Thunderstruck (28 page)

T
O THE
B
ALL

W
HEN
E
THEL
L
E
N
EVE ARRIVED
at work on the morning of Wednesday, February 2, 1910, she found a packet on her desk with a note on top that caused a soaring of spirit. Written in Crippen’s hand, the text was simple and direct: “B.E. has gone to America.” The note asked Ethel to deliver the packet to Melinda May, secretary of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild.

“Shall be in later,” Crippen wrote, “when we can arrange for a pleasant little evening.”

So Belle was gone. “I was, of course, immensely excited at this disappearance of Dr. Crippen’s mysterious wife,” Ethel wrote. “I knew well enough that they had been on bad terms together. I knew that she had often threatened to go away and leave him. I knew also that she had a secret affection for Mr. Bruce Miller, who lived in New York.” Ethel assumed that Belle had at last made good on her threat and had run off to join the ex-prizefighter. If true, if really true, it meant that Crippen now would be free to seek divorce and, despite the strictures of British law, likely would prevail. It was, as she put it, “amazing news.”

Ethel took the packet down the hall to the offices of the guild, which was due to meet that day, then returned to Yale Tooth to await her lover. She had many questions.

At noon he still had not appeared. She believed he was conducting business at nearby Craven House, on Kingsway. She busied herself with the work of the office, though Crippen’s news made it hard for her to concentrate.

Crippen did not come back until four o’clock that afternoon. “He was not in a mood then for a long conversation on the subject,” she recalled, “and his reticence I readily understood.” But she had to speak with him.

“Has Belle Elmore really gone away?”

“Yes,” Crippen said. “She has left me.”

“Did you see her go?”

“No. I found her gone when I got home last night.”

“Do you think she will come back?”

Crippen shook his head. “No,” he said, “I don’t.”

On this score Ethel needed reassurance: “Did she take any luggage with her?”

“I don’t know what luggage she had, because I did not see her go. I daresay she took what she wanted. She always said that the things I gave her were not good enough, so I suppose she thinks she can get better elsewhere.”

Though Crippen seemed downcast, Ethel offered neither condolence nor sympathy. “I could not pretend to commiserate with him,” she wrote. “He had led me into the secret of his unhappy married life, and now that his wife had disappeared it seemed to me best for him, perhaps also best for her.”

Now Crippen surprised her. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of jewels that Belle had left behind. “Look here,” he said. “You had better have those.” He held them out. “These are good, and I should like to know you had some good jewelry. They will be useful when we are dining out, and you will please me if you will accept them.”

“If you really wish it,” Ethel said, “I will have one or two. Pick out what you like. You know my tastes.”

He chose several diamond rings; a more elaborate ring with four diamonds and a ruby; and a brooch in a pattern that evoked a rising sun, with a diamond at its center and pearls radiating outward in zigzag fashion.

The jewels were lovely, and Ethel believed them to be of the finest quality, for Crippen, as she put it, “was a real expert in diamonds.” Previously he had shown her how to judge a diamond by color and clarity, and how to tell at a glance whether a diamond had been set in New York or London.

She suggested he pawn the remaining jewels—a dozen rings and a large brooch inlaid with rows of diamonds in the shape of a tiara. The idea of doing so had not struck Crippen, but now he told Ethel it was a good plan. He walked to a pawnshop on the same street as his office, Mssrs. Jay & Attenborough.

He showed a clerk named Ernest Stuart three diamond rings. After examining them closely, Stuart agreed to lend Crippen £80. Crippen returned a few days later with the rest of the jewels, and got another £115 pounds, for a total of £195—nearly $20,000 today.

That night Ethel Le Neve slept in Crippen’s bed at Hilldrop Crescent for the first time.

F
OR THE LADIES
of the guild, the news was equally amazing. The packet delivered to the guild office that morning contained two letters—one for Melinda May, and one for the guild’s executive committee. It also contained the guild’s ledger and checkbook, which Belle in her role as treasurer had kept at home.

The letters were dated that same day, February 2, and were from Belle Elmore. A notation after the closing of May’s letter indicated it had been prepared by Crippen at Belle’s request.

