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.
Mrs Burrage’s evidence cast a new light on the relationships within the family. According to her, Emily not only favoured Robert but was in constant conflict with Nattie. She saw him as the child most liable to antagonise and undermine her.
Rosina Robertson of 37 Cave Road testified that the Coombes brothers were ‘very sharp boys’ who ‘appeared to know thoroughly well what they were about’.
Harriet Hayward of number 39 agreed. ‘They always appeared to be sharp and intelligent lads,’ she said. ‘They appeared to know right from wrong.’ Mrs Hayward, thirty-three, had been married for eleven years to John Hayward, a carpenter, with whom she had several children. She had known the Coombes family since they moved to Cave Road early in 1892, and she told the coroner that she had seen John Fox calling at their house for the past three years. He had often been left in charge of the boys when their mother went out.
‘Is he a bright kind of fellow?’ asked Lewis.
‘Mrs Coombes used to say he was a very trustworthy man,’ replied Harriet Hayward.
‘You are a woman of the world,’ said the coroner. ‘You know what I mean. Did he seem to be a bright kind of fellow, or a simple one?’
‘A simple one,’ she conceded.
In reply to a question from a juror, Mrs Hayward said she had never heard that Fox had been banned from the house. On the contrary, she said, John Fox and Mr Coombes ‘seemed always to be on friendly terms, and Mrs Coombes seemed also to treat him well’.
The Brechts appeared again, and supplied a few more details about the knife that they had sold Robert. One of a lot of 140 sample knives that Mary Ann Brecht’s husband had bought second-hand, it was made of Sheffield steel, marked ‘Shenton & Co’, and had been damaged by water when doused during a fire. Mrs Brecht said she knew Robert well, having often seen him playing in the street outside her shop.
When John Hewson gave his evidence about the medical certificate that Robert had brought to the docks, the boy’s ingenuity and nerve provoked ‘grim laughter’ in the room. The atmosphere of the coroner’s court in the Liverpool Arms was more informal and less dramatic than that of the police court in Stratford, more conducive to dark humour than to gasps and faints.
The coroner, unlike the magistrate, allowed Hewson to describe what happened after Robert tricked him out of £2 in 1894. Two days later, said Hewson, Mrs Coombes had come to him at the docks and asked if he had seen the boys. She was very distressed. ‘I told her what I had done,’ said Hewson. ‘She said there was not the slightest occasion for her to send to me for money. She then said she had not seen them, for two days.’ A day or two after that Hewson heard that a detective had found the brothers in Liverpool.
Inspector Gilbert, as Mellish had promised, produced the gaudily coloured penny dreadfuls taken from the back parlour. Among the works that he laid on the coroner’s table were The Witch of Fermoyle, The Mesmerist Detective, Under a Floating Island, Cockney Bob’s Big Bluff, Buffalo Bill, A Fortune for £5 and The Bogus Broker’s Right Bower.
Nattie was called to give evidence after lunch. He wore a brown tweed suit with a band of black crape around the left arm. This was the first time that either of the boys had been seen with any item of mourning dress. The coroner reminded Nattie that he need not say anything that might incriminate himself. He was at first self-composed (‘calm almost to the degree of indifference’, said the Sun) as he stood at the coroner’s table, though his voice was very soft. The jurymen leaned forward to catch his replies as he answered some preliminary questions, and asked him to speak up. When the subject turned to his mother’s murder, he became upset.
A long time before his mother thrashed him that weekend, Nattie said, ‘something was said’ about her – when pressed as to what, he burst into tears, sobbing so desperately that it was difficult to get anything out of him.
Nattie slowly grew calmer, and pulled a black-edged mourning handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his face. Lewis asked him what he thought Robert had meant when he told him he was going to buy a knife to ‘do it’ with. In spite of Nattie’s distress, the coroner dealt with him more directly than the magistrate had done the previous week.
‘I did not know what he meant.’
‘But you have already told me that you thought he was going to kill your mother,’ said Lewis.
‘Please, sir,’ said Nattie, starting to cry again, ‘I thought he was going to kill Ma. He said he was going to do it whenever he could.’
The coroner asked why Robert had killed her.
‘Because he wanted some money to go to some places in India.’
‘But couldn’t he go without killing your mother?’
‘He wanted her money. I was to go with him and John Fox was to take us both. He said he knew his way there.’
‘Who put India into your brother’s head?’
Nattie gave no answer. Over the weekend he had told the reporter from the East London Advertiser that it was the penny dreadfuls that had inspired Robert’s dreams of India, but his brother might also have heard stories of the exotic Far East from his history and geography teachers at school, from his father’s seafaring friends, or even from his mother, who was born in India. The subcontinent was the glory of the British Empire, and the newspapers in the first week of July had been full of the wonders of ‘India in London’, the big summer show at Earl’s Court, which boasted snake-charmers, elephants, a six-legged sacred cow, swaying punkahs, stalls selling goat curry, and barges offering rides past palaces and flower gardens.
