Thunderstruck (48 page)

T
HE
S
T
. M
ARY’S
C
AT

A
T
S
T
. M
ARY’S
H
OSPITAL
, L
ONDON,
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.

A
BOARD THE
L
AURENTIC
C
HIEF
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.

I
N 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.

W
HISPERS

O
N
F
RIDAY
, J
ULY 29,
as the
Montrose
entered the vast Gulf of St. Lawrence, Captain Kendall sent a new message, stating that Crippen and Le Neve still had no idea that they were under surveillance.

At one point, Kendall reported, Crippen had spent about ten minutes at the door of the Marconi cabin listening as Llewellyn Jones transmitted a dispatch. Fascinated by the spark and thunder, Crippen asked who the recipient might be.

Jones proved himself an agile liar. Without expression he told Crippen it was a message to another liner, the
Royal George,
asking if her captain had spotted any ice in the vicinity of Belle Isle.

Crippen returned to his walk.

T
HE
I
NSPECTOR
A
RRIVES

T
HE
L
AURENTIC
SLOWED TO A STOP
off Father Point at about three o’clock on Friday afternoon, July 29. As Chief Inspector Dew emerged from a portal in the immense black hull and climbed gingerly down to the pilot boat,
Eureka,
he saw that its decks were crammed with reporters who shouted and waved. He was appalled and gauged it a display of unruly behavior unlike anything he had experienced in London, yet he confessed he also was relieved to see it because until this moment, despite assurances from the captain of the
Laurentic,
he had not quite believed that he truly had beaten the
Montrose
to Father Point. If the reporters were still here, he knew, the other ship had yet to arrive. In fact, he held a lead of about a day and a half.

Cameras were thrust in his face, questions shouted. “I was importuned to say something, but I need hardly say that I refused.”

This did not sit well with the reporters, most of whom seemed to be Americans who clearly expected a higher level of police cooperation. They shouted and jostled, and when Dew refused to speak, they had the audacity actually to grow angry. Dew wrote, “I cannot refrain from saying that the whole affair was disgraceful and should and could have been avoided, and I was fearful lest this should in any way mar the success of my mission.”

On shore Dew was met by two inspectors from the Quebec City police, who escorted him to a temporary lodging in one of the few structures—“shacks,” Dew called them—near the Father Point lighthouse. Dew found Father Point to be a “lonely little place…with scarcely more than a dozen cottages and a Marconi station on it.”

A fog had risen, adding to the desolation, but Dew himself was anything but lonely. The gentlemen of the press gathered in the other cottages and raised a clamor, shouting and joking and apparently singing, in short behaving as reporters throughout time have behaved when collected together in small places on the eve of an important event. Dew wrote, “The lighthouse foghorn combined with the vocal and musical efforts of my friends the reporters made sleep impossible.”

The following evening, Saturday, one reporter gave Dew a tip that was profoundly unsettling. Reporters for one newspaper—an American paper, of course—were planning to construct a raft and sail it down the St. Lawrence posing as shipwrecked sailors, with the intent of being “rescued” by the
Montrose
and thus scooping everyone else. “Now I don’t pretend to know whether there ever was any serious intention to carry out this ambitious scheme,” Dew wrote, “but from what I had seen of the American newspaper men I did not put it beyond them.”

He called all the reporters together and asked them to be patient. If indeed the passengers proved to be Crippen and Le Neve, he would ask Captain Kendall to blow the ship’s whistle three times, at which point the reporters would be free to come out to the ship. He learned that most of the reporters, possibly all, had a legal right to board the ship—they had bought tickets for the twelve-hour voyage from Father Point to Quebec.

The reporters did not like being constrained but agreed all the same.

Dew still had doubts as to whether the passengers on the
Montrose
really were the fugitives. He spent a restless night wondering if under the gaze of the entire world he had just spent eleven days on a false hunt of historic dimension.

I
N
L
ONDON
S
UPERINTENDENT
F
ROEST
of the Murder Squad remained skeptical. Already there had been one initially persuasive report that Crippen and Le Neve had been spotted aboard a ship. For a time the world had been convinced that they were passengers on the
Sardinian,
the same ship that a decade earlier had brought Marconi to Newfoundland for his first transatlantic experiment. The
Sardinian
’s captain ordered his crew to conduct a search. Suspense mounted until at last the captain sent a wireless message to Scotland Yard stating that his men had found no one resembling Crippen or Le Neve.

Now Dew was off chasing a different ship across the Atlantic on the strength of another captain’s suspicions. It too could prove a false trail—but if so, the consequences for the reputation of Scotland Yard would be grave. Every day the newspapers of London charted the positions of the two ships. Even the home secretary, Winston Churchill, had become caught up in the drama. His confidential clerk had called to notify Scotland Yard that Churchill wished to be informed immediately at his office of any new developments in the case.

So Froest kept the Murder Squad working at the same intensity as before Dew’s departure. In Dew’s absence he placed Sergeant Mitchell in direct charge. The squad hunted Crippen but also sought to fill in elements of the overall story and to better understand the characters involved.

They learned, for example, that Le Neve had been seen often at two public houses in Hampstead, the Stag and the Coach and Horses, accompanied by a young man whom at least one witness believed to be her “sweetheart.” The CID’s Sgt. William Hayman tracked him down and identified him as John William Stonehouse.

In a formal statement Stonehouse revealed that until the preceding October he too had been a roomer in Emily Jackson’s house on Constantine Road and had come to be friends with Ethel Le Neve.
Just
friends, he was careful to note. Through Stonehouse, Sergeant Hayman discovered that after Ethel’s first move from the boardinghouse she had taken a room in a building on Store Street. One day Stonehouse had walked her home. He said, “I accompanied her to the door and in conversation I understood that she was uncomfortable.”

He added, “There was never any undue familiarity between us.”

A room on Store Street—the same street where Crippen and his wife once had lived, and so very near Albion House. It did not take a detective to infer the use to which this nearby residence was put.

C
HURCHILL’S CONFIDENTIAL CLERK
telephoned again. The home secretary was now at his home, 33 Eccleston Square, and wished to have news of the Crippen case sent directly there.

Later the clerk called to say that Churchill was now at the Heath Golf Club, Walton. The news should go there.