“Dear Miss May,” it began, “Illness of a near relative has called me to America on only a few hours’ notice, so I must ask you to bring my resignation as treasurer before the meeting to-day, so that a new treasurer can be elected at once. You will appreciate my haste when I tell you that I have not been to bed all night packing, and getting ready to go. I shall hope to see you again a few months later, but I cannot spare a moment to call on you before I go. I wish you everything nice till I return to London again.”

The letter to the executive committee repeated the news and noted the enclosure of the checkbook and ledger. It urged the committee to suspend the usual rules and appoint a new treasurer immediately. “I hope some months later to be with you again, and in meantime wish the Guild every success and ask my good friends and pals to accept my sincere and loving wishes for their own personal welfare.”

The news of Belle’s departure and the selection of her replacement consumed most of that day’s meeting, though no one thought to walk the short distance to Crippen’s office to ask for a fuller explanation.

A
FEW DAYS LATER—MOST LIKELY
it was Saturday, February 5—Ethel and Crippen arranged to spend an evening together at the theater. “He thought it would cheer us both up,” Ethel said, though she herself needed no cheering. She reveled in her new status. No longer would she have to endure the sight of Crippen going off with his wife to some evening function, when rightfully it should have been she, Ethel, who accompanied him.

They were both in the office, Saturday being a workday, when Crippen remembered that he had forgotten to leave out food for his pets—the seven canaries, two cats, and bull terrier. He could not get away to feed them, but the prospect of leaving them so long without food troubled him.

Lest this problem destroy the evening and their first opportunity to go out together in public without fear of discovery, Ethel volunteered to go to Hilldrop Crescent and feed the animals. Crippen offered his keys. She left after lunch.

Ethel entered the house through the side door and found herself alone in the place for the first time. She had seen little of it so far, only the kitchen, the parlor, the bathroom, and of course Crippen’s bedroom. She made her way to the kitchen, where she found most of the pets. She went to the pantry, near the door to the coal cellar, to get some milk for the cats, but as she did so, one of the cats, a beautiful white Persian—Belle’s favorite—escaped and dashed upstairs. Ethel gave chase.

The cat led her throughout the house. “The faster I ran the faster went the cat,” she recalled. At last she cornered it and brought it back downstairs to the kitchen.

Her tour had taken her through rooms she had never seen before, giving her a new sense of what life had been like for Crippen—nothing “uncanny,” as she put it, just a sense of loneliness and what she termed a “strange untidiness.”

“Rich gowns lay about the bedrooms, creased and tumbled in disorder,” Ethel wrote. “Lengths of silk which had never been made into frocks were piled up, and on the pegs was a regular wardrobe, like part of a dressmaker’s show-room.” There were piles of clothes and “cheap stuff” that appeared never to have been worn or used. “I was struck,” she wrote, “by this extraordinary litter.” That Belle had left so much jewelry and clothing behind, even a number of gorgeous and expensive furs, seemed to Ethel a measure of how thoroughly her marriage to Crippen had failed. “I did not question the fact that she had walked straight out of the house, abandoning her old home life, and relinquishing everything it had contained.”

What did surprise Ethel was the decor, especially in light of Belle’s obvious attention to her own appearance. The house had been furnished “in a higgledy-piggledy way,” Ethel wrote. “There was scarcely anything which matched. The only thing in the house which I liked was the ebony piano. All the other things had been picked up at sales by the doctor and his wife, and were of the most miscellaneous description. There was a tremendous number of trumpery knickknacks, cheap vases, china dogs, and occasional tables. There were lots of pictures—small oil and water-colour paintings by unknown artists—with bows of velvet on them to add to their beauty.”

The air was stale, the rooms dark. Overall a sense of loneliness and gloom suffused the place. “From the first,” Ethel said, “I took a dislike to the house.”

T
HAT
M
ONDAY
C
RIPPEN
stopped in at the Martinettis’ flat on Shaftesbury Avenue. Clara asked, “What is all this about Belle? She has gone to America and you said nothing about it.”

“We were busy packing the whole night the cable came,” Crippen said.

Clara asked why Belle had not sent her a message; Crippen replied they had been too busy getting Belle ready for departure.

“Packing and crying?” Clara asked.

“No,” Crippen said, “we have got over all that.”

The next week he told Clara that he had received disturbing news from Belle, by telegram. She was ill, a pulmonary ailment. Nothing to worry about, but troubling all the same.