Lewis turned to the question of what Robert had done after showing Nattie their mother’s body, a matter that the magistrate had not addressed. Nattie said: ‘He stayed in mother’s bed all the same.’
‘What?’ asked Lewis incredulously. ‘After he murdered her?’
Nattie confirmed that Robert had gone back to bed with their mother.
‘How do you know this if you were in bed?’ asked Lewis.
‘He said he was going back to bed,’ said Nattie. Robert emerged from their mother’s room five minutes later, he explained, and came to the back bedroom.
Robert’s return to his mother’s bed struck the coroner with horror. It had an edge of erotic creepiness. More directly, it suggested a further act of violence. Robert had thought he had killed his mother but Emily Coombes had not been quite dead. When Nattie entered her room, she seemed to be stirring back into life, groaning into wakefulness, and Robert seems to have had to attack her again, whether with another thrust of the knife – two wounds were found in her heart – or by stifling her with the pillow that was found covering her face. The murder had been far less clean and swift, far more disturbing to both victim and perpetrator, than Dr Kennedy had indicated.
Nattie said that Robert emerged from their mother’s bedroom with her dress, from the pocket of which he pulled a purse. He had shaken out its coins on Nattie’s bed.
‘How much money was there?’ asked the coroner.
‘I don’t know. He counted it, but did not tell me.’
The purse was evidence of conquest, proof of a transfer of power. By killing his mother, Robert had freed himself from her clutches and released the treasures that she had hoarded in her lair.
The police showed the court a purse that they had retrieved from the house, but Nattie said that i
t was not the right one – the purse Robert had brought to his room had elastic round it. Inspector Gilbert produced another purse, which had been found on Fox when he was searched at the station, and Nattie identified it as the one that Robert had taken from their mother’s dress.
‘Now,’ said Lewis, ‘tell us about the arrangement as to coughing outside the bedroom door.’
‘My brother proposed it, and said I was to cough twice, but I did not do so.’ On the day that they were discovered, Robert had claimed that it was Nattie who suggested the cough signal; and that Nattie had coughed as promised. He had repeated this three times – to his aunt and to two police officers. Nattie had not been asked about this contradiction in the magistrates’ court, and nor did the coroner pursue it any further. Nattie’s simple denial seemed to satisfy him. In any case, as Lewis had noted, Robert had also said that his mother’s punch had prompted him to stab her.
‘Did Fox go up to your mother’s room?’ Lewis asked.
‘No, sir.’
‘Why was the key taken out of the door?’
‘Robert took it down so as no one should get in.’
‘Do you know why he did that?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Was it not because your mother was there?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Do you know why the key was afterwards put under the couch in the front room? Who put it there?’
‘I did, on the Tuesday before we were found out. Before that it was on the clock.’
Robert had bought the knife, Nattie said, while their father was still in London.
‘When he bought it he hid it in the dustbin in the yard, and he left it there till Father went away. He brought it into the house on the Saturday, and put it up the chimney in my back room. He took it out on the Sunday night, and said he was going to put it under the pillow. He also said he was going to try to do it that night.’
On the Sunday, said Nattie, he and Robert and their mother had breakfast, dinner and tea together. He had gone to sleep in the back bedroom at 8.45 that night.
And on the day that they were discovered, the coroner asked, ‘You jumped out of the window?’
‘Yes, and that was all of it. We got found out, and was took to the police station.’
The carelessness of Nattie’s reply provoked some laughter from the jury – he might have been admitting to a prank or a petty theft. The boy laughed too.
Lewis told the jury that he thought a further adjournment was necessary, to give the police time to trace Fox’s movements in the days after the murder. The inquest would resume on Thursday. Sergeant Erry, the coroner’s officer, agreed to take care of Nattie in the meantime.
During the first adjournment of the inquest into Emily Coombes’s death, Charles Lewis had investigated the deaths from diphtheria of several children whose parents were Peculiar People, members of a Wesleyan sect formed in Essex in 1838. In accordance with their interpretation of a passage in St James’s Epistle, the parents had not called a doctor when their children fell ill, and instead tried to cure them through prayer and the anointment of oil.
The Children’s Act of 1889 enabled the state to prosecute a parent for the ill-treatment or culpable neglect of a child, and an amendment of 1894 specified that failure to obtain medical help could be an offence. Yet all that the coroner’s court was able to do in the Peculiar People cases was give a verdict of death from natural causes – it was hard to prove that a death from diphtheria could have been prevented or even delayed by medical intervention. Lewis announced that he was ‘sick and tired’ of having these cases reported to him when he was powerless to act, and demanded that the law be tightened up. When a Peculiar father explained to him, ‘I stand up for the Lord’, Lewis returned: ‘You can lie [down] and die, if you like, but it is cowardly, most cowardly, to allow helpless children to do so.’
On Wednesday 31 July, during the second adjournment of Emily Coombes’s inquest, the coroner dealt with the death of yet another Peculiar child who had not been attended by a doctor. Lewis berated the parents, saying that he was sure that they would have called in help if their pig or donkey had fallen ill. The parents did not disagree. They simply pointed out that the Bible said nothing about animals.
