The Wicked Boy by Kate Summerscale Page A

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 Lewis acknowledged that the Treasury had withdrawn the case against Nattie, but told the jury that this should not prevent them from naming him if they thought he was implicated in the crime: ‘If the jury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.
    Horlock added a rider to the jury’s verdict: ‘We consider that the Legislature should take some steps to put a stop to the inflammable and shocking literature that is sold, which in our opinion leads to many a dreadful crime being carried out.’
    â€˜There can’t be any difference of opinion about that,’ said Lewis.
    In the mid-1890s the prevalence of penny dreadfuls (as they were known in the press) or penny bloods (as they were known to shopkeepers and schoolboys) was a subject of great public concern. ‘ Tons of this trash is vomited forth from Fleet Street every day,’ observed the
Motherwell Times
in 1895, ‘and inwardly digested by those whose mental pabulum is on a level with the stuff for which it craves.’ More than a million boys’ periodicals were being sold a week, most of