Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [184]
At the National Archives in Kew, just outside London, I entered writers’ heaven. After an hour or so of acquainting myself with the archives’ search and retrieval protocols and getting my “Reader’s Ticket”—actually a plastic card with a bar code—I received a trove of documents accumulated by detectives of the Metropolitan Police during their hunt for Crippen and Miss Le Neve, as well as stacks of depositions from the Department of Publication Prosecutions and a small but chilling collection of records from the Prison Commission, including the “Table of Drops,” which allowed me to calculate the precise distance that an Edwardian executioner would have insisted I fall in order to break my neck—four feet, eight inches. In all I collected over a thousand pages of statements, telegrams, memoranda, and reports that helped me reconstruct the hunt for Crippen and the chase that followed.
One of my greatest pleasures was simply walking London streets where the characters who appear in this book also once walked, past squares, parks, and buildings that existed in their time. There is no place quite like Hyde Park on a warm spring evening as the gold light begins to fade, no view quite so compelling as the Victoria Embankment under a bruised autumn sky. As so often occurs, I experienced strange moments of resonance where the past seemed to reach out to me as if to offer reassurance that I was on the right path. On my first research trip to London, I arrived during a week of unexpectedly hot weather. My hotel had no air conditioning. After a couple of too-still nights, I moved to a different hotel a few blocks away, the very charming and blissfully cool Academy House. I discovered the next day that the window of my room afforded me a view of Store Street, one block long, the very street where Crippen and Belle had lived after Belle’s arrival in London and where for a time Ethel Le Neve kept a room.
It was easy to imagine moments when Crippen must have walked past Ambrose Fleming, whose office and laboratory at University College, London, were just a few blocks north. On some evenings, Crippen and Belle and, later, Le Neve surely must have crossed paths with Marconi himself, perhaps on the Strand or in a theater on Shaftesbury Avenue, maybe at the Cri, the Troc, “Jimmy’s,” or the Café Royal. One thing is certain: On an almost daily basis the waves Marconi transmitted from his early apparatus struck Crippen and Belle and the ladies of the Guild, and Chief Inspector Dew and Sir Melville, Fleming and Maskelyne, and just about everyone else who makes an appearance in this book.
I visited a number of London’s many museums, and found two particularly useful in helping to conjure a vision of the past. At the Museum of London I saw one of Charles Booth’s actual color-coded maps and was able to run my hand along the gleaming enameled body of a hansom cab. There I also saw Maskelyne and Cooke’s most famous automaton, the whist-playing “Psycho,” as well as Crippen’s hearing aid and the heavy manacles that once bound his wrists. At London’s Transport Museum, the little boy in me burst forth the moment I walked through the door. The place is full of vintage taximeter cabs and double-decker buses and subterranean railcars from the days when smoke and cinder filled the Tube. I had an opportunity to meet Crippen face to face, at Madame Tussaud’s, in the Chamber of Horrors. He was shorter than I expected.
In the course of my research, I began studying Italian, expecting that I would need to do a lot of research in Italian archives and texts. I quickly found I was mistaken, for Marconi, “The Little Englishman,” conducted his affairs, business and