A few new witnesses were heard on Thursday 1 August, the final day of the Coombes inquest: two dock constables and a marine engineer who had seen Fox in the week after the murder; the keeper of the coffee house at the end of Cave Road; and the headmaster of Robert and Nattie’s school. The sightings of Fox at the docks proved confusing, two witnesses claiming they had noticed him wearing a smart suit on days before it could have been given to him by Robert. The coffee-house keeper, William Richards, also seemed muddled about dates, insisting that the trio came to his shop with fishing rods on Tuesday, which was the day before Fox had been collected from the Spain. He added that Fox and Robert had been in the habit of visiting his shop together for the past two years; usually Fox arrived first and waited for the boy. Richards claimed that he had often tried to hear what they said to one another but had been unable to do so. The headmaster of the Cave Road school testified to the intelligence of both brothers, and noted that Robert had been very attentive during his scripture lessons.
Nattie, who had been held in police custody since Monday, was then briefly examined again. He was not this time given a seat. He stood up to answer the questions.
‘When was the first talk about going to India?’ asked Lewis. ‘Was that before your mother was killed?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Joseph Horlock, the foreman of the jury, asked: ‘What day was it that you first talked about the coughing signal and killing your mother?’
‘It was on the Sunday,’ said Nattie.
‘Did you ever ask your brother not to kill your mother?’ asked Lewis.
‘Yes, once I asked him not to do it.’
‘When was that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Was it before the Saturday? Before your father went away?’
‘It was before he came home.’ The boys’ father had returned from his previous voyage on the SS France on Monday 24 June, the day before Robert gave in his notice at the Thames Iron Works. This suggested that the brothers had discussed the murder plan in the fortnight that Robert was employed at the iron yard.
‘Did you ask him not to kill her before the knife was put up the chimney in your bedroom?’
‘No, I said nothing to him.’
Detective Inspector Mellish showed the jury the suit that Fox had been wearing when arrested. Inspector Gilbert produced the boy’s nightshirt that had been found hanging on a line in the kitchen. It was lightly spattered with blood.
Lewis addressed the twelve members of the jury before inviting them to reach a verdict. ‘This case is one of the most revolting, heartless and unnatural ever presented to a jury,’ he said. He told them that their chief responsibility was to establish the cause of death, a matter on which Dr Kennedy had been very clear. ‘Not only was there one stab, which went through the heart,’ said Lewis, ‘but two, and the knife produced was found on the bed.’
Yet, he reminded the jurymen, they also had the power to name the suspected perpetrator or perpetrators of Emily Coombes’s murder and to commit him or them for trial. They would almost certainly name Robert, since he had made a confession; the question was whether they would also commit Fox or Nattie. Lewis acknowledged that the Treasury had withdrawn the case against Nattie, but told the jury that this should not prevent them from naming him if they thought he was implicated in the crime: ‘If the jury should be of opinion that he had knowledge of what was going to be done, and the purpose of it, he would be an accessory before the fact, and as such be liable with the principal.’ If Nattie knew why the knife had been bought, Lewis explained, he was – according to the law – guilty along with the person who made the purchase.
He clarified the definition of an ‘accessory before the fact’: this was someone who, even if he was not
present at the crime, had ‘procured, counselled, commanded or abetted’ another person to commit the felony. However, said Lewis, ‘he could not be an accessory if he had countermanded anything that had been said’. Lewis’s keen questioning of Nattie on the matter of whether and when he had discouraged Robert from killing their mother was intended to untangle this issue: only if Nattie had tried to stop Robert after the purchase of the knife would he be in the clear.
The Coombes brothers were young, the coroner observed, but ‘the law says that between seven years and fourteen years an infant is liable, and can be charged with felony if the jury is thoroughly well-satisfied that he has the capacity to understand good from evil. Therefore if you are of opinion that one or both of these boys thoroughly understands right from wrong, then they are amenable to the law.’
The jury did not need to deal with the possibility that John Fox was an ‘accessory after the fact’, Lewis said, and should commit him for trial only if they believed that he had been involved in the murder plot. His conduct after the killing fell outside the jurisdiction of the inquest, which dealt with just the death and not its aftermath.
The jury retired, and after an hour and ten minutes delivered the verdict towards which the coroner had been guiding them: ‘Wilful Murder against Robert Allen Coombes, and as an accessory before the fact against Nathaniel, inasmuch as he conspired with his brother Robert to murder his mother, and he never did anything to prevent his brother carrying out the dreadful deed.’
The foreman, Horlock, commended the police on the manner in which they had conducted the case and offered the jury’s condolences to the husband and relatives of Emily Coombes. The jurors signed a document attesting to their verdict, and Lewis sent a certificate to the registrar at Somerset House, giving the cause of Emily Coombes’s death as ‘wilful murder’.
The coroner issued a warrant for the re-arrest of Nathaniel George Coombes. Nattie was taken back into custody and delivered to Holloway by Detective Sergeant Don. He was to remain in gaol, with his brother and John Fox, until the September sessions of the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey.
The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer Page 9