Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [148]
Sergeant Crutchett had each witness sign a statement; he gave them to Superintendent Froest.
ON WEDNESDAY, JULY 27, at midnight, far out in the Atlantic, Dew’s ship passed the Montrose. The vessels never came close enough for visual contact. Their courses, though parallel, were separated by a vast swath of deep ocean. But now, for the first time during the voyage, the ships came within wireless range of each other. At last Dew was able to contact Kendall directly. “Will board you at Father Point,” Dew’s message read. “Please keep any information till I arrive there strictly confidential.”
Kendall replied, by wireless, “What the devil do you think I have been doing?”
CORRESPONDENTS FROM CITIES throughout North America began making their way to Quebec and from there to Father Point and Rimouski on the St. Lawrence. Provincial towns that had never seen a reporter now saw dozens trooping through with valises, stenographic notepads, and cameras.
Within Scotland Yard, however, a good deal of skepticism remained as to whether Crippen and Le Neve really were aboard the Montrose. Alternative leads continued to reach the Murder Squad, including a report that Crippen and Le Neve had escaped to Andorra, a small republic situated between France and Spain.
“Speaking for myself,” Superintendent Froest told a reporter, “I am keeping a perfectly clear mind on the subject. We have so many of these houses built with cards which fall down when the last of the pack is placed on top, and for this reason we are pursuing every clue which comes to us, just as if the Montrose incident had never occurred.”
QUIVERING ETHER
FOR CAPTAIN KENDALL, IT WAS irresistible. Here they were, Crippen and Le Neve, aboard his ship, utterly unaware of the messages rocketing back and forth all around them. Relayed from ship to ship, at least fifty Marconigrams arrived at the Montrose wireless room from editors and reporters. The Daily Mail said, “Kindly wireless on business terms good description of how Crippen and Le Neve arrested.” The New York World tried to reach Crippen himself and promised, “Will gladly print all you will say.” Kendall withheld the message.
The captain loved the attention. Suddenly his modest ship was the most famous vessel afloat. It was indeed “too good a thing to lose.” Aware that he had an audience of millions around the world, Kendall prepared an account for the Daily Mail of how Crippen and Le Neve spent their days. When the Montrose was about one hundred miles east of Belle Isle, an island just north of Newfoundland that marked a vessel’s entry into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Kendall instructed his Marconi man to send his story to the newspaper’s correspondent in Montreal.
He knew, however, that his account would gain much wider distribution. Once reduced to the invisible confetti of Morse, his story would hurtle from ship to ship, station to station, until it suffused the atmosphere, available to any editor anywhere.
AS THE MONTROSE ENTERED the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Ethel’s excitement rose. She could not wait to disembark and proceed to America. Crippen, however, seemed to grow anxious. He came to their cabin looking “very serious” and handed her £15 in notes. “My dear,” he told her, “I think you had better take charge of these.”
“Why?” she asked. “I have nowhere to put them except in these pockets. You can keep them, can’t you, until you get to Quebec?”
He paused. “I may have to leave you.”
“Leave me!” His remark left her “astounded,” she wrote. “It seemed to me incredible that I should have come all this way and then should be let alone.”
Crippen said, “When you get to Quebec you had better go on to Toronto. It is a nice place and I know it fairly well. You have not forgotten your typewriting, have you, and you have got your millinery at your fingers’ ends?”
She relaxed. She had misunderstood, she thought. Crippen was not in fact planning to abandon her but rather wished