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suspects and order their arrest.
    A crowd of about 500 people had assembled outside the Liverpool Arms, and when a closed cab drew up just after 11 a.m. they made a rush at its doors. The police managed to hold back the mob, allowing John Fox and two Holloway warders to enter the pub. Robert and Nattie had been spared the ordeal of attending the inquest because of their youth. Fox was given a seat in the coroner’s court, where he sat for a few moments, his head leaning against the wall, before Lewis announced that he did not intend to examine him and did not consider it advisable that he be present. A member of the jury asked whether Fox should at least be allowed to hear the evidence, and Lewis replied that this was exactly what he did not want. The warders took Fox away. Several hundred people chased the cab that carried him off.
    Lewis swore in the jury and called Alfred Kennedy, who had now completed the post-mortem on Emily Coombes’s body.
    â€˜The whole of the brain has been consumed by vermin,’ Dr Kennedy told the coroner and jury, ‘and the right lung nearly destroyed by maggots. Through the base of the heart, which is partly eaten away, there is a clear stab, and one also through the extreme right side. There is a notch on the spine corresponding with this wound.’
    The doctor said that Emily Coombes’s bedding and underclothes had been stained with dry blood, which indicated that she had been alive when she was stabbed. ‘There is no doubt,’ he said, ‘that death was instantaneous.’
    The jurors were invited to leave the pub for the mortuary on the other side of the Barking Road. They had to make their way through a crowd to enter the building. Emily Coombes’s body was in a double coffin , designed to contain the smell of a corpse and to slow its decomposition. The internal shell, which held the body, was usually filled with melted pitch and sealed shut. The upper part of the shell was fitted with plate glass so that mourners (or, in this case, jurors) could see the face of the dead person. Emily Coombes’s features had been mutilated by maggots. The jurors completed their inspection as quickly as they could.
    When the coroner and jury returned to the pub, Lewis called Robert and Nattie’s Aunt Emily to give evidence. She was dressed in deep mourning, with a broad-brimmed black hat sitting horizontally on her high bun of dark hair. Her voice broke as she described the ‘offensive smell’ that assailed her as she entered 35 Cave Road on Wednesday, to find her nephews playing cards and Fox puffing on his pipe. She repeated Robert’s confession to her, quoting him as saying: ‘I kicked about and Ma pushed me. I then got out of bed and stabbed her.’
    The coroner pointed out that Robert’s account of the murder was confusing. ‘I don’t quite see,’ said Lewis, ‘how this part of the story tallies with the other part, in which he said the blow was to be struck after Nathaniel’s signal from an adjoining room. It will probably, however, be cleared up later.’
    The foreman of the jury asked Aunt Emily if she had not thought it strange that her sister-in-law seemed to have vanished.
    â€˜All through I thought it was strange,’ said Emily, ‘but Mrs Coombes had some funny ways. She would not write for weeks at times.’
    After hearing two further witnesses, Lewis adjourned the inquest. It would reconvene in ten days, on 29 July.
    Now that the post-mortem and the viewing of Emily Coombes’s corpse were complete, arrangements were swiftly made to inter the body. Emily had paid a couple of pence a week to a burial insurance scheme, as was common practice among working-class people who wished to spare their families the financial burden of an unexpected death. The undertaker, Richard Wortley of 269 Barking Road, was instructed to keep the costs of her funeral low so that her husband could retain some of the