It began, as these things sometimes do, with a stink. On the evening of 15 July 1895, in Plaistow, east London, a girl arrived at the house of Emily Coombes, sent by her mother, who’d noticed a rank smell at the home of Coombes’s sister-in-law, nearby in Cave Road. Two days later, on the morning of 17 July, the milkman also encountered a stench at the house in Cave Road, and again word was sent to Emily Coombes. At 1.20pm on the same day, accompanied by her friend, Mary Burrage, she knocked on the door of the terraced house, demanding that her nephew, 13-year-old Robert, open it. Pushing past him, she went upstairs, following her instincts and, presumably, her nose. There in the bedroom, she found the body of a woman, her face covered by a sheet and a pillow. Sister-in-law Emily was unrecognisable. She had been there a while, and the weather had been hot. The corpse was all maggots.
There was, and is, no mystery attached to Emily Coombes’s unfortunate end. Her son Robert immediately and almost nonchalantly confessed to having stabbed her 10 days before. Having committed this heinous act, moreover, he and his little brother Nattie had enjoyed themselves mightily (their father was away at sea). They had been to see WG Grace play cricket at Lord’s, and to the seaside. By way of money, they’d pawned various bits and pieces, aided by an adult family friend called John Fox, whom they’d asked to stay while their mother was supposedly away in Liverpool. (“We’ve had a rich uncle die in Africa,” they said, “and Auntie wants to see Ma.”) Fox had not noticed the stink, or so he said. “My smell is not very good,” he told the police. At this point, I pictured him sniffing the air, experimentally.
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