Davis found it odd to hear Belle recount such a story, for one of Belle’s most salient characteristics was her robust good health. As one friend said, Belle “did not seem to know what an ache or pain was.”
Over tea Crippen blamed the incident on anxiety generated by Belle’s work for the guild. He urged her to resign, advice that he had given before and that she had ignored, just as she ignored it now. One reason he wanted her to quit was to remove her from Albion House, where she had become a near-constant presence, forcing Crippen and Ethel to maintain a level of circumspection that both found cumbersome and inhibiting.
At Lyons the conversation moved on.
ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 15, 1910, Crippen left his office and walked along New Oxford Street to the nearby shop of Mssrs. Lewis & Burrows, Chemists, where he always bought the compounds he used in his medicines and anesthetics. Over the previous year he had acquired hydrochloric acid, hydrogen peroxide, morphine salts, and—his highest-volume purchase—cocaine, which he bought on nine occasions throughout the preceding year, for a total of 170 grains. Today, however, he wanted something different. He asked the clerk, Charles Hetherington, for five grains of hyoscine hydrobromide.
The order did not surprise Hetherington. He knew Crippen and liked him. Crippen always smiled and exuded an aura of kindness. Part of it was the way he looked—the now-graying mustache and beard made him seem approachable, and his eyes, magnified by the lenses of his spectacles, made him seem somehow vulnerable. Hetherington knew also that Crippen made homeopathic medicines and dental anesthetics, and that hyoscine was sometimes used in drugs meant to have a tranquilizing effect on patients.
But Hetherington could not fill the order. Hyoscine was an exceedingly dangerous poison and was rarely used, and as a consequence he did not have it in stock. Indeed, in his three years working for Lewis & Burrows, he had never known the shop to have that large a quantity on hand at any one time. He told Crippen he would have to order it and that it ought to arrive within a few days.
HETHERINGTON RELAYED THE ORDER by telephone to a drug wholesaler, British Drug Houses Ltd., “the largest firm of Druggists in London, and probably in England,” according to its managing director, Charles Alexander Hill.
His company had no problem filling the order, as it typically had about two hundred grains on hand, supplied by Merck & Co. of Darmstadt, Germany. Hyoscine had “very limited demand,” he said. Ordinarily his company supplied chemists with a maximum of one grain at a time, though a wholesale drug firm once ordered three grains and a hospital fifteen, the largest single order he could recall.
The company shipped the five grains of hyoscine to Lewis & Burrows on January 18, along with other compounds the shop had ordered.
THE NEXT DAY, Wednesday, January 19, Crippen again walked to Lewis & Burrows’s shop and asked for his order.
In the past whenever Crippen picked up his poisons—his morphine and cocaine—the clerks on duty did not make him sign the poisons book, in which they recorded purchases of “scheduled” poisons. “We did not require him to do so,” said Harold Kirby, an assistant at the shop, “because we knew him, and knew him to be a medical man.”
On this occasion, however, the shop did ask him to fill out an entry in the book and sign it, because of the unusual nature of the order and the potency of the drug. Crippen “did not raise the slightest objection,” Kirby said.
First the form asked for the “Name of Purchaser,” and here Crippen wrote, “Munyons per H. H. Crippen,” though by now he had only a slight connection to Munyon. Where the form asked, “Purpose for which it is required,” he filled in, “hom?opathic preparations.” He signed his name.
Kirby handed him a small container that enclosed tiny crystals that weighed only one-hundredth of an ounce yet were capable of killing twenty men. He put the container in his pocket and returned to Albion House.
THE SECRET OF THE KITES
DESPITE THE NEWS ABOUT SOUTH WELLFLEET, Marconi, Kemp, and Paget sailed for Newfoundland. The crossing took ten days and was marred by what Kemp called a “terrific gale” and a blizzard at sea. On Friday, December 6, 1901, they entered the harbor at St. John’s and docked at Shea’s Wharf. Snow bearded the
A throng of reporters and dignitaries met Marconi as he disembarked. To mask the true purpose of his mission, he hinted that he had come to Newfoundland to explore aspects of ship-to-shore communication. He reinforced the ruse by cabling the Cunard Line in Liverpool to inquire about the locations of the wireless-equipped
Soon after landing, Marconi began scouting for a site to launch his kites and balloons and settled on a “lofty eminence” that he had spotted from the ship, which bore the apt name Signal Hill, for the fact that it previously had been used for visual communication. It rose three hundred feet over the harbor and had a two-acre plateau at its top. Marconi and Kemp decided to set up their receiver and other equipment in a building on the plateau that previously had been a fever hospital.
On Monday, December 9, three days after their arrival, they began their work in earnest. They buried twenty sheets of zinc to provide a ground, assembled two kites, and oiled the skin of one balloon so that it would retain hydrogen.
Before leaving England, Marconi had given his operators at Poldhu instructions to wait for a cable from him specifying a day to begin signaling. Here too he was concerned about secrecy, for he knew that information leaked from telegraph offices as readily as water from a colander. By establishing the protocol in advance, all he now had to do was send a cable stating a date, with no further instructions. On that date, at three o’clock Greenwich Mean Time, his Poldhu station was to begin sending the letter S, three dots, over and over. Marconi had chosen S not out of nostalgia for his first great success on the lawn at Villa Griffone, but because the transmitter at Poldhu channeled so much power, he feared that repeatedly holding down the key for a dash might cause an electric arc to span the spark gap and damage his equipment. His operators were to send ten-minute volleys of 250 S’s spaced by five- minute intervals of rest. The pauses were important, for the key required to manage so much power had more in common with the lever on a water pump than the key typically found in conventional telegraph bureaus—it required strength and stamina to operate.
That Monday Marconi sent Poldhu his cable. The message read, simply, “BEGIN WEDNESDAY 11TH.”
So far, he had succeeded in keeping his real goal a secret. Only the
On Tuesday Kemp and Paget conducted a test flight of one kite, which rose into the sky trailing an antenna of five hundred feet of wire. The weather was fair, and the kite flew nicely. The next day, Wednesday, when the signaling was to begin, the weather changed.
Of course.
A strong wind huffed across the clifftop and raised the hems of the men’s coats. They decided to try a balloon first, thinking it would have more stability in the rough air. They filled a balloon with a thousand cubic feet of
