better listen to the full story.”
The detective took a chair.
HIS NAME WAS WALTER DEW; his rank, chief inspector. He was a tall man, built solid, with blue eyes and a large cow-catcher mustache, neatly groomed. He had joined the force at nineteen; he now was forty-seven. He had received his detective’s badge in 1887 and shortly thereafter won the nickname “Blue Serge” for always wearing his best suit on duty. He took part in the Yard’s investigation of the Ripper killings in 1888 and had the good luck, or bad, to be one of the detectives who discovered the remains of Jack’s last and most horribly mutilated victim, Mary Kelly. “I saw a sight which I shall never forget to my dying day,” Dew wrote in a memoir. “The whole horror of that room will only be known to those of us whose duty it was to enter it.” What stayed with him most keenly, he wrote, was the look in the victim’s eyes. “They were wide open, and seemed to be staring straight at me with a look of terror.”
Now Nash told Dew his story:
“When we got back from America a few days ago, we were told that Belle was dead. Our friends said she had gone suddenly to America without a word of good-bye to any of them, and five months ago a notice was out in a theatrical paper announcing her death from pneumonia in California. Naturally, we were upset. I went to see Dr. Crippen. He told me the same story, but there was something about him I didn’t like. Very soon after his wife’s death Dr. Crippen was openly going about with his typist, a girl called Ethel Le Neve. Some time ago they went to a dance together and the girl was actually wearing Belle’s furs and jewelry.”
He told Dew, “I do wish you could make some inquiries and find out just when and where Belle did die. We can’t get details from Dr. Crippen.”
Froest and Dew asked a few more questions, then Froest said, “Well, Mr. Dew, that’s the story. What do you make of it?”
Under ordinary circumstances, Dew would have been inclined to reject the inquiry and turn it over to the uniformed branch for handling as a routine missing-person case. Dew did not suspect foul play and sensed that the Nashes also did not. “What was really in the minds of Mr. and Mrs. Nash, what prompted them to seek the assistance of Superintendent Froest, I cannot say, but it is quite certain that neither of them dreamt for a moment that there was anything very sinister behind the affair,” Dew wrote. “It is probably that they were actuated more than anything else by Crippen’s lack of all decency in placing another woman so soon and so completely in the shoes of his dead wife.”
But the Nashes were personal friends of Superintendent Froest, and Lil Hawthorne was a well-known music hall performer. It seemed important to demonstrate that Scotland Yard was taking their concerns seriously. Also, his own experience on the force had taught him, as he put it, “that it is better to be sure than sorry.”
Dew said, “I think it would be just as well if I made a few inquiries into this personally.”
RATS
THE FADING CREDIBILITY OF HIS COMPANY prompted Marconi to deploy Ambrose Fleming yet again, this time for a lecture on tuning and long-range wireless at the Royal Institution, on June 4, 1903. Fleming arranged to have Marconi send a wireless message from Poldhu to a receiver installed at the institution for the lecture, as a means of providing a vivid demonstration of long-range wireless. The recipient was to be James Dewar, director of the Royal Institution’s Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory. Dewar was best known for his ability to chill things, in particular his successful effort in 1898 to liquefy hydrogen, which in turn had led a German technician to invent the Thermos bottle.
The timing was tricky. The message was to arrive in the closing moments of Fleming’s lecture. It was pure theater, a variety show complete with a turn of magic, and if everything had gone according to plan, it might indeed have done much to help Marconi regain some of his lost credibility.
FLEMING BEGAN HIS LECTURE promptly at five o’clock. As always, every seat was taken. He spoke with confidence and flair, and the audience responded with murmurs of approval. One of his assistants, P. J. Woodward, took up position by the receiver and prepared to switch on the Morse inker to record Marconi’s expected message to Dewar. But as the moment approached, something peculiar happened.
Another assistant, Arthur Blok, heard an odd ticking in the arc lamp inside the large brass “projection lantern” in the hall. As he listened, he realized the ticking was not simply a random distortion. The electric arc within the projector was acting as a crude receiver and had begun picking up what seemed to be deliberate transmissions. At first he assumed that Marconi’s men in Chelmsford “were doing some last-minute tuning-up.”
Fleming did not notice. During his tenure with the Marconi company he had become increasingly hard of hearing. The audience too seemed unaware.
Blok was experienced in sending and receiving Morse code. The clicking in the lantern was indeed spelling out a word—a word that no one in Chelmsford would dare have sent, even as a test. Yet there it was, a single word:
As soon as Blok recognized this, “the matter took on a new aspect. And when this word was repeated, suspicion gave place to fear.”
A few years earlier the expression “rats” had acquired a new and non-zoological meaning. During one action of the Boer War, British troops had used light signals sent by heliograph to ask the opposing Boer forces what they thought of the British artillery shells then raining down on their position. The Boers answered, “Rats,” and the word promptly entered common usage in Britain as a term that connoted “hubris” or “arrogance.”
As the time set for Marconi’s final message neared, the assistant at the receiver turned on the Morse inker, and immediately pale blue dots and dashes began appearing on the ribbon of paper that unspooled from the inker. A new word came across:
Blok alternately kept an eye on the clock and on the tape jolting from the inker.
Blok was stunned. “There was but a short time to go,” he said, “and the ‘rats’ on the coiling paper tape unbelievably gave place to a fantastic doggerel”:
The clicking paused, then resumed. Helpless, Blok and his colleague could only listen and watch.
Any well-schooled adult of the time, meaning almost everyone in the audience, would have recognized these lines as coming from Shakespeare’s
It was like being at a seance, that mix of dread and fascination as the planchette pointed to letters on the
