Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [151]
He shined a bright light directly into the cat’s eyes and found that the pupil held its new diameter. This allowed him to rule out cocaine, because its mydriatic powers were less pronounced. When exposed to a powerful light, a pupil dilated by cocaine will still contract.
Willcox prepared for the next and most exacting series of tests with which he would narrow the identity to one of the three remaining possible alkaloids.
He dismissed the cat. His laboratory associates immediately named it Crippen. Adopted by a medical student, it would live for several years and bear a litter of kittens, before meeting its end in the jaws of a dog.
WHISPERS
ON FRIDAY, JULY 29, as the Montrose entered the vast Gulf of St. Lawrence, Captain Kendall sent a new message, stating that Crippen and Le Neve still had no idea that they were under surveillance.
At one point, Kendall reported, Crippen had spent about ten minutes at the door of the Marconi cabin listening as Llewellyn Jones transmitted a dispatch. Fascinated by the spark and thunder, Crippen asked who the recipient might be.
Jones proved himself an agile liar. Without expression he told Crippen it was a message to another liner, the Royal George, asking if her captain had spotted any ice in the vicinity of Belle Isle.
Crippen returned to his walk.
THE INSPECTOR ARRIVES
THE LAURENTIC SLOWED TO A STOP off Father Point at about three o’clock on Friday afternoon, July 29. As Chief Inspector Dew emerged from a portal in the immense black hull and climbed gingerly down to the pilot boat, Eureka, he saw that its decks were crammed with reporters who shouted and waved. He was appalled and gauged it a display of unruly behavior unlike anything he had experienced in London, yet he confessed he also was relieved to see it because until this moment, despite assurances from the captain of the Laurentic, he had not quite believed that he truly had beaten the Montrose to Father Point. If the reporters were still here, he knew, the other ship had yet to arrive. In fact, he held a lead of about a day and a half.
Cameras were thrust in his face, questions shouted. “I was importuned to say something, but I need hardly say that I refused.”
This did not sit well with the reporters, most of whom seemed to be Americans who clearly expected a higher level of police cooperation. They shouted and jostled, and when Dew refused to speak, they had the audacity actually to grow angry. Dew wrote, “I cannot refrain from saying that the whole affair was disgraceful and should and could have been avoided, and I was fearful lest this should in any way mar the success of my mission.”
On shore Dew was met by two inspectors from the Quebec City police, who escorted him to a temporary lodging in one of the few structures—“shacks,” Dew called them—near the Father Point lighthouse. Dew found Father Point to be a “lonely little place…with scarcely more than a dozen cottages and a Marconi station on it.”
A fog had risen, adding to the desolation, but Dew himself was anything but lonely. The gentlemen of the press gathered in the other cottages and raised a clamor, shouting and joking and apparently singing, in short behaving as reporters throughout time have behaved when collected together in small places on the eve of an important event. Dew wrote, “The lighthouse foghorn combined with the vocal and musical efforts of my friends the reporters made sleep impossible.”
The following evening, Saturday, one reporter gave Dew a tip that was profoundly unsettling. Reporters for one newspaper—an American paper, of course—were planning to construct a raft and sail it down the St. Lawrence posing as shipwrecked sailors, with the intent of being “rescued” by the Montrose and thus scooping everyone else. “Now I don’t pretend to know whether there ever was any serious intention to carry out this ambitious scheme,” Dew wrote, “but from what I had seen of the American newspaper men I did not put it beyond them.”
He called all the reporters together and asked them to be patient. If indeed the