The Wicked Boy (11 page)

If Nattie had heard his mother groaning in her bed, Dr Kennedy had been wrong to tell the coroner that Emily Coombes's death was instantaneous.

‘Did you go at all after that and look at your mother?'

‘About twice.'

‘How many days afterwards?'

‘I think it was on the Wednesday and Thursday.'

‘On that morning did you two boys go out?'

‘Yes; we went to Lord's Cricket Ground.'

‘Had you any money?'

‘Yes.'

‘Where did you get it from?'

‘She had some in her dress.'

‘Who had?'

‘My mother.'

‘Did you take it?'

‘No; Robert got it out. I saw him take it. He brought the dress into my room and there took the money out.' This was the dress that Emily had taken off the previous night, before going to bed in her underclothes.

‘Did you see the money box? Who broke that open?'

‘That was broke open a long time ago.' Nattie did not specify that it was he and Robert who had smashed it open, before running away to Liverpool together a year or two earlier.

‘When did John Fox come to the house?'

‘He came on the Wednesday afternoon.'

‘Now, when you went upstairs on the Wednesday and Thursday did you go alone?'

‘No, my brother went up with me.'

‘Anyone else?'

‘John Fox went up to make the bed.'

‘Did he go into the front room?'

‘No.'

‘Was anything said between you and Fox about your mother?'

‘No.'

‘Did he ask about your mother?'

‘He asked my brother where she had gone, and he said she had gone to Liverpool.'

‘Did he ask any more questions?'

‘No, sir.'

Stephenson asked Nattie when the unpleasant smell in the front bedroom had first become apparent.

‘There was a bad smell in the house when I opened the door. That was going on for a long time before my aunt came, but Fox did not say anything about it.'

Baggallay asked Nattie if he had seen Robert write the letters to his father and to the
Evening News
. Nattie said that he had.

Sharman then submitted questions on Fox's behalf. These were put to Nattie by Baggallay, since he had established a rapport with the boy. In reply, Nattie confirmed that the two boys went together to fetch Fox and that they did not tell him that their mother was dead.

Nattie was dismissed, and Guy Stephenson said that this closed his case.

Sharman addressed the magistrate. ‘I submit that there is no evidence to show that Fox knew of the terrible crime that had been committed,' he said. ‘To be convicted, it would be necessary that he should be proved to have full knowledge of the crime; but there is not a tittle of evidence that he did. On the contrary, the little lad said that nothing was said about it, and that Fox was told the mother had gone to Liverpool. He was fetched for the purpose of minding them, and there the matter seems to rest, with the exception of the pawning of the goods. This was done at the instance of Robert, who said his mother gave him permission to do so.' Sharman added that two of the three articles that Fox pawned had belonged to Robert rather than his parents. Fox could not have believed that there was anything illicit about pledging these.

Baggallay pointed out that the visits to the pawnbrokers were not the only indication that Fox had colluded with the boys: he had also taken the letter to Hewson asking for money on 13 July. Sharman replied that it was by no means clear that Fox was aware of the contents of the letter.

For the Crown, Stephenson argued that though many of Sharman's remarks were pertinent, it would be better to address them to a jury. Fox and Robert, he insisted, should both be tried.

‘Yes,' said Baggallay, ‘under the circumstances I do not see how I can do other than commit both for trial.' Sharman asked for bail for Fox, and Baggallay said he would accept two sureties in £100 each pending trial at the next sessions of the Central Criminal Court.

Nattie left the court in the care of his mother's family. Robert was taken back to Holloway gaol. He was laughing as he got into the cab.

Over the weekend, the national press reported on the case. The
Illustrated Police Budget
remarked that Robert Coombes was the embodiment of the ‘New Boy'. Like the New Woman, the paper said, the New Boy is ‘a terror – partly created by the School Board. He is bossy and cheeky, he smokes, drinks, and as a fact goes in for other vices as soon as possible.' In 1895 the phenomenon of the New Woman – an assertive firebrand, smoking cigarettes and riding bicycles in her ‘rational' dress of knickerbockers and stockings – was being picked over and parodied in the press. Here was a child to match, even to surpass, the subversive woman: a working-class upstart with so little respect for his elders that he thought nothing of killing them.

