Robert addressed his letter to the Reverend Mr Shaw at 583 Barking Road. ‘Dear Mr Shaw,’ he wrote.
I received your letter on last Tuesday. I think I will get hung, but I don’t cares as long as I get a good breakfast before they hang me. If they don’t hang me I think I will commit suicide. That will do just as well. I will strangle myself. I hope you are all well. I go up on Monday to the Old Bailey to be tried. I hope you will be there. I think they will sentence me to death, and if they do I will call all the witnesses liars.
I remain, your affectionate friend, RA Coombes
Robert had drawn two pictures on the letter. The first, captioned ‘Scene I – Going to the Scaffold’, was a sketch of three figures making their way towards a gallows, with the word ‘Executioner’ written above the first figure. The second figure, presumably, was Robert; and the third may have represented Fox, though he did not face a capital charge, or Nattie, though he faced no charges at all.
Beneath this drawing, Robert wrote: ‘Will – To Dr Walker, £3,000; to Mr Hay, £2,000; to Mr Shaw, £5,000; to my father, £60,000; to each of the warders, £300.’
The second picture was entitled, ‘Scene II – Hanging.’ It showed a body suspended by the neck from a gallows, with a hand pulling the rope and a message issuing from the mouth of the dangling figure: ‘Good-bye; here goes nothing. PS – Excuse the crooked scaffold. I was too heavy, so I bent it. I leave you £5,000.’
The letter was skittish, excited, switching between bleakness and gaiety, lightness and weight. Robert seemed full of bravado (he didn’t care about death, only breakfast) and defiance (he would kill himself if he was not killed; he would denounce the witnesses as liars if he was convicted). In the captions to the pictures, he was both an airy ‘nothing’ on the gallows, and a being so heavy that he bent the wooden beam. The reference to his weight bending the scaffold was a joke – a piece of gallows humour – about the wobbly line of his drawing. The tone of the letter was unsteadily detached, as if Robert was half allowing and half refusing the sadness that had started to leak in when he wept in Walker’s office about his mandolin and his cats.
On the day that he killed his mother, the explanation that Robert had given for her disappearance was that a relative had died and left them money. This was a veiled version of the truth: his mother was the relative who had died, and the boys and their playmate Fox were the inheritors of her wealth. ‘All I know is that we are rich,’ he had told his aunt. When Robert predicted his own death, in the letter to Shaw, he became the munificent benefactor. As if his love was money, he bestowed his bounty on the men who had shown him kindness: the prison warders, the Plaistow curates, the prison doctor and, most of all, his father. In this fantasy, death was not an absence but a release of riches.
PART III
THESE TENDER TIMES
9
COVER HER FACE
In the morning of Monday 16 September, Robert, Nattie and John Fox were taken from their cells to the yard of Holloway gaol, where they were ushered into the back of a horse-drawn van and fastened into narrow boxed compartments. A few warders accompanied them on the drive south to Newgate gaol, a four-mile trip that took half an hour.
The Black Maria discharged its passengers at Newgate, next to the Old Bailey law courts in the City of London. Until 1868 a gallows had stood just outside the prison entrance; as executions were no longer conducted in public, the gallows were now inside the yard, in a purpose-built shed fitted with a horizontal glass window. If Robert were to be sentenced to death, this was where he would be hanged. The most recent execution here had been that of Paul Koczula, a twenty-four-year-old waiter who had been found guilty of robbing and murdering his boss’s wife at a German restaurant in Soho. Dr Walker of Holloway gaol had been present at the waiter’s death. On 14 August 1894, he and the other witnesses had watched from benches in the yard as the hangman placed a noose around Koczula’s neck and then pulled a lever to let him drop out of sight through a trapdoor in the ground.
The Coombes brothers and John Fox were led from the gaol to the Old Bailey courthouse through an underground passage known as Birdcage Walk. The roof of the tunnel was a heavy iron grating; the flagstone floor covered the graves of executed convicts.
