Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [79]
Belle turned to Crippen. “Didn’t I dear?”
“Yes,” Crippen agreed, “but you are alright now.”
The three then left and walked together to a nearby Lyons & Co. teahouse, crowded as always, and there Belle repeated her story, with still more drama.
“I shall never forget it,” she said. “It was terrible.”
She put her hand to her throat.
Davis found it odd to hear Belle recount such a story, for one of Belle’s most salient characteristics was her robust good health. As one friend said, Belle “did not seem to know what an ache or pain was.”
Over tea Crippen blamed the incident on anxiety generated by Belle’s work for the guild. He urged her to resign, advice that he had given before and that she had ignored, just as she ignored it now. One reason he wanted her to quit was to remove her from Albion House, where she had become a near-constant presence, forcing Crippen and Ethel to maintain a level of circumspection that both found cumbersome and inhibiting.
At Lyons the conversation moved on.
ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 15, 1910, Crippen left his office and walked along New Oxford Street to the nearby shop of Mssrs. Lewis & Burrows, Chemists, where he always bought the compounds he used in his medicines and anesthetics. Over the previous year he had acquired hydrochloric acid, hydrogen peroxide, morphine salts, and—his highest-volume purchase—cocaine, which he bought on nine occasions throughout the preceding year, for a total of 170 grains. Today, however, he wanted something different. He asked the clerk, Charles Hetherington, for five grains of hyoscine hydrobromide.
The order did not surprise Hetherington. He knew Crippen and liked him. Crippen always smiled and exuded an aura of kindness. Part of it was the way he looked—the now-graying mustache and beard made him seem approachable, and his eyes, magnified by the lenses of his spectacles, made him seem somehow vulnerable. Hetherington knew also that Crippen made homeopathic medicines and dental anesthetics, and that hyoscine was sometimes used in drugs meant to have a tranquilizing effect on patients.
But Hetherington could not fill the order. Hyoscine was an exceedingly dangerous poison and was rarely used, and as a consequence he did not have it in stock. Indeed, in his three years working for Lewis & Burrows, he had never known the shop to have that large a quantity on hand at any one time. He told Crippen he would have to order it and that it ought to arrive within a few days.
HETHERINGTON RELAYED THE ORDER by telephone to a drug wholesaler, British Drug Houses Ltd., “the largest firm of Druggists in London, and probably in England,” according to its managing director, Charles Alexander Hill.
His company had no problem filling the order, as it typically had about two hundred grains on hand, supplied by Merck & Co. of Darmstadt, Germany. Hyoscine had “very limited demand,” he said. Ordinarily his company supplied chemists with a maximum of one grain at a time, though a wholesale drug firm once ordered three grains and a hospital fifteen, the largest single order he could recall.
The company shipped the five grains of hyoscine to Lewis & Burrows on January 18, along with other compounds the shop had ordered.
THE NEXT DAY, Wednesday, January 19, Crippen again walked to Lewis & Burrows’s shop and asked for his order.
In the past whenever Crippen picked up his poisons—his morphine and cocaine—the clerks on duty did not make him sign the poisons book, in which they recorded purchases of “scheduled” poisons. “We did not require him to do so,” said Harold Kirby, an assistant at the shop, “because we knew him, and knew him to be a medical man.”
On this occasion, however, the shop did ask him to fill out an entry in the book and sign it, because of the unusual nature of the order and the potency of the drug. Crippen “did not raise the slightest objection,” Kirby said.
First the form asked for the “Name of Purchaser,” and here Crippen wrote, “Munyons per H. H. Crippen,