Crippen

by John Boyne

‘Andrew, that’s an outrageous lie,’ said his wife. ‘You know perfectly well how close we all were to Cora.’

  ‘If you insist, my dear,’ he replied with a sigh. ‘Anyway, this whole matter will be over and done with soon, and then we can finally move on with our lives. Although I have to admit, it’s been very good for business. Ever since our names started appearing in the newspapers, there’s been a rush of interest in my mining projects in Mexico. I have hopes that a lot of new investors are going to come on board. Stand to make quite a tidy profit if all goes well. I heard from Alec Heath yesterday, and he’s become something of a local celebrity too.’

  ‘Oh, hush, Andrew, the jury is returning.’

  Three thousand miles away in Canada, Matthieu Zéla and Martha Hayes were at the offices of the Quebec Gazette, where news of the verdict was expected to be reported as soon as it was announced. They had followed the case eagerly since the morning when Dr Crippen had been arrested on board the Montrose, and they had been shocked by it.

  ‘He seemed like such a pleasant fellow,’ said Martha, controlling her tears but seeking comfort on the shoulder of her new employer and friend. ‘To do such a hideous thing. It just defies humanity.’

  ‘He may well be a pleasant fellow,’ Matthieu pointed out. ‘After all, just because he committed a brutal crime does not mean that he doesn’t have a good heart.’

  ‘Oh, Matthieu! How can you say such a thing?’

  ‘I just mean that circumstances can lead us into actions sometimes, and we cannot necessarily be held accountable for them. Who knows what this Cora woman was like?’

  ‘She could have been the most awful human being who ever lived, but that does not justify such a cruel end.’

  ‘Of course not. I simply mean that one malevolent action does not a monster make. We liked Dr Crippen—or Mr Robinson, however you care to describe him—while we were on board the Montrose, and we should not automatically assume that we were wrong, simply because of this.’

  ‘You are a very forgiving man, Matthieu,’ said Martha, smiling at him warmly.

  ‘Well, he hasn’t done me any harm,’ he replied with a shrug, ‘so I can’t condemn him.’

  ‘I can,’ said Tom DuMarqué, listening to their conversation from a distance and recalling the late-night events on board the ship. ‘I’ll be happy when he hangs. After all, I could have been his next victim.’

  ‘Yes, well, you probably would have deserved it,’ said Matthieu.

  ‘He tried to push me overboard! He tried to drown me!’

  ‘Only because you attacked his . . . his . . .’ He searched for the right words. ‘ . . . Edmund. Ethel. His friend,’ he said finally, lost for words.

  ‘His fiancée,’ said Martha.

  ‘It’s sick and twisted,’ said Tom, who could not quite get over the fact that he had never managed even to kiss Victoria Drake, while Ethel LeNeve, a woman, had. It did nothing for his self-confidence. ‘I hope they publish pictures of the hanging. I’d stick them on my wall.’

  ‘Oh really, Tom,’ said Martha. ‘How can you be so callous?’

  ‘He comes from a callous line,’ said Matthieu, staring at his nephew with barely disguised contempt. ‘I believe I got the honourable genes in our family,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Tom. ‘You’re wonderful. You would have let me drown. That’s very honourable.’

  ‘But I didn’t, did I?’

  ‘You would have,’ he repeated petulantly.

  Matthieu shrugged. ‘Well, that’s my point,’ he said. ‘We don’t know what we’re capable of. Come the moment, come the man. Or the woman, pretending to be a man. We can do the strangest things in the name of love.’

  In New York, two other people were looking forward to hearing the verdict. Mrs Antoinette Drake and her daughter Victoria were finishing their four-month trip to North America with a two-week sojourn in Manhattan, where Mrs Drake was regaling all who would listen with stories about her intimate knowledge of the evil Dr Crippen.

  ‘The man was positively obsessed with me,’ she told friends at a dinner party. ‘He followed me around everywhere. I believe he was lining me up to be his next victim. And as for Victoria, well, that evil creature Edmund chased her too. Or Ethel, as she wishes to be called now. It’s infamous, the entire thing.’

  Victoria was scarcely listening. Her eye had been taken by one of the guests at the dinner party, and she could hardly stop staring. Naturally, the news that Edmund was in fact a girl had shocked her initially. She was embarrassed by how intently she had been pursuing him on board ship, and when she recalled some of their conversations she could only blush with mortification. And yet, the more she thought about it, the more she had to admit to herself that there was no one she had ever been more attracted to than him/her. The memory of the kiss they had shared behind the lifeboats on that dreadful night of violence remained in her head; no one had ever kissed her quite like that, either before or since. Nothing made her shiver when her skin was touched quite like the fingers of Ethel LeNeve.

  ‘Really, Victoria,’ said Mrs Drake later that evening when they were returning to their hotel room. ‘You were quite distracted tonight. What was wrong with you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she replied in a dreamy voice, her mind elsewhere.

  ‘And the way you kept staring across at young Miss Hartford. I realize she’s a pretty girl, but why on earth were you looking at her in that way?’

  ‘I wasn’t staring,’ she protested, ‘I was simply interested in her conversation, that’s all. She seems like a fascinating girl.’

  ‘I dare say she is,’ said her mother, not caring much one way or the other. ‘But did you see her brother, Luke Hartford? I believe he took quite a shine to you. And he’s very wealthy and handsome, don’t you agree?’

  Victoria frowned and considered the prospect. ‘I don’t recall,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember noticing him at all. However, I have arranged to lunch with Miss Hartford tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, Victoria!’ said Mrs Drake, frustrated by her daughter’s lack of matrimonial intentions.

  ‘Here they come,’ said Lousie Smythson at the same moment, leaning forward in her seat, anticipating the verdict with great excitement.

