Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [62]
Though the letter might seem to indicate otherwise, Aural Remedies was not going to take a loss if the customer never made the second payment. Patent medicines cost almost nothing to produce. Even the reduced price Crippen now offered would have yielded a substantial profit regardless of whether the customer paid another pence. The key point is that Crippen was not offering to return the initial payment.
In time Aural Remedies and Crippen would be identified by the muckraking magazine Truth in its “Cautionary List” of companies to avoid.
WITHIN THE CRIPPEN HOUSEHOLD the weather did not improve. They moved to another address on Store Street, No. 37, but this new apartment did not offer enough additional space to allow them to stay out of each other’s way. They still had to sleep in the same bedroom. They could not afford anything larger, at least not in Bloomsbury. Crippen was only earning a fraction of the salary Munyon’s had paid. Nonetheless he continued to allow Belle to spend heavily on clothing and jewelry. Crippen said, “although we apparently lived very happily together, as a matter of fact there were very frequent occasions when she got into most violent tempers, and often threatened she would leave me, saying she had a man she could go to, and she would end it all.”
It was clear to Crippen that the man in question was Bruce Miller. In early April Miller came by the apartment for what would prove to be the last time. He wanted to say good-bye to Belle. He told her he was taking her advice and returning to Chicago to reunite with his wife. He sailed from England on April 21, 1904.
If Miller’s departure reignited in Crippen any hope that his own marriage could now be restored, he immediately found those hopes dashed. Belle’s temper worsened, and so too did the couple’s financial situation, though he still made no effort to curb her expenditures. He began looking for another home that would be much larger but also cheaper, which meant necessarily that he would have to look outside the core of the city, at grave risk of annoying Belle even further.
THE EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPE negotiated each day by the Crippens grew still more contorted. On her brief visits to Crippen’s office, Belle had taken note of his typist, Ethel Le Neve. She was young and striking and slender. Her looks alone may have made Belle uneasy, or Belle may have sensed an unusual degree of warmth in the way Crippen and the young woman behaved toward each other, but there was indeed something about the typist that made Belle uneasy.
One morning a friend of Belle’s named Maud Burroughs, who lived in the same building on Store Street, stopped by as Belle was getting dressed. In the course of their conversation, Belle mentioned her past surgery and asked Burroughs if she would like to see the scar.
Burroughs said no.
“Give me your hand,” Belle said, “and you can feel where it was.”
Belle took Burroughs’s hand and, as Burroughs recalled, “placed it underneath her clothing upon her stomach. I felt what seemed to me to be a hole, so far as I remember, a little on one side of the lower part of her stomach.”
The conversation shifted to Crippen, who by now, for reasons unclear, had taken to calling himself Peter. It was by this name that Belle and her friends addressed him.
Belle said, “I don’t like the girl typist Peter has in his office.”
“Why don’t you ask Peter to get rid of her then?” Burroughs asked.
Belle replied that