Crippen: A Novel of Murder

by John Boyne

  ‘Well, there’s that, certainly,’ Louise admitted. ‘But that’s a matter for his conscience and for polite society to deal with. Naturally, my husband and I would not be able to associate with such a man any more.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘The fact is that I just don’t believe that Cora Crippen would go to America and leave her jewellery behind her. It doesn’t make sense, Inspector.’

  Dew thought about this for a few moments, then nodded his head. ‘This Crippen character,’ he asked, ‘what sort of fellow is he?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose he’s quite a respectable man,’ she admitted grudgingly.

  ‘Not the violent sort? No trouble in his past?’

  ‘None that I know of. Although I did hear that he was a widower when he married Cora. Might there be something in that? My husband—Nicholas Smythson? He might be Lord Smythson one day, you know—my husband calls him a milksop of a man. He doesn’t care for him. He’s not my type either, of course, but still. Not your typically suspicious sort. But still . . . two wives. Both dead. You can’t help but wonder, can you? He’s always seemed very quiet, almost too quiet, if you know what I mean. There was something about him I never quite trusted. It’s in the eyes, Inspector. There’s a tip for you. You can always tell a killer by the look in his eyes!’

  Without giving any warning, Inspector Dew closed his notebook firmly and, standing up, practically picked Mrs Smythson out of her chair and steered her towards the door. ‘It was very good of you to come in and express your concerns,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t sound to me as if there’s anything for you to be worried about. If the woman has died in America, then she has died in America. That’s not our jurisdiction. And what she chose to do with her jewellery when she left England, well, that’s a matter for—’

  ‘But, Inspector, don’t you think it even a little strange?’ she asked irritably, disliking the way he was manhandling her out through the door and back along the corridor as if she was an hysteric or a common criminal.

  ‘Not particularly,’ he said. ‘There’s no case to answer here, Mrs Smythson. I suggest you return home and not give it another thought. Let the poor woman rest in peace and if Dr Crippen wishes to take company with another woman, then that’s his own concern. I realize that you were a friend of his late wife but—’

  ‘That’s not why I’m here,’ she protested. ‘I’m not angry about that.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Smythson. Glad to have been of service.’

  Without further ceremony she found herself back in the main lobby of Scotland Yard, shocked by his casual treatment of her, her face growing a little red as people stared in her direction.

  A voice piped up from the back of the room, and she recognized it as that of Mary Dobson. The whole room listened as the woman shouted. ‘Don’t worry, darlin’,’ she yelled. ‘The Peelers only take in prossies to give them a lecture, first time out anyways. They won’t bother you if you stick to your own area. Try round Leicester Square or Covent Garden next time. Always a market for upper-class whores like you there.’

  Mrs Louise Smythson, who had aspirations towards the nobility, felt her mouth drop open in shock as a room full of people stared at her, looking her up and down, sizing her up, pricing her in their minds.

  ‘Well I never did,’ she said out loud, before storming through the door and turning round to look back at Scotland Yard as if the building itself had ruined her day. ‘Some mischief has come to her,’ she shouted up at the windows of the top floor, forgetting her upper-class accent once again. ‘You’ll find out, Inspector, and then you’ll want me to come back and tell you all the details. And I bloody well won’t bother!’

  4.

  The First Mistake

  Detroit; Utah: 1884–1890

  Hawley didn’t last long as Price’s apprentice; within a week he was allowed to begin his own dissections. A month after that, he was getting through up to seven or eight a night, a new record, and earning extra money as a bonus for his speed and precision as a surgeon. The floor manager stated that he had never seen such meticulousness in a cutter before, and he took particular pleasure in the way Hawley managed to separate the organs and the bones carefully from the remaining carcass, distributing them at various parts of his work area so that when the moment came to dispose of them separately into the different tanks, he could do so in the quickest possible time, leaving barely any sign of a disturbance behind.

  Such was his success that, one night before beginning work, he was summoned to the office where he met Leo McKinley, one of the owners of the abattoir. ‘They say you’re the best prospect we’ve had in a long time,’ he was told. ‘A good arm, resilience, and you’re quick.’ It made him sound as if he was being accepted as a professional baseball player.

