Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [145]
FOR CRIPPEN AND ETHEL, the hours passed sweetly. Compared to life before the departure of Belle Elmore, this was heaven. No one stared, and there were no furtive meetings in secret rooms. They felt free to love each other at last.
“The doctor was as calm as ever, and spent as much time in reading as myself,” Ethel wrote. “He was very friendly with Captain Kendall, and at meal times many amusing stories were told over the table, which kept us in a good humor. All the officers were very courteous to us, and used often to ask me how I was getting on.”
She imagined the letter she would write to her sister Nina once settled in America. “Oh! Such a letter! I had been saving up all my little adventures in Rotterdam and Brussels. How she would laugh at my boyish escapade. How she would marvel at my impudence!”
ON SUNDAY NIGHT, July 24, the Montrose’s Marconi operator, Jones, intercepted a message from a London newspaper meant for someone aboard another ship, the White Star Laurentic. The contents were intriguing enough that Jones passed the message along to Captain Kendall.
It asked: “What is Inspector Dew doing? Are passengers excited over chase? Rush reply.”
Only then did Kendall realize that his own message had gotten through and—far more amazing—that Scotland Yard was pursuing his ship across the Atlantic.
He understood, too, that the story was now public knowledge.
CAGE OF GLASS
ABOARD THE LAURENTIC FELLOW PASSENGERS knew Chief Inspector Dew only as Mr. Dewhurst, and on the Montrose Crippen and Le Neve remained the Robinsons, but suddenly millions of readers around the world now knew, or at least suspected, their real identities. On Sunday Scotland Yard released a brief statement:
“It is believed that ‘Dr’ Crippen and Miss Le Neve are now on board a vessel bound for Canada. Chief Inspector Dew has left Liverpool for Canada, and hopes to overtake the fugitives and arrest them on arrival.”
It took only a bit more effort by reporters to learn the names of the ships involved and the contents of Kendall’s initial message. Marconi operators on other ships had intercepted it and passed it on. Aboard inbound liners the news moved from passenger to passenger. Some ships may even have reported the telegram in their onboard newspapers. Foreign correspondents based in London passed the news by cable to their editors in New York, Berlin, Stockholm, and New Delhi, and soon the front pages of newspapers around the world bloomed with maps of the Atlantic showing the supposed relative positions of the Montrose and the Laurentic.
The story consumed the editors of the Daily Mail, who offered a reward of £100—about $10,000 today—for information about Crippen and Le Neve. On Tuesday the paper reported, “At noon to-day the Laurentic will be only 253 knots (285 miles) behind the Montrose.” The article predicted that Dew would try to intercept the ship at Father Point in the St. Lawrence River, where pilots boarded large ships to guide them to Quebec. One article speculated that Crippen would realize, eventually, that he had been discovered—“that he will not before long have gauged the fact that the cracking, snapping, in the ‘wireless’ cabin means that messages about him are flying to and fro across the hundreds of miles of sea. All on board will assume that nothing is amiss, and even those who know most will pretend an ignorance of the fact that the air is quivering with wireless messages transmitted, perhaps, by intervening ships. It will be a voyage which no one aboard will be likely to forget.”
For editors around the world, one point seemed obvious: Wireless had made the sea less safe for criminals on the run. “Mysterious voices nowadays whisper across it,” a writer for the Daily Mirror observed: “invisible hands stretch out upon it; viewless fingers draw near and clutch and hold there.” A French newspaper, Liberté, proclaimed that wireless “has demonstrated that from one side of the Atlantic