Thunderstruck

fires continued over the next several mornings. At one point he looked over his wall and saw smoke rising from the Crippens’ garden. He had never known the Crippens to burn refuse before. He also told Crutchett that another neighbor had seen Crippen carrying a “burning substance” in a white enamel pail, which Crippen then emptied into a dustbin and stirred.

Evans said he missed Belle. He and his wife had enjoyed hearing her sing as she worked in the garden.

Crutchett tracked down the “dustman” employed by the Islington Borough Council to collect refuse from Hilldrop Crescent. Every Wednesday for nine years William Curtis had come to No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent to empty the accumulated waste. He told Crutchett that in February 1910 he and another dustman, James Jackson, took from the Crippens’ back garden four and a half baskets of partially burned material, in addition to the ordinary contents of the dustbin. “There was burnt stuff of all description, paper, clothing, womens petticoats, old skirts, blouses,” Curtis said.

On the next two Wednesdays Curtis and Jackson took away additional baskets of burned refuse, though it had been reduced entirely to ash. In his years as a dustman Curtis had learned to tell one kind of ash from another. This ash, he told Crutchett, was not ordinary fireplace ash; nor was it the ash one would expect to find after incinerating paper. “It was very light stuff, white ash,” Curtis said. He added, “I did not see any bones amongst it.”

Just how much credence could be given to all these accounts was unclear. None of the witnesses had seen fit to report the shots and screams to police at the time they occurred. As any detective knew, one had to treat such belated reports with a good deal of skepticism, especially in the midst of an investigation as celebrated as this one. It was likely that stories had circulated through the neighborhood many times over, each time gaining detail and color. Still, the accounts were consistent and thus worthy of record.

Sergeant Crutchett had each witness sign a statement; he gave them to Superintendent Froest.

ON WEDNESDAY, JULY 27, at midnight, far out in the Atlantic, Dew’s ship passed the Montrose. The vessels never came close enough for visual contact. Their courses, though parallel, were separated by a vast swath of deep ocean. But now, for the first time during the voyage, the ships came within wireless range of each other. At last Dew was able to contact Kendall directly. “Will board you at Father Point,” Dew’s message read. “Please keep any information till I arrive there strictly confidential.”

Kendall replied, by wireless, “What the devil do you think I have been doing?”

CORRESPONDENTS FROM CITIES throughout North America began making their way to Quebec and from there to Father Point and Rimouski on the St. Lawrence. Provincial towns that had never seen a reporter now saw dozens trooping through with valises, stenographic notepads, and cameras.

Within Scotland Yard, however, a good deal of skepticism remained as to whether Crippen and Le Neve really were aboard the Montrose. Alternative leads continued to reach the Murder Squad, including a report that Crippen and Le Neve had escaped to Andorra, a small republic situated between France and Spain.

“Speaking for myself,” Superintendent Froest told a reporter, “I am keeping a perfectly clear mind on the subject. We have so many of these houses built with cards which fall down when the last of the pack is placed on top, and for this reason we are pursuing every clue which comes to us, just as if the Montrose incident had never occurred.”

QUIVERING ETHER

FOR CAPTAIN KENDALL, IT WAS irresistible. Here they were, Crippen and Le Neve, aboard his ship, utterly unaware of the messages rocketing back and forth all around them. Relayed from ship to ship, at least fifty Marconigrams arrived at the Montrose wireless room from editors and reporters. The Daily Mail said, “Kindly wireless on business terms good description of how Crippen and Le Neve arrested.” The New York World tried to reach Crippen himself and promised, “Will gladly print all you will say.” Kendall withheld the message.

The captain loved the attention. Suddenly his modest ship was the most famous vessel afloat. It was indeed “too good a thing to lose.” Aware that he had an audience of millions around the world, Kendall prepared an account for the Daily Mail of how Crippen and Le Neve spent their days. When the Montrose was about one hundred miles east of Belle Isle, an island just north of Newfoundland that marked a vessel’s entry into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Kendall instructed his Marconi man to send his story to the newspaper’s correspondent in Montreal.

He knew, however, that his account would gain much wider distribution. Once reduced to the invisible confetti of Morse, his story would hurtle from ship to ship, station to station, until it suffused the atmosphere, available to any editor anywhere.

AS THE MONTROSE ENTERED the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Ethel’s excitement rose. She could not wait to disembark and proceed to America. Crippen, however, seemed to grow anxious. He came to their cabin looking “very serious” and handed her ?15 in notes. “My dear,” he told her, “I think you had better take charge of these.”

“Why?” she asked. “I have nowhere to put them except in these pockets. You can keep them, can’t you, until you get to Quebec?”

He paused. “I may have to leave you.”

“Leave me!” His remark left her “astounded,” she wrote. “It seemed to me incredible that I should have come all this way and then should be let alone.”

Crippen said, “When you get to Quebec you had better go on to Toronto. It is a nice place and I know it fairly well. You have not forgotten your typewriting, have you, and you have got your millinery at your fingers’ ends?”

She relaxed. She had misunderstood, she thought. Crippen was not in fact planning to abandon her but rather wished to scout opportunities in America first, on his own, and then would send for her, “that we might settle down in peace in some out-of-the-way spot.”

She asked, “How about these clothes?”

Crippen smiled. “Are you tired of being a boy?”

They worked out a plan where as soon as they left the ship, they would check into a hotel. He would go out immediately and find a dress shop and buy all the clothes she needed. The prospect restored her optimism. She wrote, “I looked forward with keen delight to an adventurous life in Canada.”

Crippen went back up on deck. Ethel returned to her reading. The deck had little appeal for her now. The weather was too cold, and she found the periodic fogs unbearable.

ON FRIDAY, JULY 29, the London Daily Mail published Kendall’s dispatch, transmitted by wireless from the Montrose, snared by the wireless station at Belle Isle, and relayed to London by undersea cable—and doubtless touched up by the newspaper.

Kendall began by describing his own detective work, starting with his discovery of the Robinsons holding hands. “Le Neve squeezed Crippen’s hand immoderately,” Kendall wrote. “It seemed to me unnatural for two males, so I suspected them at once.”