  ‘I enjoy my work,’ Hawley replied modestly.

  ‘Enjoy it, eh? Three nights a week, you do. What would you say to a full-time position? Five day shifts, leave your nights free for the ladies, eh? What do you think of that?’

  Hawley shook his head. ‘It’s out of the question,’ he explained. ‘I’m studying to be a doctor.’

  ‘There’s better prospects here, son,’ he was told. ‘I’m talking about a twenty per cent raise. You won’t get a better offer than that. What if you want to settle down one day and take a wife? You’ll need money then. Trust me, sonny. The women today expect a man who’ll look after them.’

  Hawley laughed, flattered that he had been considered for the position, but he continued to decline it, preferring to keep his unsocial hours and his ambitions alive.

  Jezebel complained when he returned home, stained with blood, in the mornings. ‘Take a look at yourself,’ she said, shaking her head in disgust. ‘What must the neighbours think? They’ll say you’re some kind of vicious murderer, going out all clean and decent in the evening time, coming home in the early hours covered in blood and reeking of death. What kind of a living is that to make? It’s hardly the Lord’s work.’

  ‘It’s not a living at all,’ he stated coldly. ‘It’s a way of making a living.’

  Sure enough, that first year at McKinley-Ross saw him earn his diploma from Philadelphia and then another, this time as an eye and ear specialist from the Ophthalmic Hospital in New York City, all thanks to his three nights a week as the best cutter in the Michigan abattoirs. He dreamed of the moment when strangers would ask his name for the first time, and he would finally be able to give a polite bow and lean forward, extending a hand and offering the version which he had dreamed of for such a long time. ‘My name,’ he would say proudly, ‘is Doctor Crippen.’

  While it takes no more than an hour to travel from the town of Ann Arbor in Michigan to the city of Detroit, Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen’s decision to move there in the spring of 1884 was seen by his mother as a deliberate attempt to escape her influence. In this she was correct.

  On the basis of his two diplomas, from Philadelphia and New York, Hawley was offered a position as a physician’s assistant at a busy general surgery in downtown Detroit. His job, which would more usually have been done by a nurse, involved long hours and low pay, but he had the opportunity now to work with actual human beings rather than with dead animals, and that alone made it worthwhile to him. The surgery was owned by four doctors, ranging in age from thirty-three to sixty-seven, the youngest, Dr Anthony Lake, being the son of the eldest, Dr Stephen Lake; they allowed their colleagues to address them as Dr Anthony and Dr Stephen respectively in order to save confusion. Hawley worked for Dr Stephen, and he got along with him quite well, for the older man could identify in his new employee the makings of a good doctor. He had rarely seen such enthusiasm, not even in his own son, who had more or less drifted into the profession when his father had purchased him a place at university.

  ‘Why didn’t you go to medical school, Hawley?’ Dr Stephen asked him one evening when the surgery had closed for the night and they were enjoying a light supper together in the kitchen. ‘You know as much about the workings o
f the body as an average student approaching his finals. I’ve seen less efficient qualified doctors. And you have excellent hands. Some of your suturing is quite brilliant.’

  ‘I couldn’t afford it,’ Hawley explained. ‘The tuition fees were too expensive. I worked as a clerk in my father’s grocery store, and it just wasn’t possible. I only managed to afford the diploma courses because I worked in an abattoir three nights a week.’

  Dr Stephen pulled a face, although squeamishness was the thing furthest from his mind. ‘One of life’s cruel ironies,’ he said. ‘The good Lord gives you the talent but the great god of commerce doesn’t allow you to pursue it.’

  Hawley smiled; mention of the Lord’s name brought back memories of his mother. He had left the two of them behind in Ann Arbor and rarely thought of either any more.

  ‘By the way, while you’re here, in front of the patients I mean, you will always be addressed as Dr Crippen. Of course you are not really a doctor, but most medical students adopt the title because it sets the patients at ease. It’s simpler that way.’

