Mary Jane Burrage sent a telegram to Mary Macy, the older sister of Robert and Nattie’s mother, and that same morning received in reply a telegram from Liverpool stating that Emily was not there. Robert and Nattie’s uncle Nathaniel tried the Cave Road house himself, then went to look for the boys in the recreation ground. He could not find them.
At 1.20 p.m., Aunt Emily and Mary Jane Burrage banged again at the door of 35 Cave Road. Mrs Burrage had brought along her youngest son, James, a boy of Robert’s age. At first there was no reply, but at their second knock Robert opened the door. Emily pushed past him, followed by the Burrages, and marched through to the back of the house. Robert, Nattie and Fox had been playing cards – Nattie scrambled them up when he saw his aunt. He rose to his feet but Fox stayed in his chair, smoking a pipe. A strong smell of tobacco permeated the room.
Emily asked Robert where his Ma was.
‘She is with Mrs Cooper,’ Robert said. ‘I will take you to see her.’
‘No,’ said Emily. ‘Your Ma is in this house, and I won’t go away until a policeman comes.’
‘All right,’ said Robert.
On hearing his aunt’s warning, Nattie climbed out of the back parlour window and ran for the market gardens beyond the yard.
Emily asked Robert whether she could go into his mother’s room.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It is locked.’
She asked him where the key was, and he replied that he did not know.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I will burst open the door.’
Mrs Burrage said to Robert: ‘Your mother is lying dead in that room upstairs.’
‘No, she isn’t, Mrs Burrage,’ said Robert. ‘She’s in Liverpool.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Mrs Burrage.
She and Aunt Emily went upstairs, but when they tried to force the door found that it would not give. They sent someone to fetch a spare key from the landlady. The key was brought, and Aunt Emily opened the door to the bedroom. There she saw the form of a woman, lying on the bed, the face covered by a sheet and a pillow. Overcome by the smell of rotting flesh, she drew back and sent Mary Jane Burrage and her son to find a policeman.
Now that the bedroom door was open, the stench spread swiftly through the house. At 1.30 p.m. Harriet Hayward, of 39 Cave Road, approached the front door and bent to peer through the frosted glass panels to see if she could spy the boys in the passage. She was startled by the smell issuing from the letter box. The day was becoming intensely hot. A black cloud of blowflies hovered at the upstairs windows. Mrs Hayward hurried away to fetch Mrs Robertson from number 37. ‘Come and have a smell,’ she urged her.
The Burrages found Constable Robert Twort in Greengate Street, a block away from Cave Road. A single man of twenty-four, Twort lived as well as worked at the Barking Road police depot. He was dressed in a high-collared dark navy woollen tunic with his number on the collar (686K), high-waisted fishtail trousers and a domed helmet. He carried a truncheon, a pen and notebook and a whistle. Twort went straight to the house with the Burrages. Aunt Emily showed him upstairs.
In the front bedroom, PC Twort turned down the sheet and lifted the pillow to reveal a woman’s body, severely decomposed and swarming with maggots. He saw a knife on the bed and a truncheon on the floor. He sent word to the police station, asking for an inspector and the divisional surgeon to come to the house at once.
Aunt Emily approached the bed and looked at her sister-in-law’s body, but the face was so disfigured that she could not recognise her. She returned to the back parlour, where Robert was standing by the window. Fox was sitting on a chair between the door and the dresser.
‘You are a bad, wicked boy,’ she told Robert. ‘You knew your Ma was dead in the room and you ought to have told me.’
‘Auntie,’ he replied. ‘Come to me and I will tell you the truth and tell you all about it.’
His aunt went towards him.
‘Ma gave Nattie a hiding on Saturday for stealing some food,’ said Robert, ‘and she said, “I will give you one too.” Nattie said: “I will stab her. No, I can’t do it, Bob, but will you do it? When I cough twice, you do it.” I did do it.’
Emily asked him if his mother was awake at the time.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She was lying with a hand over her face.’
‘Did your Ma cry?’
‘She did not cry nor speak. I covered her up and afterwards went away to Lord’s cricket ground.’
Emily asked at what time he had killed his mother.
‘About a quarter to four on the Monday morning,’ said Robert, ‘a week ago. I slept with Ma that night and I kicked about a great deal, and she punched me. Nattie was in his room. I did it by myself.’
