Read Online The Wicked Boy by Kate Summerscale - Free Book Online Page B

seen him in the Broadway,’ said John, abandoning his claim that they had been schoolmates, ‘near my mother’s other shop.’ This was Plaistow Broadway, where Mrs Brecht had a second store, just north of Cave Road.
    Mary Ann Brecht, fifty-two, the daughter of a dairyman and the wife of a house painter, was next to testify. She said that Robert had entered her shop in the Barking Road on Wednesday 3 July or Thursday 4 July and asked her: ‘How much do you want for that knife in the window?’ ‘Which one?’ she said. He pointed to the knife and she told him it was sixpence. ‘Is that the lowest you will take for it?’ asked Robert. ‘Yes,’ she replied; ‘it is very cheap.’ Robert accepted the price and Mary Ann Brecht fetched the knife for him, asking if he wanted it wrapped up. ‘Yes please,’ he said. Mrs Brecht wrapped the knife and handed it to him. He gave her a sixpenny piece and she, relenting, gave him a penny in change. ‘It will make your mother a fine breadknife,’ she said. ‘Oh yes,’ said Robert as he left.
    The police produced the blood-stained knife in evidence. It was a sailor’s sheath knife with a curved, beak-like point, which had been made to look like a dagger by a cross-guard of brass between the four-and-a-half-inch blade and the black handle. The
News of the World
observed that it was nothing like a kitchen implement, but rather ‘a terrible dagger’, ‘the kind of knife one sometimes sees in the possession of a Malay sailor or a swarthy coolie hanging about the docks’. In assuring Robert that it would make his mother a good breadknife, Mrs Brecht may have been trying to assuage her unease about selling him just the kind of sharp, showy weapon that a boy might like to brandish.
    The court heard evidence from the pawnbrokers with whom Fox had pledged goods. William White of George Fish’s pawnshop in the Commercial Road remembered taking a gold-plated American watch from a short, dark man who gave the name Robert Coombes. He showed the watch to the court. Henry Goldsworthy of Ashbridge & Co produced a silver watch, which he said had been pledged by a short, dark man wearing a sailor’s peaked cap. Richard Bourne, who ran the pawnbrokers by Plaistow station, showed the court Robert’s mandolin.
    Aunt Emily, who had given evidence the previous week, was called back to answer questions about the pawned goods now laid out in the courtroom. The mandolin was Robert’s, she confirmed. The gold watch was his father’s, but his mother used to wear it when her husband was at sea. The silver watch was bought for Robert, she said, though she was not sure whether it had been given to him. She knew that he used to wear the watch when his father was away.
    Stephenson asked her how old Robert was.
    â€˜He is thirteen years of age,’ Emily said.
    Baggallay interrupted to point out that they had a better authority for Robert’s age. ‘You have the certificate,’ he said to Stephenson. ‘Put it in.’
    Stephenson handed over a copy of Robert’s birth certificate, which Detective Inspector Mellish had obtained from the Registry for Births, Marriages and Deaths at Somerset House the previous day.
    Baggallay looked at the certificate. ‘He was thirteen last January,’ he observed. ‘It is not important as a matter of evidence, but it is important as a matter of fact.’
    Rosina Robertson of 37 Cave Road came forward to testify. Mrs Robertson, twenty-eight, was the wife of James, the painter and decorator who had changed Robert’s sovereign on 8 July. The couple had three boys, aged between one and six, and had recently moved to Plaistow from Canning Town. She and her husband had last seen Emily Coombes standing at her front door on the Saturday evening before her death, she said, and had stopped to chat to her for a few minutes.
    â€˜On the evening before