Thunderstruck (47 page)

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

C
ORRESPONDENTS 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.”

Q
UIVERING
E
THER

F
OR
C
APTAIN
K
ENDALL, 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.

A
S THE
M
ONTROSE
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.

O
N
F
RIDAY
, J
ULY 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.”

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.”

T
O 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.”

O
N ONE OCCASION
K
ENDALL
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.