The Wicked Boy (22 page)

The
Star
reporter who attended the Old Bailey trial also recognised the boy's dreams. ‘Alas! that island,' he lamented. ‘We all wanted to get there in our day to live in a hut and shoot pirates and slavers, though happily the road there was less bloodthirsty than that which unhappy Robert Coombes chose.'

The origin of the crime was still a mystery. In their bid to secure an insanity verdict, Robert's lawyers had tried to wipe out motive rather than to find it: their medical witnesses had characterised the killing as a psychic spasm with no emotional content or meaning. The newspapers, too, placed the blame for the murder on Robert's physiology, though most argued that his degeneracy had rendered him immoral rather than insane.

Just one publication argued that Robert might be neither mad nor bad.
The
Child's Guardian
, the journal of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, proposed that the cause of the crime lay not in the boy's disordered body but in the history of his home: specifically, in his relationship with his mother. ‘Of the dead, we speak no ill in courts,' it observed in October in a piece entitled ‘Boy Murderers'. ‘Of the dead, in this particular case, we know no ill to speak, but we are of opinion that it is of great public concern to know what were the relations of the dead mother and her murderous child.'

The
Child's Guardian
suggested, as the lawyers had not, that Robert had assaulted Emily Coombes because she was physically brutal. This, after all, was what Robert had said. He had told the police that he had decided to kill his mother because she had beaten Nattie and threatened them both; and that he finally attacked her because she punched him as he lay in bed. He had told Dr Walker that he had killed her because she had thrown knives at Nattie and warned that she would stick a hatchet in his head. The
Child's Guardian
pointed out that Nattie had colluded in the murder plan.
‘Was he, too, insane?'
it asked sceptically.

Legislation had been passed to protect children from violent parents – the Children's Acts of 1889 and 1894 stipulated that physical correction should be ‘reasonable' and ‘within the bounds of moderation' – but neither the police, the coroner, the solicitor nor the magistrate in the Coombes case seemed to have inquired into the frequency, force or emotion with which Emily beat her boys. They accepted Nattie's and the neighbours' assurances that she was kind to her sons, and ignored Robert's accounts of her threats and aggression. As the
Child's Guardian
suggested, this was in part because it was unseemly to speak ill of the dead, especially of a murdered woman: whatever she had done, she had not deserved this. Most people in any case believed that parents were entitled to punish their children by whatever means they felt necessary; and the Coombes family appeared to be a respectable, churchgoing household, neither dissipated nor desperate. None the less the NSPCC, which had been prosecuting parents for cruelty since its inception in 1884, had no difficulty in believing the worst. ‘That brute force begets brute force and injustice injustice is beyond doubt,' it observed. ‘That there are thousands of parents – both fathers and mothers – whose conduct to their children is worse than barbarous, the records of this Society's work during but a few years places beyond doubt.'

In a booklet
published a few years later, the NSPCC reminded its inspectors of the need to interpret the language used by children. ‘What the starved child calls stealing may not be stealing,' advised
The Inspector's Directory
(1901), ‘yet as his parents call it stealing, the child calls it so, too. Never take a frightened, ill-treated child's
names
for its actions; find out, in particular, what those actions were.' This applied not only to Nattie's crime – the ‘stealing' of food – but also to his punishment: the boys adopted their mother's description of the ‘hiding' she administered, but the event may have been much more alarming than that term implied.

Violent parents not only inflicted physical suffering on their children, observed the
Child's Guardian
, but also caused psychological ‘degradation'. As the older and favoured boy, Robert occupied a confusing position in his household: sometimes his mother punished him as a child, sometimes she enlisted him as a companion. The intensity of their relationship was particularly acute when his father was away, a closeness made literal on the nights that he slept alongside her. The NSPCC journal stopped short of addressing the oddity of a thirteen-year-old boy sharing his mother's bed, though such arrangements were usually witnessed only in slums and tenements that did not have enough space for adults and older children to sleep apart. A drawing in the
Illustrated Police News
picked up on the sexual symbolism of the murder scene: Robert is shown plunging a knife through the half-revealed breast of his mother while holding a truncheon at his groin. Pain is inscribed on the faces of both mother and son, one twisted in grief and the other in rage. Next to this image of savage and debauched frenzy, the newspaper published a sketch of Robert as a smooth-faced, clean-cut schoolboy standing in the dock.

The
Illustrated Police News
images dramatised the bewildering duality of Robert's behaviour: he was the good boy and the bad, child and man, beast and sophisticate. Robert ‘appears to have two personalities', wrote
the
Times
critic J. F. Nisbet
, ‘two memories which remain distinct'. His case played to the contemporary preoccupation with double selves. ‘Every person consists of two personalities,' the French psychologist
Pierre Janet
had argued in 1886, ‘one conscious and one unconscious.'
Frederic Myers
, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, identified a ‘subliminal self' that lay ‘below the threshold of ordinary consciousness'. ‘Two or more distinct trains of memory, feeling, will, may exist in the same personage,' wrote Myers in 1892. He proposed that the buried self communicated with the conscious mind by such means as auditory hallucination. Others speculated that unconscious selves might be revealed by hypnotism and mesmerism, or break forth spontaneously in somnambulism, epilepsy and homicidal insanity. ‘Man is not truly one,' says Dr Jekyll in
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,
‘but truly two.' By killing his mother, Robert had tried to resolve an intolerable tension, to simplify his divided self.

