Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [152]
The reporters did not like being constrained but agreed all the same.
Dew still had doubts as to whether the passengers on the Montrose really were the fugitives. He spent a restless night wondering if under the gaze of the entire world he had just spent eleven days on a false hunt of historic dimension.
IN LONDON SUPERINTENDENT FROEST of the Murder Squad remained skeptical. Already there had been one initially persuasive report that Crippen and Le Neve had been spotted aboard a ship. For a time the world had been convinced that they were passengers on the Sardinian, the same ship that a decade earlier had brought Marconi to Newfoundland for his first transatlantic experiment. The Sardinian’s captain ordered his crew to conduct a search. Suspense mounted until at last the captain sent a wireless message to Scotland Yard stating that his men had found no one resembling Crippen or Le Neve.
Now Dew was off chasing a different ship across the Atlantic on the strength of another captain’s suspicions. It too could prove a false trail—but if so, the consequences for the reputation of Scotland Yard would be grave. Every day the newspapers of London charted the positions of the two ships. Even the home secretary, Winston Churchill, had become caught up in the drama. His confidential clerk had called to notify Scotland Yard that Churchill wished to be informed immediately at his office of any new developments in the case.
So Froest kept the Murder Squad working at the same intensity as before Dew’s departure. In Dew’s absence he placed Sergeant Mitchell in direct charge. The squad hunted Crippen but also sought to fill in elements of the overall story and to better understand the characters involved.
They learned, for example, that Le Neve had been seen often at two public houses in Hampstead, the Stag and the Coach and Horses, accompanied by a young man whom at least one witness believed to be her “sweetheart.” The CID’s Sgt. William Hayman tracked him down and identified him as John William Stonehouse.
In a formal statement Stonehouse revealed that until the preceding October he too had been a roomer in Emily Jackson’s house on Constantine Road and had come to be friends with Ethel Le Neve. Just friends, he was careful to note. Through Stonehouse, Sergeant Hayman discovered that after Ethel’s first move from the boardinghouse she had taken a room in a building on Store Street. One day Stonehouse had walked her home. He said, “I accompanied her to the door and in conversation I understood that she was uncomfortable.”
He added, “There was never any undue familiarity between us.”
A room on Store Street—the same street where Crippen and his wife once had lived, and so very near Albion House. It did not take a detective to infer the use to which this nearby residence was put.
CHURCHILL’S CONFIDENTIAL CLERK telephoned again. The home secretary was now at his home, 33 Eccleston Square, and wished to have news of the Crippen case sent directly there.
Later the clerk called to say that Churchill was now at the Heath Golf Club, Walton. The news should go there.
A BOAT IN THE MIST
ON SATURDAY NIGHT FOG SETTLED over the St. Lawrence and forced Captain Kendall to slow the Montrose. The blue spark of the ship’s wireless lit the suspended droplets and made the Marconi cabin seem as if it truly were a magician’s cavern. Even with the door now shut against the weather, the crack of the spark generator was audible on the deck outside.
Fog during a voyage was never pleasant, but in so heavily traveled a channel as the St. Lawrence, it was especially unnerving. “The last night was dreary and anxious, the sound of our foghorn every few minutes adding to the monotony,” Kendall