The
Daily Chronicle
reported that the French neurologist Désiré-Magloire Bourneville was taking an interest in the Coombes case. Dr Bourneville was head of psychiatry at the Bicêtre Asylum, near Paris, where he specialised in treating delinquent and mentally deficient adolescents. Bourneville held the view that both Coombes boys were responsible for the murder, and had been motivated by an atavistic impulse. His interpretation was based on the theories of the Italian scientist
Cesare Lombroso
, a believer in racial degeneration who argued that criminals and lunatics were throwbacks to a lower stage of evolution. Bourneville said that he would like to have data by which he could trace the hereditary characteristics that had led to Robert and Nattie's crime: ‘germs of perversity, alcoholic mischief, or other more delicate imprints'.

And yet, Bourneville admitted to reporters, the premeditation of the ‘Plaistow boy-murderers', their calm levity after the killing and their cunning explanation of their mother's absence did not indicate primitive mental development. This was a peculiarly puzzling case, he said, likely to baffle every modern group of criminologists.

The
Evening News
did its best to describe Robert's physiognomy in terms that conformed to the stigmata of degeneration identified by scientists such as Lombroso and Bourneville. ‘The boy is large-headed,' noted that paper's reporter, ‘his skull projecting at the back, his ears big and noticeably standing out. His forehead is straight, but low, and his nose and mouth protuberant, the chin receding, the cheekbones high, and the line from eye to mouth disproportionately long. His eyes are dark, deep-set, and shifty, and the bumps behind his ears highly developed.' The characteristics listed by Lombroso as traits of atavism included a low, sloping forehead, large and prominent ears, deep-set eyes and an insensitivity to pity or pain. Yet in the newspaper illustrators' images Robert did not resemble the pale, buckled urban criminal of the criminologists' textbooks: he looked robust, alert, a prime specimen of a boy. Perhaps his twisted, atavistic self was concealed from view, as
the wicked Mr Hyde
was concealed within the upright Dr Jekyll in Robert Louis Stevenson's novella of 1886.

A group of doctors
based in Nancy, in the north-east of France, were also said to be following the case. Instead of ascribing mental disturbance to hereditary impairments, the Nancy school, led by Hippolyte Bernheim, believed that the mind could be warped by disturbing experiences and cured by hypnotic suggestion. When Sigmund Freud studied briefly under Bernheim at Nancy in 1889, he gained ‘
the profoundest impression
of the possibility that there could be powerful mental processes which nevertheless remained hidden from the consciousness of man'.

Nattie was taken to temporary accommodation in East London by his mother's relatives, who had travelled down by boat from Liverpool. The ‘motherly woman' on whom he had leant in the courtroom was probably his mother's older sister Mary Macy, who lived in Toxteth Park with her widowed mother, Tryphena. Mary was forty-three and had five children, the eldest of them a man of twenty-three and the youngest a boy of Nattie's age. She was also guardian to the ten-year-old son of her other sister, Isabella, who had died in 1888 at the age of twenty-five. Nattie knew his Aunt Mary well, since the whole family had lived near her in Toxteth a few years earlier.

The family gave a reporter from the
East London Advertiser
permission to interview Nattie. The boy told the journalist that his brother had been passionately fond of penny dreadfuls, and it was through reading one of these that the idea became fixed in his mind of going to India in search of ‘romance and riches'.

Of the identifiable penny dreadfuls in Robert's collection, only one had an Indian component:
Cockney Bob's Big Bluff
; or, the Thugs Terror
features a trio of Indians caught up in a New York detective adventure. The villain is the Rajah Jaipur, who possesses a man-eating tiger; his enemy is Ongo Phal, a snake-charmer with a lethal python; and the heroine of the story is the beautiful Rana, who is first seen sleeping on a couch, clad in ‘loose garments which fell about her exquisite figure in a manner that betrayed its perfect contour'. Ongo warns Rana: ‘White men come! Lose not a jiff! Get out big hurry!' Yet Rana falls in love with a white man called Harold, and when the Rajah attacks her beloved she feels Harold's pain as if it were her own, their shared suffering tinged with eroticism: his every groan ‘cut her to the heart, like the sharp thrusts of a keen knife wielded by a strong hand'.