 

PART IV

THE MURDERERS' PARADISE

13

THOSE THAT KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO

On Monday 23 September, six days after his conviction, Robert Coombes and two warders from Holloway gaol travelled by train to a village in Berkshire, forty miles south-west of London. Robert was wearing his cricketing trousers, his tennis jacket with gold piping and a pair of handcuffs by which he was attached to one of his guards. The day was blazing hot, but the boy was ‘very cool and collected', reported the
Hampshire Telegraph
.
‘He returned the glances of the passengers who travelled with him with careless smiles.'

A carriage met Robert and his guards at the railway station and they were driven up the hill and along the thickly wooded road to
Broadmoor asylum
, a group of tall, red turreted buildings encircled by a sixteen-foot wall.

The asylum gate was set in an archway flanked by towers and topped by a clock of black and gold. A turnkey unlocked the gate and the cab passed through the arch to a courtyard.

Robert was uncuffed, taken into the building and officially admitted to the asylum.
His occupation
was entered in the register as ‘labourer in iron works', his crime ‘murder of his mother by stabbing her with a knife'. He was sent to a bathroom, where an attendant watched over him while he bathed, and another took away his jacket and trousers and replaced them with a long calico nightshirt. His belongings were listed and stored. He was allotted a bed in one of the admissions wards in the asylum's central complex, where he would remain while his mental condition was assessed. Since he was considered a suicide risk, he was observed closely.

During Robert's first week in Broadmoor
the sun shone
from dawn to dusk in a cloudless sky, and the temperature repeatedly reached 80 degrees Fahrenheit – it was the hottest September ever recorded. The admissions wards faced south, with a view through French windows to the open country at the front of the asylum:
an undulating landscape
of pastures, knolls and copses, run through by dark belts of pine and fir. Between the lawns and flowerbeds on the terrace outside the ward, a gravel drive was shaded from the bright sky by an avenue of limes. Below the drive the ground fell away gently in richly planted terraces to the foot of the ridge. The wall bounding the southern reach of the estate lay beneath the terraces.

It was as idyllic a prospect as a city boy like Robert had ever seen. In this pastoral setting the inmates of Broadmoor were returned to a kind of innocence: they were stripped of their freedoms and responsibilities, rendered as powerless and unencumbered as children. In Broadmoor they were unlikely to be reproached for their crimes. They entered a suspended existence, with little reference to the past or the future, a strange corollary to the dissociated, dreamlike state that often attended psychosis. The asylum was both gaol and sanctuary, fortress and enchanted castle. The spell by which the patients were bound within its walls could be lifted only at the behest of the queen.

Robert was interviewed by one of the asylum's four doctors within a few days of his admission. ‘
When questioned as to the murder
of his mother,' the physician wrote in his notes, he ‘at first pretended to have forgotten the occurrence: but subsequently admitted the deed.' Robert may genuinely, if briefly, have lost his memory of the killing, as he had done in Holloway. His grasp of the crime he had committed was fitful and unsteady. To survive the horror of the murder, Robert needed to forget. To recover from it, he would need to remember.

Broadmoor was built in the early 1860s
to house the growing number of men and women found insane in the criminal courts. Its first patients were transferred from the Bethlem asylum in London in 1864 and
the institution now held
almost 500 men and more than 150 women. Just under half of the men had committed homicide, and about half of these had killed a member of his family. Robert became one of twelve male inmates who had murdered their mothers. Of the women in Broadmoor, who were housed in a separate part of the asylum, 80 per cent had killed one or more of their children.

In October, Robert was
joined in the admissions ward
by two more patients who had been convicted at the Old Bailey.
Henry Jackson
, an unemployed postman in his twenties, had suffocated his six-month-old baby. ‘He seemed to hear a voice, not human, telling him to do the deed,' Dr Walker of Holloway gaol testified at his trial, ‘and he felt he must kill the child; and after he had done it he felt a satisfaction.' Jackson was apparently suffering from the same species of mania – the compulsion to kill, the relief after killing – that Dr Walker had identified in Robert. Yet the insanity verdict in his case, too, masked the difficulty and unhappiness that lay behind his violent act. Henry Jackson's mother described the very tangible pressures on her son: he and his family were in a state of ‘dreadful distress' after he lost his job, she said, having sold everything they owned in order to buy food.

The other arrival,
Carmello Mussy
, had shot at his landlord before trying to take his own life. Mussy was an elderly Italian, wispy-haired, grey-whiskered, lame, his speech a garbled blur of French, English and his native tongue, often punctuated by sobs. The Old Bailey jury, moved by his vulnerability, had found him guilty but insane. The judge complained afterwards that the jury's mercy was misguided: he had intended to give Mussy a light sentence, but the insanity verdict meant that the old man, like all the ‘Pleasure Men' in Broadmoor, might never be free again. Robert's situation was similar. If he had been found simply guilty, his death sentence would almost certainly have been commuted – no one under the age of sixteen had been hanged in England since the execution in 1831 of the fourteen-year-old John Bell, who had killed another boy – but the combination of Justice Kennedy's intransigence and the jury's pity had ensured that his detention would be indefinite. ‘Those with long experience at the Old Bailey,' asserted the
Sheffield Independent
when Robert was convicted, ‘remark that no case is on record of a person sentenced as a criminal lunatic ever being released.' This was a common misconception – several Broadmoor inmates were discharged each year – but most inmates did remain within its walls until they died.