Your Worship,' said Stephenson.

‘Then he may be discharged,' said Baggallay. ‘Let him stand down and go into that room till he is called for.'

A police sergeant took Nattie to an anteroom. He was now to be a witness against his brother.

Baggallay called the first witness, Police Sergeant Charles Orpwood of the Barking Road station, who had measured up 35 Cave Road. The sergeant produced a plan of the house and described its layout to the court.
On the ground floor, Orpwood explained
, were a passage, or hallway, a front parlour and a back parlour, each parlour measuring eleven foot by nine foot nine inches. Upstairs were two bedrooms, each fourteen foot wide and nine foot deep, with a communicating door. The staircase between the two floors had fourteen steps, and cut across the house, dividing the front and back parts. The house was narrow, with a total width of fifteen feet. The back yard, which contained a washhouse (elsewere described as the kitchen) and a privy, was about fifteen foot long.

Next to be called were Mary Ann Brecht, who ran a general store at 273 Barking Road (two doors up from the undertaker who had arranged Emily Coombes's funeral), and John Brecht, fourteen, the youngest of her five sons. The
Sun
characterised the Brechts' store as a ‘kind of old curiosity shop'. Mrs Brecht had sold Robert the knife found next to his mother's body.