Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [128]
Soon Crippen arrived but without his mustache. He smiled and asked happily, “Do you recognize me?”
They made their way by subterranean railway to the Liverpool Street station, where eighteen platforms served a thousand trains a day. Crippen planned to catch a train to Harwich and there to book passage aboard one of the steamships that regularly sailed to Holland. They arrived at the station just after a Harwich train departed and now faced a three-hour wait for the next one, scheduled to leave at five o’clock.
Crippen suggested a bus ride, just for fun, and Ethel agreed. “Strange as it may seem,” she wrote, “I was now quite cheerful, and, indeed, rather exhilarated in spirits. It seemed to me that I had given the slip, in fine style, to all those people who had been prying upon my movements”—meaning the ladies of the guild. “I had gone in disguise past their very door in Albion House, and no longer would they be able to scan me up and down with their inquisitive eyes. That made me feel glad, and I had no thought whatever of any reason for escape except this flight from scandal.”
That evening, in Harwich, they boarded the night boat to Hoek van Holland, which sailed at nine o’clock. They reached Holland at five the next morning, Sunday, and had breakfast, then caught a seven o’clock train to Rotterdam, where they spent a few hours walking and seeing sights. At one point they took seats in an outdoor café, where Ethel realized how good her disguise really was. Two Dutch girls began flirting from afar, one remarking, “Oh, the pretty English boy!”
Soon afterward they boarded a train for Brussels. That afternoon they checked into a small inn, the Hotel des Ardennes, at 65 Rue de Brabant. Crippen identified himself in the hotel’s register as “John Robinson,” age fifty-five, and listed his occupation as “merchant.” At entry number 5, “De Naissance,” or place of birth, he wrote “Quebec,” and beside “De Domicile” wrote “Vienna.” He identified Ethel as “John Robinson, Junior,” and explained to the innkeeper’s wife, Louisa Delisse, that the boy was ill and that his mother had died two months earlier. They were traveling for pleasure, he said, and planned to visit Antwerp, The Hague, and Amsterdam.
The innkeepers noticed that the Robinsons carried only a single suitcase, measuring about twelve inches by twenty-four. They observed too that the boy spoke only in whispers.
LATER THAT SUNDAY Chief Inspector Dew went over Crippen’s statement and realized that in the cause of thoroughness he ought to meet with the doctor one more time. He planned a visit to Albion House the next day, Monday, July 11.
A LOS S IN MAYFAIR
MARCONI DID NOT TAKE BEATRICE back to London. He brought her instead to the Poldhu Hotel, adjacent to his wireless compound. She was pregnant and felt ill nearly every day.
Marconi was oblivious, distracted by his experiments and by his company’s financial troubles. The expenses of his transatlantic venture were mounting rapidly, as was pressure from his board and investors. Even so he began looking for a location to replace Poldhu and found one near Clifden in County Galway, Ireland. He envisioned a station that would produce 300,000 watts of power, four times that of his original Glace Bay station, with a horizontal antenna more than half a mile long stretched across the tops of eight two-hundred-foot masts. To fuel the boilers needed to power the station’s generators, he planned to use peat from a bog about two miles away and to build a small railway to deliver it to the station. Once erected, the condenser building would house eighteen hundred plates of galvanized iron, each five times the height of a man and suspended from the ceiling.
By this point he had invested his personal fortune in his quest. Another failure now would ruin not just his company but himself as well. He kept the situation a secret from Beatrice. She said, years later, “I was almost too young to realize