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pay-out. In the morning of Saturday 20 July, Wortley transferred Emily Coombes’s body to a plain wooden coffin, screwed down the lid and conveyed it by hearse and carriage to the Tower Hamlets and East London Cemetery, three miles west. Bow Cemetery, as it was known locally, had since its establishment in 1841 been the chief burial ground for the poor of East London. A third-class interment here cost about fifteen shillings. By 1895 the cemetery contained more than a quarter of a million bodies, most of them in shared public graves, and had become neglected and overgrown. Many of the headstones had fallen down and were half-covered by weeds and grass.
    At 1 p.m. Emily’s body was lowered into a long trench of public graves in a section of the cemetery adjacent to Lockhart Street, where Robert and Nattie’s grandmother Mary Coombes lived. Since the police had kept the details of the funeral a secret, only two or three members of the family were present. Robert and Nattie were not invited to attend. The mourners cast earth on to the coffin and the priest – a Reverend Yates – stood over the grave and read the words of committal.
    That day four policemen, led by Inspector Gilbert and Detective-Sergeant Don, went to 35 Cave Road to burn the filthy bedding from the front bedroom. Despite the disinfectants with which the room had been doused three days earlier, both Gilbert and Don reported that the stench was almost unbearable. After their visit, they left a constable at the gate to make sure that sightseers were kept out.
    Ever since the discovery of Emily Coombes’s body, local men and women had been visiting Cave Road to see the house and to discuss the case with whoever was passing. West Ham was so full of people, and the people so avid for entertainment, that spontaneous gatherings were commonplace. A few weeks earlier a fourteen-year-old boy had climbed a tree in The Grove, near Stratford Broadway, and started dropping twigs and bits of bark on to the hats of people walking below. He refused to budge when the police ordered him down, and it was reported that nearly 3,000 people turned up to watch the constables remove him from the tree with the aid of a fire ladder. The inhabitants of West Ham looked for their drama, whether comedy or tragedy, in the streets.
    The penny paper
Lloyd’s Weekly , which had a circulation of more than 750,000, sent an artist and a reporter to Cave Road. The artist sketched the house: the arched doorway and bay window on the ground floor, the two open windows of Emily Coombes’s bedroom above, the low fence and the metal gate bounding the front yard. The journalist interviewed the locals who had gathered nearby. He was told that Robert and Nattie had a very bad reputation, and that their mother had been too lenient with them, ‘always allowing them to have their own way’. Robert was said to have been a constant source of trouble to the school officials: he had frequently been late and had often played truant. Three years earlier, the reporter heard, the brothers had run away to Liverpool to visit an aunt, using money stolen from their mother’s cashbox. The police had been informed but when the boys were found their mother interceded and managed to hush up the affair. Over the past ten days, the
Lloyd’s
man was told, Robert and Nattie had led a ‘fast’ life in the West End of London, riding about in cabs and watching shows at the theatre.
    One neighbour said that Robert was a talented mandolin player. ‘This love of music,’ the
Lloyd’s
reporter observed, ‘is not infrequent among the bad folk of criminal history.’
    Several other journalists turned up to interview the bystanders. The
Forest Gate Gazette
was informed that Robert had treated his friends to lavish quantities of ginger beer and ice cream in the days after his mother’s death. The
News of the World
heard that Fox was a