Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [127]
Dew composed a circular in which he described Belle Elmore and classified her as a missing person. He arranged to have it sent to every police division in London. It was a routine step, unlikely to bear fruit, but necessary all the same.
AROUND NOON CRIPPEN and Ethel met in the work room of Yale Tooth, on the fourth floor of Albion House. Ethel’s spirits had improved. Her anger of the night before was gone, and having completed the sorrowful task of saying good-bye to her sister, she now found herself caught up in the daring of the moment.
Crippen showed her the suit of clothes that William Long had bought earlier that morning. “You will look a perfect boy in that,” Crippen said. He grinned. “Especially when you have cut off your hair.”
“Have I got to cut my hair?” she cried.
His delight increased. “Why, of course,” he said. “That is absolutely necessary.”
She wrote, “Honestly, I was more amused than anything. It seemed to me an adventure.”
She removed her clothes.
ETHEL’S BROTHER, SIDNEY, planned to visit Hilldrop Crescent that same day. Ethel had made the invitation a few days earlier, before everything changed, but was unable to reach him to cancel his visit.
Now he walked up the ten steps to the front door at No. 39 and knocked. The French maid gave him a note from Ethel.
“Dear Sid,” it said, “Am sorry to disappoint you to day; have been called away. Will write you later. My love dear to you and all and kisses. From your loving Sis, Ethel.”
AT ALBION HOUSE Ethel stood before Crippen in a white shirt, suspenders, tie, vest, brown jacket and pants, and a new pair of boots. In trying on the pants she had split the seat, but she reconnected the seam with safety pins. “It was not a good fit,” she wrote. “It was ludicrous.” To complete the outfit she put on the brown felt hat.
She laughed “at the absurdity” of dressing up as a boy. “Dr. Crippen was just as gay as I was at this transformation. It seemed a merry joke to him.”
Crippen picked up a pair of scissors.
“Now for the hair,” he said.
He began to cut. Hair flurried around her. “I did not think twice about this loss of my locks,” she wrote. “It was all part of the adventure.” She put the hat back on and walked back and forth across the room, trying to get used to the alien feel of the clothing. “I was like a child,” she wrote, “and strutted up and down, and very soon felt quite at ease, although for a time I missed the habit of holding my skirt.”
Crippen watched and smiled. “You will do famously,” he said. “No one will recognize you. You are a perfect boy.”
She feared she would not be able to muster the courage to wear her disguise on the street. It felt so odd. The nape of her neck was cold. The collar chafed. The boots hurt. The sensations reported to her brain from all quarters were strange. It was hard to imagine men wearing these things day in, day out, and not going mad from constriction and abrasion.
Crippen reassured her that she looked exactly like a sixteen-year-old boy. He instructed her to leave first, by the stairs, and to meet him at the Tube station at Chancery Lane, a dozen blocks east on High Holborn—the street along which, in the distant past, condemned men traveled on their way to be executed at Tyburn, at the northeast corner of Hyde Park. To enhance her costume, Ethel placed a cigarette in her mouth and lit it, “another novelty for me which I did not much appreciate.”
She set off for the stairs and soon was outside. “I was terribly self-conscious,” she wrote, “but the crowds surged past, and my disguise did not cause one man to turn his head. I suppose I must have had a certain amount of pluck.