She asked how he had killed her.
‘I got out of bed and I stabbed her,’ said Robert. ‘Nattie was in the back room, and coughed twice, and that was when I done it, when Nattie coughed. I did it with a knife, and it is on the bed.’
Mrs Hayward of 39 Cave Road had by now come in to number 35, taken a quick look at the corpse on the bed upstairs and then joined the party in the back parlour. She addressed John Fox.
‘What, you John!’ Mrs Hayward said. ‘You have been here all this time. Didn’t you know what was going on?’
‘No, missus,’ he replied. ‘I know nothing about it. The boys fetched me from the ship.’
Robert said: ‘No, Mrs Hayward. John knows nothing about it. I did it.’
‘You bad boy,’ said Harriet Hayward.
Aunt Emily asked him the whereabouts of his father’s gold watch.
‘I have pawned it,’ said Robert. ‘I got Fox to do it. I’ll give you the ticket.’ He took the pawn tickets from a bookshelf on the parlour wall and was about to hand them to her when Twort came into the room. On discovering a murder, a policeman was meant to keep close watch on the body until relieved by another officer, but Twort had found the smell so overpowering that he had remained upstairs for only five minutes.
Aunt Emily told the constable that her nephew had been making a confession to her. Twort cautioned Robert and then asked him to repeat what he had told his aunt. As Robert spoke, Twort took notes in his book.
‘I did it,’ Robert began. ‘My brother Nattie got a hiding for stealing some food, and Ma was going to give me one. So Nattie said that he would stab her, but as he could not do it himself he asked me to do it. He said, “When I cough twice, you do it.” He coughed twice, and I did it. I am sorry that I did it. I did it with a knife, which I left on the bed. I covered her up and left her.’
Twort asked where Nattie was. ‘I think he has gone to Woolwich,’ said Robert, ‘as we were going there this afternoon.’ Woolwich was across the Thames from the Victoria and Albert docks, a short ride on a free ferry.
Twort turned to John Fox and asked what he was doing in the house. Fox said that he had been there since Wednesday. He added: ‘I do not know nothing what has taken place.’
At 2 p.m., Police Sergeant Henry Baulch, a married man of thirty, also from the Barking Road station, knocked at the door of 35 Cave Road. Mrs Hayward let him in as she left the house. Aunt Emily and Twort met him in the passage and took him through to the back parlour.
Robert repeated his confession to the sergeant: ‘My brother, Nattie, said he would kill mother, as she had given him a hiding for stealing food. He then asked me to do it. Nattie then said, “When I cough twice, you stab mother with the knife”, which I did. We then went to a cricket match at Lord’s and have slept in the house ever since.’ Robert gave Baulch four pawnbrokers’ duplicates: those for the watches and the mandolin, and another for an item that his mother had pawned before her death.
‘I took the property,’ Robert told him, ‘and gave it to Fox to pledge.’
‘Yes,’ Fox said, ‘Robert gave it to me and I pawned it.’ Twort told Fox that he must accompany him to the station. He led him away.
Baulch stayed in the house with Robert until the police surgeon, Alfred Kennedy, showed up a
t about 3 p.m. When Dr Kennedy went upstairs to examine the body, Baulch took Robert to the police station at 386 Barking Road.
Meanwhile, other constables were hunting for Nattie. At five o’clock he was found on Tunmarsh Lane, a route to the Plaistow marshes only minutes from his home. PC George Hardy asked him: ‘Is your name Coombes?’
‘Yes,’ said Nattie. ‘I didn’t kill my mother. It was my brother who did it when I was in bed.’
‘You will have to come with me to the station,’ said Hardy.
At the police station, Detective Inspector George Mellish charged Robert Allen Coombes and Nathaniel George Coombes with murder, and John Fox with being an accessory after the fact. Fox was very nervous, jerking his head, looking round him wildly. The boys were calm and said nothing. They were all locked in cells.
Mellish, forty-five, was a member of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department, and had worked for fifteen years for the K division, which covered West Ham and Limehouse. He lived north of Plaistow with his wife and eight children. At 5.15 p.m., he left the police station with Inspector George Gilbert, of the Barking Road branch, to survey the crime scene at 35 Cave Road.
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 evid
ence 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.