men stood at the door. “I had not the faintest idea who they were or what they wanted,” she wrote.
“He is not at home,” she told the men, “and will not return until after six o’clock this evening.”
One of them looked at her “in a curious way,” she recalled. He said, “I beg your pardon, but I am informed that Dr. Crippen is still here, and I wish to see him on important business.”
“Well, you have been wrongly informed,” Ethel said. She told him that the doctor had left at his usual hour, just after eight o’clock.
“I am sorry to doubt your word,” the man said, “but I am given to understand that Dr. Crippen does not go to his office until after eleven. I feel quite sure he is in the house, and I may as well tell you at once I shall not go until I have seen him. Perhaps if I tell you who I am you will find Dr. Crippen for me.”
He then identified himself as Chief Inspector Walter Dew of Scotland Yard, and his partner as Sgt. Arthur Mitchell.
“All the same,” she said, “I cannot find Dr. Crippen for you. He is out.” She was angry now. “You will have to stay a long time if you want to see him here,” she said. “He will not be home until after six this evening. As you decline to believe me when I say he is not at home, you had better come inside and look for him.”
She led them into the sitting room.
Dew repeated that his visit “was most important” and that he would not leave until he had spoken with Crippen. He told Ethel to be “a sensible little lady” and get him.
Ethel laughed at Dew. She repeated that Crippen was not home. She offered to telephone him at his office.
Dew asked her instead to accompany them to the office.
“All right,” she said, “but you must give me time to dress properly.”
She went to the bedroom to change. She wrote, “I had no compunction in making them wait a good long time while I arranged my hair, put on a blouse, and generally made myself look presentable.”
Their visit puzzled her. “Yet I can honestly say that I was not much alarmed,” she wrote, “—only a little bewildered and more than a little annoyed.”
When she went back downstairs, she found Dew to be a changed man, suddenly affable and friendly and “inclined for conversation.” He asked her to sit down. “I would very much like to ask you a few questions,” he said.
He asked when she had come to live at Hilldrop and about Mrs. Crippen’s departure. Sergeant Mitchell took notes. Ethel told them what she knew and mentioned Crippen having received cables telling him of his wife’s illness and, later, her death.
“Did you see the cables?” Dew asked.
“No. Why should I? I do not doubt Dr. Crippen’s word.”
“Ah,” Dew said.
Ethel wrote, “He was always saying that little word, ‘ah,’ as though he knew so much more than I did.”
Again Dew asked her to accompany them to Crippen’s office. Now she resisted. She told him she was a woman “of methodical habits” and did not like having the day disrupted.
“No; I quite understand that,” Dew said, “but you see this is a matter of very special importance to Dr. Crippen. It is for his sake, you see.”
She assented.
AT ALBION HOUSE Ethel went to the upstairs workroom to get Crippen. She found him sitting at a table working on dental fittings, alongside his partner, Rylance. She touched him to get his attention and whispered, “Come out, I want to speak to you.”
Crippen asked why.
“There are two men from Scotland Yard,” Ethel said. “They want to see you on important business. For heaven’s sake, come and talk to them. They have been worrying me for about two hours.”
“From Scotland Yard?” Crippen said. “That’s very odd. What do they want?”
He was utterly calm, she wrote. She accompanied him down the stairs. The time was now, by Ethel’s recollection, about eleven-thirty A.M.
DEW WAITED. A FEW moments later Le Neve reappeared “with an insignificant little man at her side.” For Dew it was a revelatory moment. So this was the doctor he had heard so much about. Crippen was a small man, balding, with a sandy mustache. His most notable feature was his eyes, which were blue and protruded slightly, an effect amplified by his spectacles, which had thick lenses and thin wire rims. If Crippen was at all troubled by a visit from two detectives, he gave no sign of it whatsoever. He smiled and shook hands.
Dew kept it formal: “I am Chief-Inspector Dew, of Scotland Yard. This is a colleague of mine, Sergeant Mitchell. We have called to have a word with you about the death of your wife. Some of your wife’s friends have been to us concerning the stories you have told them about her death, with which they are not satisfied. I have made exhaustive inquiries and I am not satisfied, so I have come to see you to ask if you care to offer any explanation.”
Crippen said, “I suppose I had better tell the truth.”
“Yes,” Dew said, “I think that will be best.”
Crippen said, “The stories I have told about her death are untrue. As far as I know she is still alive.”
AH.
THE GIRL ON THE DOCK
FOR MARCONI THE FIRST HALF OF 1904 proved a time of disillusionment and sorrow. His father, Giuseppe, died on March 29, but Marconi was so consumed by the difficulties of his company that he did not travel to Italy for the funeral. In May he set off on a voyage aboard the Cunard Line’s
The new station would impose great strain on his company’s increasingly fragile financial health, to say nothing of taxing his board’s willingness to support his transatlantic quest—especially now, in the face of the grave threat posed by Kaiser Wilhelm II and his international conference on wireless. The conference had taken place the previous August in Berlin, and the nations in attendance had agreed in principle that every station or ship should be able to communicate with every other, regardless of whose company manufactured the equipment involved. They agreed also that companies must exchange the technical specifications necessary to make such communication possible. For the moment the agreement had no effect, but eventual ratification seemed certain.
Back in London Marconi confronted skepticism and suspicion that seemed to have deepened. He found it hard to comprehend. Wireless worked. He had demonstrated its power time and again. Lloyd’s had endorsed the system. More and more ships carried his apparatus and operators. News reports testified to the value of wireless. The previous December, for example, the Red Star Line’s
