Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [109]
Froest listened with care as Nash and Lil Hawthorne told their story, then summoned a detective from the Murder Squad, one of its best. When the man entered, Froest introduced the Nashes and explained they had come because a friend of theirs seemed to have disappeared. Her name, he said, was Mrs. Cora Crippen, though she also used the stage name Belle Elmore and was a member of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild. Her husband, Froest said, was a physician “out Holloway way,” named Hawley Harvey Crippen.
“Mr. and Mrs. Nash are not satisfied with the story the husband has told,” Froest said. “Perhaps you had better listen to the full story.”
The detective took a chair.
HIS NAME WAS WALTER DEW; his rank, chief inspector. He was a tall man, built solid, with blue eyes and a large cow-catcher mustache, neatly groomed. He had joined the force at nineteen; he now was forty-seven. He had received his detective’s badge in 1887 and shortly thereafter won the nickname “Blue Serge” for always wearing his best suit on duty. He took part in the Yard’s investigation of the Ripper killings in 1888 and had the good luck, or bad, to be one of the detectives who discovered the remains of Jack’s last and most horribly mutilated victim, Mary Kelly. “I saw a sight which I shall never forget to my dying day,” Dew wrote in a memoir. “The whole horror of that room will only be known to those of us whose duty it was to enter it.” What stayed with him most keenly, he wrote, was the look in the victim’s eyes. “They were wide open, and seemed to be staring straight at me with a look of terror.”
Now Nash told Dew his story:
“When we got back from America a few days ago, we were told that Belle was dead. Our friends said she had gone suddenly to America without a word of good-bye to any of them, and five months ago a notice was out in a theatrical paper announcing her death from pneumonia in California. Naturally, we were upset. I went to see Dr. Crippen. He told me the same story, but there was something about him I didn’t like. Very soon after his wife’s death Dr. Crippen was openly going about with his typist, a girl called Ethel Le Neve. Some time ago they went to a dance together and the girl was actually wearing Belle’s furs and jewelry.”
He told Dew, “I do wish you could make some inquiries and find out just when and where Belle did die. We can’t get details from Dr. Crippen.”
Froest and Dew asked a few more questions, then Froest said, “Well, Mr. Dew, that’s the story. What do you make of it?”
Under ordinary circumstances, Dew would have been inclined to reject the inquiry and turn it over to the uniformed branch for handling as a routine missing-person case. Dew did not suspect foul play and sensed that the Nashes also did not. “What was really in the minds of Mr. and Mrs. Nash, what prompted them to seek the assistance of Superintendent Froest, I cannot say, but it is quite certain that neither of them dreamt for a moment that there was anything very sinister behind the affair,” Dew wrote. “It is probably that they were actuated more than anything else by Crippen’s lack of all decency in placing another woman so soon and so completely in the shoes of his dead wife.”
But the Nashes were personal friends of Superintendent Froest, and Lil Hawthorne was a well-known music hall performer. It seemed important to demonstrate that Scotland Yard was taking their concerns seriously. Also, his own experience on the force had taught him, as he put it, “that it is better to be sure than sorry.”
Dew said, “I think it would be just as well if I made a few inquiries into this personally.”
RATS
THE FADING CREDIBILITY OF HIS COMPANY prompted Marconi to deploy Ambrose Fleming yet again, this time for a lecture on tuning and long-range wireless at the Royal Institution, on June 4, 1903. Fleming arranged to have Marconi send a wireless message from Poldhu to a receiver installed at the institution for the lecture, as a means of providing a vivid demonstration