Thunderstruck

He described Le Neve as having “the manner and appearance of a very refined, modest girl. She does not speak much, but always wears a pleasant smile. She seems thoroughly under his thumb, and he will not leave her for a moment. Her suit is anything but a good fit.” A wave of sympathy must have risen from women around the world. “Her trousers are very tight about the hips, and are split a bit down the back and secured with large safety- pins.”

Crippen was growing a beard but continued to shave his upper lip to prevent the reappearance of his mustache, Kendall reported. The doctor still had marks on his nose from his glasses. “He sits about on deck reading, or pretending to read, and both seem to be thoroughly enjoying their meals.” Crippen seemed knowledgeable about Toronto, Detroit, and California, Kendall wrote, “and says that when the ship arrives he will go to Detroit by boat if possible, as he prefers it.”

Kendall listed some of the books Crippen had been reading and noted that at the moment he was engrossed in a thriller called The Four Just Men, a novel by Edgar Wallace in which anarchists assassinate Britain’s prime minister despite every effort of Scotland Yard to protect him.

“At times both would sit and appear to be in deep thought,” Kendall wrote. “Though Le Neve does not show signs of distress and is perhaps ignorant of the crime committed, she appears to be a girl with a very weak will. She has to follow him everywhere.”

One evening about midway through the voyage there was a concert on board, which Crippen and Le Neve both seemed to enjoy. The next morning Crippen told Kendall “how one song, ‘We All Walked Into the Shop,’ had been drumming in his head all night, and how his ‘boy’ had enjoyed it and had laughed heartily when they retired to their room. In the course of one conversation he spoke about American drinks and said that Selfridge’s was the only decent place in London to get them at.”

Kendall wrote, “You will notice I did not arrest them: the course I am pursuing is the best as they have no suspicion, and with so many passengers it prevents any excitement.”

TO READERS AROUND THE WORLD, this report was magic. They knew what books the fugitives were reading. They knew about their contemplative moments, and how much they enjoyed the ship’s concert. They saw Crippen laughing at the captain’s jokes and Le Neve deploying her feminine manners to pluck fruit from a tray. The London Times said, “There was something intensely thrilling, almost weird, in the thought of these two passengers traveling across the Atlantic in the belief that their identity and their whereabouts were unknown while both were being flashed with certainty to all quarters of the civilized world.” From the moment of their departure, the paper said, the two “have been encased in waves of wireless telegraphy as securely as if they had been within the four walls of a prison.”

One newspaper invited W. W. Bradfield, one of Marconi’s principal engineers, to write about the unfolding saga. Bradfield described a ship’s Marconi room as resembling “a magician’s cave” and said wireless had forever altered the prospects of criminals. “The suspect fugitive flying to another continent no longer finds immunity in mid-ocean. The very air around him may be quivering with accusatory messages which have apparently come up out of the void. The mystery of ‘wireless,’ the impossibility of escaping it, the certainty that it will come out to meet a fugitive as well as follow him in pursuit, will from henceforth weigh heavily on the person trying to escape from justice.”

ON ONE OCCASION KENDALL found Crippen sitting on deck looking up at the wireless antenna and listening to the electric crackle coming from the Marconi cabin. Crippen turned to him and exclaimed, “What a wonderful invention it is!”

Kendall could only smile and agree.

THE ST. MARY’S CAT

AT ST. MARY’S HOSPITAL, LONDON, Dr. Willcox conducted an initial series of experiments to rule out certain easy-to-detect poisons, such as arsenic, antimony, and prussic acid. He found trace amounts of arsenic and carbonic acid but attributed them to a disinfectant that a police officer enthusiastically if unwisely had applied to the sides of the excavation in the Hilldrop cellar before the remains were removed. Willcox found the traces only in some organs, not in all, which reassured him that the arsenic was a contaminant, not the cause of death. Now he turned to the more complex and time-consuming task of determining whether the remains contained any poisons of the alkaloid variety, such as strychnine, cocaine, and atropine, a derivative of deadly nightshade. He estimated this phase would take about two weeks.

“It is necessary,” Willcox said, “to weight the different parts of the remains where it is supposed that [an] alkaloid might possibly be. Those are mixed up quite fine, and then placed in rectified spirits of wine. The spirits of wine is drawn off after twenty-four hours, and then what is left of the mixed up flesh is placed in another lot of spirits, which again is drawn off after another twenty-four hours, and so on as long as the liquid which comes away is coloured—about five times. When the liquid ceases to get coloured we stop.”

He found that an alkaloid of some sort was indeed present, then applied a well-known process, the Stas extraction method, to pull the alkaloid from the spirit solution in pure form. He weighed each amount. This was precise work. He found, for example, that his sample of intestines contained one-seventh of a grain of the alkaloid, the stomach only one-thirtieth.

Now came an important, yet startlingly simple, test that would if successful rule out a whole class of alkaloid poisons and greatly simplify Willcox’s investigation. For this he needed a cat.

ABOARD THE LAURENTIC CHIEF Inspector Dew refined his plan. His ship was by now well ahead of the Montrose, as the world knew. Like all large ships, it would stop at Father Point in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, near the village of Rimouski, to pick up a pilot who would guide the ship along the St. Lawrence River to Quebec City, a route notorious for its sudden obliterating spells of fog.

He realized he would need clearance to disembark without first going through the quarantine station at Quebec, and now by wireless made the necessary arrangements.

Almost immediately each of the fifty reporters gathered at Father Point also knew the plan.

IN HIS LABORATORY at St. Mary’s Hospital, Dr. Willcox mixed a bit of his alkaloid extract into a solution and, with the help of an assistant, placed a couple of droplets into the cat’s eye. Moments later the cat’s pupil expanded to many times its ordinary size. This was an important clue, for it meant the substance he had isolated was “mydriatic,” that is, it had the power to dilate pupils. He knew of only four alkaloidal poisons with that power: cocaine, atropine, and two derivatives of henbane, hyoscyamine and hyoscine.

He shined a bright light directly into the cat’s eyes and found that the pupil held its new diameter. This allowed him to rule out cocaine, because its mydriatic powers were less pronounced. When exposed to a powerful light, a pupil dilated by cocaine will still contract.

Willcox prepared for the next and most exacting series of tests with which he would narrow the identity to one of the three remaining possible alkaloids.

He dismissed the cat. His laboratory associates immediately named it Crippen. Adopted by a medical student, it would live for several years and bear a litter of kittens, before meeting its end in the jaws of a dog.

WHISPERS