Shortly after eleven o’clock, the warders guided Robert, Nattie and Fox up a small staircase that climbed straight from the Old Bailey basement into the prisoners’ dock in the Old Court. Robert’s shirt collar was turned up beneath his tennis blazer and Nattie wore a bow tie. Fox had spruced himself up a little, too. His wispy beard had grown fuller and blacker, and he sported a red handkerchief in his breast pocket.
Robert seemed to be suppressing laughter as he stepped in to the raised and bulwarked dock. Nattie ‘gazed around like a visitor inspecting a new building,’ said the Star, ‘with a truly horrible unconcern’. Fox’s expression was grave, and he trembled visibly as he looked about him.
Neither the boys’ father nor their Aunt Emily was present, since both were waiting in a chamber reserved for the witnesses, but the forty-foot-square courtroom was crammed. The benches to the right of the dock were filled with reporters and newspaper artists, a gallery above the dock with members of the public. In front of the dock, in a well between the defendants and the judge, were the barristers-at-law who would defend and prosecute the case and the solicitors and government officials who had instructed them. The twelve men of the jury sat on benches in a box to the left, beneath three square windows that looked on to the dark granite walls of Newgate. Next to the windows were reflectors to brighten the room, and huge lamps for use when London became dense with fog – the city’s ‘pea-soupers’ of soot and sulphur were at a peak in the 1890s.
Justice William Rann Kennedy, the judge who would conduct the trial, sat with two Old Bailey sheriffs opposite the dock. Behind them hung a crimson curtain and a gilded sword, above them a canopy and a carving of the Royal Arms. Robert peered over the dock railing at the judge, smiling broadly.
Kennedy, who was forty-nine, had smooth, clean-shaven skin, full cheeks, large brown eyes and a slightly downturned mouth, which gave him a doleful expression. He was well turned out in court, being one of the few lawyers in Westminster to adhere to the old custom of having his wig powdered and done up every morning. Before becoming a judge he had run a practice in Birkenhead, near Liverpool, specialising in maritime and commercial law, and had twice stood unsuccessfully as Liberal candidate in his constituency. Kennedy had been known at Eton and Cambridge as a brilliant classical scholar and linguist, but once appointed to the Queen’s Bench in 1892 he proved ponderous, with none of the intellectual sparkle that had marked his academic career.
The case against Robert and Fox was to be presented by Charles Gill and Horace Avory, both of whom regularly appeared for the Crown at the Old Bailey. Earlier in the year, the two had prosecuted Oscar Wilde. Famously, Gill had asked Wilde to gloss a line from a poem by his friend Lord Alfred Douglas: ‘What is the love that dare not speak its name?’ It was the love between an older and a younger man, Wilde replied, ‘when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him’. Gill had also helped to convict James Canham Read, the murderer of Florence Dennis, in Chelmsford the previous winter.
Gill began by asking for Nattie to be discharged. The Crown had decided not to prosecute him, despite the West Ham coroner’s belief that he should stand trial, because his evidence might help secure convictions against Robert and Fox. He was clearly less culpable than his brother, and he was the only person who could corroborate or refute the key details of Robert’s confession and Fox’s account of the aftermath of the crime.
After Nattie had been removed from the dock, the charges were read out by the Clerk of Arraigns. Kennedy asked Robert how he pleaded to the murder charge.
‘Guilty,’ said Robert.
His counsel, William Grantham, quickly intervened to inform the judge that Robert’s plea was ‘not guilty’.
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��Tell him to say “not guilty”,’ said Kennedy.
‘Not guilty,’ said Robert, with another wide smile.
Fox was charged with ‘receiving, comforting and abetting’ Robert, in the knowledge that he had committed the murder.
‘Not guilty,’ said Fox.
Just as Gill was about to open the prosecution case, the proceedings were interrupted by an official who wanted to consult Justice Kennedy on a point of law. Kennedy left the room. While the court waited for his return, Fox and Robert were provided with chairs.
When Kennedy came back to the bench at noon, Gill rose to his feet again and ran through the facts of the case. A handsome man of forty-three, Gill was one of the finest advocates of his generation: his preparation for trials was thorough and intelligent, his manner in court unshowy, persuasive and scrupulously fair. His only mannerism was to remove his spectacles for emphasis, whether to signal surprise, doubt, indignation or encouragement. He was suspected of a lurking sympathy for many of the defendants he prosecuted.
