Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [108]
IN NOVA SCOTIA, when winter and spring collide, an event called a silver thaw can occur. As rain falls, it freezes and sheathes everything it touches with ice until tree limbs begin to break and telegraph wires to fall. Marconi’s men at Glace Bay had never experienced a silver thaw before, and they were unprepared for the phenomenon.
On April 6, 1903, the rain came. Ice accumulated on the station’s four hundred wires until each wore a coat about one inch thick. It was lovely, ethereal. A giant crystal pyramid hung in the sky.
The weight of so much ice on so many miles of wire became too great. The whole array pulled free and crackled to the ground.
BLUE SERGE
FOR TWO OF BELLE’S FRIENDS, John Nash and Lil Hawthorne, the news of Belle’s death came as an especially harsh surprise. On March 23, 1910, the day before Crippen telegraphed the news, Nash and his wife had set sail for America, after a doctor recommended a sea voyage to ease Hawthorne’s nerves. No one thought to send them word by wireless. After their arrival in New York, they paid a visit to Mrs. Isabel Ginnette, president of the guild, who also was in New York. To their shock, the Nashes now heard that Belle had died.
Nash promised Mrs. Ginnette that on his return to England he would go and talk to Crippen. Once safely back in London, the Nashes got together with their friends in the guild and discovered that no one believed Crippen’s account of what had happened. Nash was appalled that his friends had done little to learn the truth. “I came over here and found that no one had had the courage and pluck to take up this matter,” Nash said. “I therefore felt it my duty to take action myself.”
Nash and his wife stopped by Crippen’s office. “It was the first time we had seen him since his wife’s death,” Nash said. “He seemed much cut up—in fact, sobbed; he seemed very nervous, and was twitching a piece of paper about the whole time.”
Crippen told him that Belle had died in Los Angeles, but then corrected himself and said it had happened in “some little town” around San Francisco. Nash knew San Francisco and pressed Crippen for a more precise location. Exasperated, Nash said, “Peter, do you mean to say that you don’t know where your wife has died?”
Crippen said he could not remember but thought the place was called “Allemaio.”
Nash changed direction. “I hear you have received her ashes.”
Crippen confirmed it and said he had them in his safe. Nash did not ask to see them. Instead, he asked for the name of the crematorium and whether Crippen had received a death certificate.
“You know there are about four Crematoria there,” Crippen said. “I think it is one of those.”
“Surely you received a certificate.”
Crippen became visibly nervous.
Nash said later, “I began to feel there was something wrong, as his answers were not satisfactory when a man cannot tell where his wife died or where her ashes came from.”
Two days later, June 30, Nash and his wife set out to visit a friend who worked at New Scotland Yard. No mere functionary, this friend was Superintendent Frank C. Froest, head of the Yard’s Murder Squad, established three years earlier as a special unit of its Criminal Investigation Department or CID.
ANYONE APPROACHING THE HEADQUARTERS of the Metropolitan Police from the north along the Victoria Embankment saw a building of five stories topped by a giant mansard roof, with Westminster Hall and Big Ben visible two blocks south. Huge rectangular chimneys marched along the top of the roof. Turrets formed the corners of the building and imparted the look of a medieval castle, giving their occupants—one of whom was the police commissioner—unparalleled views of the Thames. The lower floors were sheathed in granite quarried by the residents of Dartmoor Prison; the rest up to the roofline was brick.
The Nashes were anxious, but being creatures of the theater, they were also excited by the prospect of their interview with Froest. The building and its setting conveyed melodrama, and Froest himself was a man of some fame, for