July 1895. The sun beats down on the East End of London. The empire stands at its zenith and London is the metropolitan centre of the world. WG Grace goes in to bat in the Gentlemen v Players match at Lords. And in a bedroom of a house in working-class Plaistow, the victim of a matricide decomposes in the stifling heat.
The wicked boy is 14-year old Robert Coombes. The dead woman is his mother, Emily. While the maggots devour her, Robert and brother Nattie, who is 12, take off on the mitch. They go to the test match at Lords. They attend the Theatre Royal in Stratford, go fishing in Southend. They pick up an idiot sidekick and dress him in their seafarer father’s clothes. All the while the evidence of Robert’s crime festers.
It is never going to last. After two weeks the odour attracts attention, and Robert and Nattie are caught. Robert confesses to stabbing his sleeping mother twice. The boys are put on trial and the yellow press descend on the Stratford courtroom.
They have plenty to go on. The insouciant forays into the city over the course of two weeks. The boys daily return to the house made foul by the reeking corpse. The admission that Robert shared his mother’s bed. There is a psycho-sexual enquiry to be made there but the court leaves it hanging in the air. Nattie’s assertion that Robert got back under the sheets with the dying woman isn’t pursued.
Late in proceedings, Robert alleges that his mother threatened Nattie with a hatchet, but its hard to find any real conviction in the allegation. His behaviour after the murder was not that of a child driven beyond endurance.
We don’t get any further with Emily Coombes. There is reference to her excitable nature and hidings that were dished out to the boys. But even if she did in some way precipitate her own murder, there is still no explanation for the lack of remorse shown by her oldest son. Besides, a neighbour says that Emily “favoured Robert”.
As a young child, Robert was prone to odd turns and a doctor stated that he had “too much brain matter for the size of his skull”. His father noted absences, neural lapses. Plenty to go on, but Robert remains elusive. And perhaps that is the way it should be. Give the facts as they exist in the historical record and leave it at that. Don’t let conjecture tip over into invention.
Vivid setting
Late 19th-century London is as good a subject as you can get for social history, and there is plenty of it here. Jack Coombes is a seafarer and we learn all about shipping. There are accounts of contemporary medicine when Robert’s brain is discussed. A history of Broadmoor when it is called for. A shipyard iron plater is called as a witness and we learn the intricacies of his trade.
The research is rigorous and well-written. “The sour urinous stink of the Bryant and May match factory mingled with the musty caramel of the Tate and Lyle sugar refineries.” There are lyric chapter headings. But author Kate Summerscales’s honesty works against her. Fact starts to stand in the way of the truth. Forty pages of end notes is rigorous in a history but deadweight in a book that seeks to be something more than an historical account. You’re looking for the novelist’s amoral eye, speculative, faithless.
What went on between Robert and his mother on the night of Sunday, July 8th? The historian stops at the front door and the reader wants to follow them in. Only fiction might take you into the transgressive space between mother and son in search of something more than speculation but less than truth.
Much is made of the penny dreadfuls or penny bloods – the boys comics of the period. Nattie testifies that Robert wanted to go to the India of Cockney Bob's Big Bluff, where the beautiful Rana is clad in "loose garments which feel about her exquisite figure in a manner which conveyed its exquisite contour". But Emily stood in his way.
Still, it doesn't quite add up. The fact that the boy read penny dreadfuls doesn't prove cause and effect, any more than you can say that games such as Doom or Duke Nukem sent Harris and Kleibolt into Columbine High School to kill their fellow students.
We’re certainly not short of characters. Summerscale runs her eye over dodgy solicitors and reforming prison governors. Ripper suspect Thomas Cutbush makes an appearance, sinking his teeth into his mother’s face in the Broadmoor visiting room in an echo of Robert’s crime. Cutbush is patently demented, but Robert remains hard to pin down. He is cunning and larcenous in financing the boys’ escapades, a malicious imp cavorting in a blue tennis jacket trimmed with gold.
It seems unlikely that Robert’s malice and cunning would dissipate with age, or that his skull would grow to accommodate his brain.
Heir to Collins
Wilkie Collins is reckoned to be the archetypal father of the detective novel and Summerscale is mentioned as an heir, though on the basis of The Wicked Boy this seems wide of the mark. There is an hallucinatory shimmer on the margins of Collins's prose – he finds the Wiccan undertones, the dread in the Victorian spirit. The driver of unease in The Wicked Boy is social change, not elemental stirrings.
The brothers are lost to the reader when they withdraw from the documented past and the crimson cloak of the empire is thrown over them. You can place them on the beaches of the Dardenelles or in the thunderous bowels of a Dreadnought boiler-room and you can guess what might have been going through their heads. But there is no way of telling for sure.
Then, as the trail grows cold and the archivists reach falters, Robert steps briefly into the light. A living witness animates the story, and for a moment we close in on the wicked boy, get a sense of him before he fades into history.
The tension between what can be told and what cannot is eased. Real mystery seeps in and the story ends up in the place where you feel it belongs: the realm of what is not knowable.
Eoin McNamee’s most recent novel is Blue Is the Night
