The Wicked Boy by Kate Summerscale Read Free Book Online Page A

corpse – ‘the thing on the bed’, as she described her friend’s body. ‘The smell!’ she exclaimed, reeling at the memory. ‘The flies were everywhere.’ On the right side of Emily’s face, she said that she had seen a clot of blood, apparently from a wound to the temple, and afterwards had watched the doctor remove the clot to reveal a writhing cluster of maggots.
    Mrs Burrage reported that the boys’ grandmother in Bow was ‘nearly mad with shock’.
    The
Star
correspondent asked if Fox had rented a room in the house.
    â€˜No,’ she said. ‘Old John was not a lodger – Mrs Coombes never had any lodgers, she was not that kind of woman.’ Mrs Burrage was at pains to impress on the reporter that both she and her friend were respectable housewives who did not need to bring in extra cash.
    Mrs Burrage claimed that Fox had never been to the house in Emily Coombes’s lifetime, unless perhaps to do a job for Mr Coombes. In this, as in other matters, she expressed with certainty things that she did not know for sure. Family, friends and neighbours were to testify that John Fox had been a frequent visitor to Cave Road before the murder, whether to chop wood for Emily Coombes or to look after the boys; he had even helped the family move in to the house in 1892. Mrs Burrage went on to assert that Fox was thirty-six (he was forty-five) and to cast doubt on his honesty, saying that he was adept at faking simple-mindedness, or ‘playing silly’.
    The reporter asked her to comment on certain rumours about the boys and their mother.
    â€˜It is not true that they were kept without pocket money,’ she replied, ‘and it is a lie to say that Mrs Coombes drank – as great a lie as ever was told. You can see that by her beautiful house.’ For Mrs Burrage, the condition of the house was proof of her friend’s virtue and sobriety. She told the reporter that 35 Cave Road was prettily furnished and well kept, replete with lovely and interesting objects, some of them valuable, which Mr Coombes had brought back from his travels.
    Mrs Burrage said that she dreaded to think how he would take the news.
    Throughout the murder and the arrests, through the first hearings before the magistrate and the coroner, Robert and Nattie’s father had been sailing to New York on the SS
France
, oblivious to the catastrophe that had befallen his family in Plaistow.
    Robert Coombes senior was a slight man of fifty-one, with a receding chin, sandy sideburns and a moustache. The eldest son of a prosperous potato merchant and greengrocer, he was born in 1844 in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames, but his family moved north of the river to Limehouse when he was a boy. He was a butcher by the age of fifteen and by twenty-five a master pork butcher in Notting Hill, West London, employing three men and three boys including his younger brother Frederick. In 1873, though, he was declared bankrupt . Thanks to an Act of 1869, bankrupts were no longer automatically imprisoned. Coombes instead had his assets seized and distributed among his creditors. Having lost his business, his home and its contents, he went north to Liverpool and became a ship’s steward for the National Steamship Company Limited, a fleet established in 1863 to ferry emigrants across the Atlantic.
    It was in Liverpool that he met Emily Allen, whose father was a captain on emigrant ships to Australia. Emily was born in the town of Karachi, then part of India, and bore the middle name ‘Harrison’ in honour of a captain who had rescued her pregnant mother from a shipwreck on the river Indus. She was dark and attractive, with thick eyebrows and a firm jaw.
    The two were married in 1878. Robert Coombes was thirty-three (though he gave his age as twenty-six on the marriage certificate) and Emily was twenty. They were said to be a loving couple. After the opening of the Royal Albert Dock