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aged thirty-three, the son of the Director of Public Prosecutions and a barrister who practised at the Old Bailey, was first to address the court. As the junior lawyer in the legal team that would prosecute the case if it were tried, he was preparing the case for the Crown. He had performed a similar role in the trial of the murderer James Canham Read the previous year.
    â€˜After very careful consideration,’ said Stephenson, ‘I wish to ask Your Worship to discharge the younger boy. I then intend putting Nathaniel Coombes into the witness box and asking him to tell us the whole story. He has not been approached, and would be merely asked to tell his story.’
    â€˜Do you propose to offer any further evidence against the lad Nathaniel?’ said Baggallay. ‘At present I must say I see no evidence against him at all.’ Either the magistrate had not understood Stephenson’s request, or he was trying to claim the idea of dismissing Nattie as his own, because he asked him exactly the question that had just been put to him: ‘Would it not be as well if he should at once be discharged?’
    â€˜If you please, Your Worship,’ said Stephenson.
    â€˜Then he may be discharged,’ said Baggallay. ‘Let him stand down and go into that room till he is called for.’
    A police sergeant took Nattie to an anteroom. He was now to be a witness against his brother.
    Baggallay called the first witness, Police Sergeant Charles Orpwood of the Barking Road station, who had measured up 35 Cave Road. The sergeant produced a plan of the house and described its layout to the court. On the ground floor, Orpwood explained , were a passage, or hallway, a front parlour and a back parlour, each parlour measuring eleven foot by nine foot nine inches. Upstairs were two bedrooms, each fourteen foot wide and nine foot deep, with a communicating door. The staircase between the two floors had fourteen steps, and cut across the house, dividing the front and back parts. The house was narrow, with a total width of fifteen feet. The back yard, which contained a washhouse (elsewere described as the kitchen) and a privy, was about fifteen foot long.
    Next to be called were Mary Ann Brecht, who ran a general store at 273 Barking Road (two doors up from the undertaker who had arranged Emily Coombes’s funeral), and John Brecht, fourteen, the youngest of her five sons. The
Sun
characterised the Brechts’ store as a ‘kind of old curiosity shop’. Mrs Brecht had sold Robert the knife found next to his mother’s body.
    John appeared first. He said that he had been alone in his mother’s store when Robert Coombes had come in about three weeks earlier and pointed to a dagger among a set of knives displayed on a card in the window. ‘Johnny,’ he had said, ‘how much do you want for that knife in the window?’ John said that the knife cost sixpence. Robert said: ‘I will come tomorrow and see Mrs Brecht about it, and ask what will be the lowest you will take.’ John told the court that he remembered Robert as a fellow pupil at the North Street board school in Plaistow.
    Since Robert still had no solicitor to represent him, Baggallay gave him a chance to put his own questions to the witnesses: ‘Do you wish to ask any questions, Robert Coombes?’
    â€˜Yes, sir,’ said Robert. ‘I never went to North Street school, and I never knew his name.’ Robert had attended three West Ham schools, but North Street was not among them. This was irrelevant to the case: Robert was not disputing that he had been to the shop and enquired about the knife. By correcting John Brecht, he was acting like a schoolboy eager to score a point. He seemed to have little sense of what was at stake for him in this hearing.
    Baggallay addressed the witness. ‘Have you seen the prisoner before?’
    â€˜Yes,’ said John Brecht.
    â€˜Where?’ asked Baggallay.
    â€˜I have