  The courtroom went silent as the prisoner stood in the dock.

  ‘Foreman of the jury,’ intoned the aged judge, whose wig seemed to overshadow his entire face. ‘Have you reached a verdict upon which you are all agreed?’

  ‘We have, your Honour.’

  ‘And on the charge of murder, do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty?’

  The foreman swallowed and cleared his throat quickly, aware that he had the attention of the entire world. He felt an overwhelming urge to burst into song—which, to his credit, he resisted. The atmosphere was electric and no one breathed while they waited for him to speak.

  ‘Not guilty,’ he said, to the surprise of all.

  Some weeks later, on the morning of 23 November 1910, Ethel LeNeve walked along the corridor of Pentonville prison to the cell where Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen was being held, her hands clasped together inside a muffler, and wearing a black dress and a veil. She had wept all night long and could hardly imagine what the rest of the day would be like. To her surprise, the cells were cleaner than she had expected them to be. When the door to Hawley’s cell was opened, she found him sitting quite relaxed in a corner, reading a book. He rose when he saw her, smiling warmly, and enveloped her in his arms, kissing her gently. He had grown thinner, she could tell, but he did not seem afraid of what was to come.

  ‘My dearest one,’ she said, sitting down beside him and bursting into tears. ‘They’ve said I can only have a few minutes with you.’

  ‘Ethel,’ he said, embracing her again. ‘Don’t cry. You’ll make me start. This is a good day.’

  ‘How can it be?’ she asked desperately. ‘What have I done to you?’

  ‘You have done nothing,’ he said, and she marvelled at how relaxed he seemed. ‘The happies
t moment of my life came when I heard you had been found not guilty.’

  ‘But I am the guilty one,’ she protested. ‘Not you.’

  ‘I am just as guilty,’ he replied, shaking his head. ‘I was pleased that Cora had died. I even took pleasure in how she died.’

  ‘Yes, but you didn’t kill her, did you? I could still admit my guilt, you know. I could tell them—’

  ‘You cannot,’ he stated firmly. ‘You must promise me that you will not. I will die anyway. For you to admit anything will simply lead to your joining me, and I couldn’t bear that.’

  ‘But I want to join you.’

  ‘You’re still a young woman, Ethel. You can live a life yet. And you can remember me. I am happy because I know I die loved. And I don’t remember living loved until I knew you.’

  Ethel shook her head, distraught. ‘It just seems so unfair,’ she said. ‘That you should die for my crime.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of death,’ he said. ‘But if I knew you were meeting the same fate, I would die miserable. As things stand, my conscience is clear. And I am prepared.’

  The guard reappeared and indicated to Ethel that her two minutes were up. She could hardly cry any more, and they held each other for a few moments before she was led away, with protestations of love.

  When she had gone, Hawley turned around and stared up at the barred window above his head through which the light streamed. Since he had been held here, he had discovered that if he stood on his bed and raised himself on his toes he could see through it, and he did so now and watched as Ethel left the building and walked slowly down the street. She stopped for a moment and turned around, unable to see him watching her, before hailing a hansom cab. Unaware that he could watch her every move, she blew a kiss in his direction and, stepping inside the cab, was driven away.

  Later that evening, standing alone at the bow of the Mercurial as she left Liverpool behind and set sail for America, Ethel gripped the railing firmly in her hands and closed her eyes, thinking of her dear, dead love. She planned on avoiding the passengers entirely during the trip and speaking to no one—although she knew this might be difficult since her steerage compartment also housed three other young ladies. It was only a matter of time before they discovered who she was, and she dreaded the commotion that would take place then, but for the moment this was far from her thoughts.

  Instead, she remembered the day they had arrived at Antwerp harbour, preparing to board the Montrose. How excited they had been, how filled with love. And how they had nearly got away with it, too. But Hawley had been right: she was young, she could survive. She had a future ahead of her and she owed it to him to make the most of it. After all, he had sacrificed his life so that she might have one. She had loved him dearly, there was no question about that, but then he had been the first man she had ever known. Perhaps, she thought, reflecting on it, it had merely been an obsession, a romance that she could enjoy and get carried away by. And if she had felt like that about Hawley Crippen, then surely she could feel it again towards another?

  She smiled and looked out to sea. Ahead lay America.

  Author’s Note

  When mentioning the name of Dr Crippen to people during the writing of this book, I found myself time and again excusing his actions with the rather odd comment that he ‘only’ killed one person, his wife Cora. Common perception seemed to have placed him as a vicious serial killer, with his eternal tenancy of the Chamber of Horrors assured. Obviously the Hawley Crippen presented in the novel is a different one from that whom we have been encouraged to accept over the years. But then my Crippen is a fiction, and the events of the night on which Cora Crippen met her bloody end are entirely a supposition on my part.

  While many of the characters and situations in the book are taken from the facts of the case—Inspector Dew really did chase ‘Mr Robinson’ and ‘Edmund’ across the ocean; Louise Smythson really was the first person to suspect foul play; Captain Kendall really did discover the truth about the ‘father’ and ‘son’ by chance and use the newly installed Marconi telegraph to alert Scotland Yard—many others were created to serve the plot.

  However, readers may be interested to know that when Ethel LeNeve was acquitted of Cora’s murder, she left England for a new life and finally settled in Toronto. She changed her name, found work as a secretary, married, became a mother and never again referred to the events which led her to Munyon’s Homoeopathic Medicines, the Montrose, or Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen. She died in 1967, at the age of 84.

  Dr Crippen’s last request of his executioners was that a photograph of his lover be buried with him; in her will, Ethel left instructions that a picture of Crippen also be placed in her hands before her coffin was sealed. Both requests were granted.