Nattie said that in June, Robert had pleaded with his mother to be allowed to go to India, but she refused to countenance the idea and insisted that he stay at the ironworks. It was this dispute, said Nattie, that first put the idea into Robert's head of murdering her: Robert hoped that if he killed her while his father was at sea, he would be able to help himself to her jewellery and the money that had been left for their upkeep.

Emily Coombes was at all times devoted to her sons, Nattie claimed, and in fact spoilt them with her kindness. In this interview, conducted under the supervision of his murdered mother's family, Nattie portrayed Emily Coombes as loving and generous. He did not explain why he had colluded with Robert's plan to kill her, and nor did he acknowledge the act that prompted the murder: the thrashing that she had given her younger son.

7

CHRONICLES OF DISORDER

The inquest into Emily Coombes's death reopened at the Liverpool Arms on Monday 29 July. Mellish and Gilbert again watched on behalf of the police. Nattie, who was due to testify, was brought in by one of his uncles. He sat stolidly through the questioning of the other witnesses.

Much of the evidence repeated that which had been heard before Baggallay on Thursday, but Charles Carne Lewis called a few extra witnesses and adopted a different line of questioning. Despite the fact that the magistrates' court had discharged Nattie, Lewis was particularly probing about his role in the crime.

First, Lewis had a few further questions for Robert and Nattie's aunt Emily. She looked very worn, according to the
Leytonstone Express
, when she came in to the court. In answer to the coroner, she testified that she had never seen anything in either of the boys to indicate that they ‘did not know what they were about'.

‘They were rude boys,' she said. ‘I thought them impertinent.'

‘To you?' asked the coroner.

‘No, sir, to their mother.' In fact, said Aunt Emily, she believed that her sister-in-law had been generally ‘too fond of the children and too weak with them'.

‘You mean you think the mother spoilt them, being so fond of them?'

‘Yes.'

‘So as a sort of natural return they were very rude to her?'

‘Yes.'

Her sister-in-law, she said, had been ‘very proud and fond of Robert'.

One of the jurymen asked if it was within the scope of the inquiry to ask what kind of reading the lads indulged in.

‘The last book Robert had to read while his mother was alive was
The Last Shot
,' said Emily.

Detective Inspector Mellish said that the books found in the house would be produced.

Joseph Horlock, the foreman of the jury, asked Emily whether Nattie had overheard her exchange with Robert on the Monday before their mother's body was discovered.

She said that he had: ‘When I asked Robert where his mother was, Nathaniel must have heard what he said in reply.' This confirmed, if confirmation were needed, that Nattie was privy to his brother's lies about their mother's whereabouts.

Asked about Nattie's reactions on the day that the body was found, she said: ‘Directly I remarked, “Your mother is in the house”, Nathaniel made a dash and jumped out of the window.'

A jury member asked: ‘He was sensible enough to know that something was the matter?'

‘Yes,' Aunt Emily replied.

Mary Jane Burrage then gave evidence for the first time. A ‘pale and sedate-looking person of middle age', as the
Sun
described her, she told the court that she was an intimate friend of Robert and Nattie's mother, whom she had known for three years. She had last visited her on the Saturday evening before her death. The Coombes brothers were ‘very intelligent but also very rude boys', she said. ‘They knew well what they were about.' Mrs Burrage confirmed that Emily Coombes had taken pride in Robert's academic achievements. She said that she had been very kind to her sons in every way and had been exasperated by their behaviour.

Nattie was a particular problem, Mrs Burrage said. ‘She complained to me many times of Nathaniel being such a bad boy he would not obey her. Nathaniel has been present and heard her say so. I used to try to console her by saying he would improve as he grew older.' Emily Coombes had described Nattie as being very cruel to her, said Mrs Burrage. ‘He “cheeked” her so habitually that she often declared she didn't know what to do with him. When told to do anything, he openly defied her, and at dinner would snatch things off the table and help himself in spite of her remonstrance.' Nattie, said Mrs Burrage ‘was addicted to pilfering food'. It was a theft of this kind for which he had been beaten shortly before his mother's murder.