Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [149]
She asked, “How about these clothes?”
Crippen smiled. “Are you tired of being a boy?”
They worked out a plan where as soon as they left the ship, they would check into a hotel. He would go out immediately and find a dress shop and buy all the clothes she needed. The prospect restored her optimism. She wrote, “I looked forward with keen delight to an adventurous life in Canada.”
Crippen went back up on deck. Ethel returned to her reading. The deck had little appeal for her now. The weather was too cold, and she found the periodic fogs unbearable.
ON FRIDAY, JULY 29, the London Daily Mail published Kendall’s dispatch, transmitted by wireless from the Montrose, snared by the wireless station at Belle Isle, and relayed to London by undersea cable—and doubtless touched up by the newspaper.
Kendall began by describing his own detective work, starting with his discovery of the Robinsons holding hands. “Le Neve squeezed Crippen’s hand immoderately,” Kendall wrote. “It seemed to me unnatural for two males, so I suspected them at once.”
He described Le Neve as having “the manner and appearance of a very refined, modest girl. She does not speak much, but always wears a pleasant smile. She seems thoroughly under his thumb, and he will not leave her for a moment. Her suit is anything but a good fit.” A wave of sympathy must have risen from women around the world. “Her trousers are very tight about the hips, and are split a bit down the back and secured with large safety-pins.”
Crippen was growing a beard but continued to shave his upper lip to prevent the reappearance of his mustache, Kendall reported. The doctor still had marks on his nose from his glasses. “He sits about on deck reading, or pretending to read, and both seem to be thoroughly enjoying their meals.” Crippen seemed knowledgeable about Toronto, Detroit, and California, Kendall wrote, “and says that when the ship arrives he will go to Detroit by boat if possible, as he prefers it.”
Kendall listed some of the books Crippen had been reading and noted that at the moment he was engrossed in a thriller called The Four Just Men, a novel by Edgar Wallace in which anarchists assassinate Britain’s prime minister despite every effort of Scotland Yard to protect him.
“At times both would sit and appear to be in deep thought,” Kendall wrote. “Though Le Neve does not show signs of distress and is perhaps ignorant of the crime committed, she appears to be a girl with a very weak will. She has to follow him everywhere.”
One evening about midway through the voyage there was a concert on board, which Crippen and Le Neve both seemed to enjoy. The next morning Crippen told Kendall “how one song, ‘We All Walked Into the Shop,’ had been drumming in his head all night, and how his ‘boy’ had enjoyed it and had laughed heartily when they retired to their room. In the course of one conversation he spoke about American drinks and said that Selfridge’s was the only decent place in London to get them at.”
Kendall wrote, “You will notice I did not arrest them: the course I am pursuing is the best as they have no suspicion, and with so many passengers it prevents any excitement.”
TO READERS AROUND THE WORLD, this report was magic. They knew what books the fugitives were reading. They knew about their contemplative moments, and how much they enjoyed the ship’s concert. They saw Crippen laughing at the captain’s jokes and Le Neve deploying her feminine manners to pluck fruit from a tray. The London Times said, “There was something intensely thrilling, almost weird, in the thought of these two passengers traveling across the Atlantic in the belief that their identity and their whereabouts were unknown while both were being flashed with certainty to all quarters of the civilized world.” From the moment of their departure, the paper said, the two “have been encased in waves of wireless telegraphy as securely as if they had been within the four