The court fell silent when Gill began to reprise the story of the murder. Robert smiled and looked over attentively as the barrister described him buying a dagger with which to kill his mother and concealing it until his father had gone to sea. Gill told how Robert slipped the dagger under his pillow as he got into his mother’s bed on the night of 7 July and how he rose before dawn to retrieve the knife, raise it above his mother’s body and stab her in the bosom.
As Gill’s account went on Robert became sullen and distracted, glancing around the room and then staring at the ground, though he smiled again when the advertisement that he had composed for the Evening News was read out to the court.
Gill told the jury that the Crown had made the fullest possible inquiries into Robert’s state of mind and had passed to his counsel all the information that they had gathered from the Holloway medical officer.
He added that if the charge against Robert were to fail, that against Fox would automatically fail.
The judge queried this claim. ‘Do I understand you, Mr Gill, to say that a person cannot aid and assist an insane person in the concealment of a murder?’
‘No,’ said Gill. ‘I do not say that. I quite admit that I went a little too far in saying that Fox could not be convicted if the lad was insane.’
Kennedy accepted Gill’s retraction and gave him leave to call his witnesses.
Robert and Nattie’s aunt, Emily Coombes, was the first to be summoned. She entered the witness box to the left of the dock, between the judges’ bench and the jury enclosure, and told the court that she had last seen her sister-in-law in the evening of Saturday 6 July. The boys had been playing in the garden, she said, ‘quite happy’. She gave evidence about her subsequent visits to Cave Road, and then Robert’s counsel rose to cross-examine her.
William Grantham, the twenty-nine-year-old son of a High Court judge, was educated at Harrow and Cambridge, and had been called to the Bar in 1890. He had been appearing at the Old Bailey since 1893, usually as prosecuting counsel in theft and burglary trials. His strategy in this case was to present Robert as deranged and – in some respects, at least – guileless.
In reply to his questions, Emily said that Robert’s confession to her was ‘quite open and frank’; the boy ‘did not seem to feel his position at all’.
Grantham asked her about Robert’s mother.
Aunt Emily said she had seen her sister-in-law nearly every day since Christmas. ‘I had known his mother many years,’ she said. ‘She was a very excitable woman.’ To be ‘excitable’ was to be impulsive, agitated, extravagantly emotional; it was a trait sometimes associated with drunkenness, sometimes with hysteria. According to the trajectory of degeneration set out by the French psychiatrist Bénédict Morel in 1857, it would be natural for such tendencies in Emily Coombes to become more acute in her son: a retrogressive family exhibited mild nervous disorders in one generation, neurosis or hysteria in the next, and psychosis in the third; the subsequent, and probably last, generation would be marked by idiocy.
The barrister asked whether Robert had seemed excitable.
‘I have noticed him excitable many times,’ she said. ‘His mother gave him medicine for it when he complained of his head.’
Frederick Sherwood, on behalf of Fox, was next to cross-examine her. A solicitor’s son aged thirty, Sherwood was educated at Oxford and had been appearing as counsel at Old Bailey trials since 1890. Sherwood hoped to persuade the jury that Fox was a trusting dullard, a warm-hearted old fool gulled by a brilliant child.
Sherwood asked Emily for her impression of Fox.
‘Fox struck me as rather a stupid man,’ she said.
Kennedy announced an adjournment for lunch.
When the court reconvened in the afternoon, Nattie was called to the witness box. He looked much younger than twelve, said the Sun reporter, who was struck by the ‘grotesque’ spectacle of ‘this little lad testifying against his brother, scarce older than himself, for a horrible murder’. Nattie stammered slightly as he replied to Gill’s questions.
Nattie told how Robert showed him the dagger, saying: ‘This is the knife I am going to do her with,’ and stuffed it up the back bedroom chimney. He related how Robert came to him on 8 July, having killed their mother, and held out the silver and gold watches. ‘You can have one,’ said Robert, handing Nattie the silver watch, ‘and I will have the other.’
