Free The Wicked Boy by Kate Summerscale

the discovery of the body,’ she said, ‘at about ten o’clock or a quarter past, I heard voices in the front bedroom of number 35.’
    She was asked if they were men’s or boys’ voices.
    â€˜I could not say,’ she replied. ‘I called my husband’s attention to them.’
    She said that she had seen a swarm of flies at the two upper front windows of number 35, and had noticed that the blinds of the room were raised on Wednesday 10 July. She first saw Fox at the house on the same day.
    Charlie Sharman, on behalf of John Fox, questioned Mrs Robertson about the voices she had heard on the night before the body was discovered.
    â€˜I was in bed at the time I heard the voices,’ she said – her bedroom was adjacent to Mrs Coombes’s bedroom next door. ‘The voices sounded as if they were in the front room, or on the little landing, I could not say which. The landing was at the top of the stairs.’
    Sharman asked Mrs Robertson exactly when the blinds had been raised and when she first saw Fox.
    â€˜The blinds were up on Wednesday morning. It was not until the evening that I saw Fox.’
    Baggallay asked her how she came to notice him.
    â€˜I was on the look,’ said Mrs Robertson, ‘like everyone else was.’
    John Hewson, the National Line cashier, told the court how Robert visited his office with the medical certificate attesting to Emily Coombes’s illness. Hewson said he had noticed that the top had been torn off the certificate, and he was not inclined to trust the boy in any case. A year or two earlier Robert had called on him and said: ‘My mother is very ill in bed – will you let me have £2?’ On that occasion, Hewson had given him the money and then discovered his story to be false.
    Stephenson asked him: ‘And two days later did the mother come and see you? What did she say?’
    â€˜No, no,’ interrupted Baggallay, ‘we can’t have that. It is a fact that the boy called, and that he got the money.’
    Constable Twort testified that Robert’s letter to Hewson had been found in Fox’s jacket after his arrest.
    Inspector Gilbert produced the letters that he had found at 35 Cave Road. Baggallay glanced through them, and read out to the court Robert’s letter to the
Evening News
and then the letter that he had written to his father, in which he claimed that his Ma’s hand was hurt.
    Robert was calm throughout, occasionally letting a slight smile pass over his lips but otherwise betraying no emotion. The reporter from the
Evening News
noticed that he was none the less keenly aware of the journalists in the room. ‘Of all the people in this Court none seems so cool and unconcerned as this boy,’ he wrote. ‘He stands easily in the dock, his hands crossed on the rail in front of him, his eyes sometimes following the movements of the witnesses, but more often straying to the right, where the busy pens of the reporters are at work on their table.’
    As each witness prepared to leave the box the magistrate asked Robert: ‘Have you any questions to put?’ and Robert replied briskly: ‘No, sir.’
    â€˜Even when evidence of the most fatal kind is being given against him he does not lose his indifferent air,’ noted the
Evening News
, ‘or the unconcerned smartness of his negative reply. He might be a confident pupil, sure of his answers to the teacher, so little does the tragedy in which he is the central figure move him.’
    Fox, on the other hand, seemed scared out of his wits. His face, said the reporter, was ‘almost blank in its expression of stupidity, straining to follow the thread of evidence. He keeps his hands clenched behind his back, the fingers ceaselessly shifting their grasp of each other in the effort to fix and retain a steady grip.’
    Nattie, too, looked terrified. Having been brought back into the courtroom to await his turn