THE MERMAID
NOW AND THEN THE MARRIAGE between Beatrice and Marconi flared back to life, and in the fall of 1909 Beatrice discovered that once again she was pregnant. At the time she and little Degna were living in a house in Clifden, as remote and austere a place as Glace Bay and Poole. Perhaps she felt a need to escape, or simply wanted for once to see the look on her husband’s face when he first heard the news rather than wait for a reply by telegram, but now she plotted a surprise. She knew when his ship was due and traveled to Cork, where she managed to talk her way onto a tugboat scheduled to rendezvous with the ship. She planned to surprise Marconi with her presence and her exciting news.
Marconi, meanwhile, was reveling in the voyage and the luxuries of the ship, and in the attention lavished upon him by his fellow first-class passengers, in particular Enrico Caruso, destined to become a friend. In future years, when circumstances allowed, Marconi would stand with Caruso offstage to ease the anxiety the great tenor felt before each performance. Marconi was particularly enthralled with the young women traveling with Caruso, a group of alluring and flirtatious actresses.
Suddenly Beatrice appeared.
She had expected him to be delighted by her surprise visit, but instead, according to Degna, his welcome “was like a pail of icy water poured over her head. Returning to his bachelor habits, he was having a gay time with the ship’s passengers…. The last thing he expected or wanted to see, popping out of the sea like a mermaid, was his wife’s face.”
Beatrice fled to Marconi’s cabin, where she spent the night in tears.
The next morning Marconi apologized and urged her to come join the group. Beatrice refused. She felt awful, and believed she looked awful, and did not feel up to competing for her husband’s attention among such a glamorous crowd. She stayed in the cabin until the ship reached Liverpool.
THE MYSTERY DEEPENS
WHERE THE BRICKS HAD LAIN, Dew found a flat surface of clay. He broke into it with the spade and found that the soil underneath seemed to be loose, or at least looser than it would have been had it lain there undisturbed for a period of years. He thrust the spade in deeper. The unmistakable odor of putrefaction struck him full in the face and sent him reeling. “The stench was unbearable,” he wrote, “driving us both into the garden for fresh air.”
Outside in the brilliant cool green, Dew and Sergeant Mitchell steeled themselves. With one last full breath they reentered the cellar, where the odor now suffused the entire chamber. Dew removed two more spadefuls of earth and found what appeared to be a mass of decomposing tissue. Once again he and Mitchell were driven from the house. They gulped the fresh cool air, found brandy, and took long draughts of it before entering the cellar a third time. They uncovered more tissue and viscera, enough to convince them that the remains were those of a human being.
At five-thirty Dew called his immediate boss, Superintendent Froest, head of the Murder Squad, and told him of the discovery. Froest notified Assistant Commissioner Sir Melville Macnaghten, in charge of the entire Criminal Investigation Department. As Macnaghten left his office, he grabbed a handful of cigars, with the idea that Dew and Mitchell might need them to counter the awful stench. He and Froest set out immediately in a department motorcar. Traveling first along the Embankment, they moved through air gilded with sun-suffused haze, the Thames a lovely cobalt edged with black shadow.
DR. THOMAS MARSHALL, divisional surgeon for Scotland Yard’s “Y” Division, which encompassed Hilldrop Crescent and the surrounding district, walked over from his practice on nearby Caversham Road. His task would be to lead the postmortem examination once the remains were removed from the house.
He and Dew watched the constables dig. Lanterns had replaced candles, and the close work had begun, the constables on their knees pushing dirt away with their hands as macabre shadows played on the surrounding walls. The men concentrated on an opening at the center of the floor about four feet long by two feet wide.
What Dew saw before him evoked recollection of his discovery of Jack the Ripper’s last victim and begged comparison: This was worse. The remains bore no resemblance to a human body, and the distortion had nothing to do with decomposition. In fact, much was well preserved, surprisingly so, though why this should be the case was itself a mystery. As Dew would note in a report entitled “Particulars of Human Remains,” the largest mass consisted of one long connected train of organs that included liver, stomach, lungs, and heart. All the skin —“practically the whole of the soft covering of a body”—had been removed and lay in a pile, like a coat dropped to the floor.
Most notable, however, was all that was absent. There was nothing to confirm sex. No sign of hands or feet. No teeth. The head and scalp were missing. And there were no bones whatsoever. None. Dew wrote, “Someone had simply carved the flesh off the bones and laid it there.”
The scope of the challenge ahead immediately became clear. It was one thing to infer from the circumstances of the case that the remains had once been Belle Elmore; it was quite another to prove it beyond doubt. The first step was to confirm that the remains were human. That proved simple: The organs were in such good condition that Dr. Marshall on first viewing was able to confirm their provenance.
It was equally obvious, however, that nothing else would be so easy. The next challenge was to identify the sex of the victim, yet no reproductive organs, pelvic bones, or other physical markers of gender could be found, save for one lump of tissue that seemed, at first, as though it might have been a portion of a female breast. Once the sex was confirmed—if ever—then Dew would have to prove that the woman was Belle Elmore. Next he would have to find the cause of death, to determine beyond doubt whether she had been murdered or had died from illness or accident. Finally he would have to determine who killed her.
What lay before him in the cellar was an affront to his working hypothesis that the killer was Dr. Crippen. It defied physics and common sense. Crippen was five feet four inches tall and of slight build. Everyone Dew had interviewed described him as kind, gentle, and affectionate. How could he kill a woman so much larger and more robust than he and then marshal the physical and mental stamina to bring her to the basement, strip the flesh from her body, remove her head, denude every bone, somehow dispose of head, bones, teeth, and sexual organs, and then bury the remainder in his cellar, all without showing signs of physical or emotional duress?
According to witnesses, on the day after Belle had last been seen alive Crippen was his usual calm and peaceful self, cheerful and ready with a smile. That day he had stopped by the Martinettis to check on Paul, and Mrs. Martinetti had noticed nothing unusual about his demeanor.
But three facts were beyond challenge:
—a mass of human remains lay in Crippen’s cellar;
—Belle had disappeared; and
—Crippen and his typist, Miss Le Neve, seemed to have fled.
MACNAGHTEN AND FROEST ARRIVED, bearing cigars. Dew showed the men the cellar and walked them through the rest of the house. What most struck Macnaghten was how near the burial site was to Crippen’s kitchen and breakfast area. “From the doctor’s chair at the head of the dining-room table to the cellar where the remains had been found was a distance of only some fifteen or twenty feet,” Macnaghten wrote. It would have taken a character of cool temperament indeed to have continued cooking and dining while aware of what lay buried beyond the next door.
After seeing the remains thus far exposed, Macnaghten telephoned a friend, Dr. Augustus Pepper, at St.