‘My mother has beaten me several times,’ said Nattie. ‘She hit me on the Sunday before she died.’ Asked why he was punished that day, he replied: ‘I was naughty.’ He reported that Robert was present during the beating, and afterwards said: ‘If you cough twice that will show that I will do it.’ There was some confusion about the day on which Emily Coombes had beaten Nattie. Robert had told the police that the beating took place on the Saturday. Nattie had told the coroner the same, but afterwards insisted that he was thrashed on the Sunday.
Gill asked whether he had coughed as agreed.
‘I did not cough.’
Asked whether his brother had given any reason for the murder, Nattie said: ‘Yes. He wanted to go away to some place – to some island – and live.’
Gill asked why Robert had gone into his mother’s room in the week after the murder.
‘He went to see if she was all right,’ said Nattie.
Robert’s counsel, Grantham, asked about the times that Robert ran away.
‘My brother ran away from home suddenly on two occasions, I think. He took me with him – he asked me to go with him.’
Grantham asked how their father had reacted.
‘Our father said nothing about it.’
Nattie confirmed that his brother had been ‘funny in the head’, having suffered from headaches and excitability.
What was Robert’s manner after the murder? asked Grantham.
‘He was quite calm,’ said Nattie, ‘and knew what he was saying then.’
Sherwood examined Nattie on behalf of John Fox.
‘Mother was kind to Fox, too,’ Nattie said. ‘He used to come to the house pretty often. Sometimes he was not there for a week, but sometimes he stopped for a good time.’
Fox leant forward in the dock, listening anxiously to Nattie’s answers.
‘He used to saw up the wood and brush up the garden,’ continued Nattie. ‘When he worked in the house I and my brother talked to him from time to time. We knew him pretty well. I used to go out with Fox sometimes before Mother died. Sometimes I just went to the top of the street with him to see him off.’
Nattie said that he and Robert had spoken to Fox about twice since the arrest. ‘He doesn’t talk much. When he was staying in the house with us he did not talk very much. He is not very sharp. Sometimes we teased him.’
Horace Avory re-examined Nattie on behalf of the Crown. Avory was forty-four, the son of an Old Bailey clerk, and a sterner, more austere figure than his colleague Gill: he was wiry in build, with a small head on a long neck, pinched features and thin li
ps. He inquired further about the conversations between Fox and the boys, asking ‘the most insidious’ questions, said the Sun, in an attempt to prove that Fox knew about the murder, but Nattie gave him no satisfaction.
‘We talked to him when we were generally playing cards,’ said Nattie. ‘We used to talk about who would win the game and that, nothing else. He used to tell us a tale sometimes.’
Avory asked if Nattie and his brother had discussed the murder in that period.
‘After that Monday when Mother was killed my brother never talked about her. We never said a word to each other about it.’
‘What was Robert going to do with your mother’s body?’ asked Avory. ‘Did he ever say?’
Robert wanted to ‘keep her’, Nattie said. ‘He said he was going to leave her up on the bed there, and put some quicklime over her. He said that soon after he did it, on the Tuesday, I think. After the Tuesday nothing further was ever said about it.’
The revelation that Robert had planned to preserve his mother’s body with quicklime caused a stir in the courtroom. Avory sat down and Nattie left the witness box.
The rest of the afternoon’s evidence turned principally on what John Fox knew of the crime. The K division police surgeon, Alfred Kennedy, described the condition of Emily Coombes’s body when it was found, and the multitude of maggots in the bedroom: ‘on the bed alone there was quite a bushel of them, I should say’. A bushel was the equivalent, in dry goods, of eight gallons, or sixty-four pints. Dr Kennedy said that when he reached Cave Road on Wednesday 17 July, he could smell the decomposing body from the street. ‘I am not asserting that the smell was equally diffused some days before,’ he said, under cross-examination from Sherwood. Both the room door and the front door had been open when he reached the house, the doctor agreed, and the odour would have been much less intense before then.
The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer Page 12