  ‘I think it has a certain ring to it,’ said Hawley.

  He lived in a small room on the top floor of a house a few doors down from the surgery. It belonged to Dr Anthony Lake, who had offered their new employee the room shortly after his arrival in Detroit, deducting a third of his weekly wages as rent. While the house itself was large and well furnished, Hawley’s room was small and poky and contained little more than a bed, a broken wardrobe, a desk and a washbasin. He had the impression that it had been used as a storeroom in the past and on more than one night he woke at five o’clock in the morning, feeling as if he was about to be choked by the dampness and dust in the air. A small skylight gave the room its only ventilation but, because it was quite dirty on the outside and impossible to clean without climbing on to the roof itself, it offered little in the way of natural light.

  ‘If you want to climb out there,’ his landlord told him, ‘you can clean it. But there’s more chance you’ll fall off and break your neck, and there won’t be a doctor in the world who can save you then.’

  Dr Anthony was ten years his senior and yet Hawley did not have as pleasant a relationship with him as he enjoyed with his father, and he was grateful that he was not the younger man’s assistant. It was well known that medical students survived with Dr Anthony for no more than a month or two at a time, just as it was common knowledge that only the prettiest were ever employed by him. A married man with a small child, he lived in this house during the week but left the city at the weekends to join Mrs Lake at their more expensive retreat on the outskirts of the city. Hawley only met her once during his residency at Eaton Lane, and he was immediately taken by her beauty, blushing furiously when she spoke to him and stuttering his responses nervously. The ladies were still a mystery to him.

  Upon arriving at the surgery in the morning, the first face he saw was that of Charlotte Bell, the young receptionist who had begun working there only three days after him. Originally from California, she had lived in Michigan for over a year and had left her previous place of employment, as a receptionist in an ophthalmologist’s surgery, only when the doctor there had died. It was this connection that encouraged her to strike up a friendship with the nervous young man.

  ‘I believe you studied ophthalmology in New York?’ she asked him as they ate their lunch together one day. Hawley considered the question, wondering whether he should be honest and point out that it had been by a correspondence course or tell a lie and make himself seem better travelled than was really the case.

  ‘That’s right,’ he replied, deciding quickly.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to visit New York,’ she said, looking out of the window dreamily, as if it was possible, if she tried hard enough, to see the Statue of Liberty in the distance. ‘But I think it would scare me a little. Is it as noisy and crowded as they say?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Hawley, who had never set foot outside the state of Michigan in his twenty-three years. ‘There must be a million people living there.’

  ‘A million!’ she repeated breathlessly. ‘Impossible to imagine!’

  ‘Everywhere there are crowds rushing along the sidewalks, streetcars blowing their horns. Noise and music emerging from every corner. It’s a lively place, that’s for sure. Not a city for a single young lady, I feel.’

  ‘I only asked because I worked for an ophthalmologist myself before I came here,’ said Charlotte. ‘Dr Abraham Rubens. Did you know him?’

  Should I? he wondered. ‘I don’t believe so,’ he said slowly, watching her face carefully for her reaction.

  ‘Really? He was one of the top men in his field. I can’t believe you haven’t heard his name. Our waiting room was always filled with important people. Alice Darson, the actress? You’ve heard of her, of course?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, despite the fact that he had never heard her name in his life, his interest in the arts section of the newspapers being minimal.

  ‘She came every week. I shouldn’t tell you this, but she’s going blind. Can’t see a thing out of her left eye any more, and her right one’s on the downward slope. Didn’t want anyone to know in case the theatre managers heard about it and wouldn’t give her a job any more. Now that the doctor’s dead I don’t know what she’s going to do. He was the only one she trusted, you see. She’d been seeing him for years.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Hawley, unsure whether he should be impressed by her connections or offended by her loose tongue.

  ‘And then there was the governor,’ she added, looking around nervously, as if he might have political enemies everywhere, even here in the small kitchen area of a local surgery. ‘He sees double. Can barely focus on anyone standing in front of him. He has to decide which is the real person—the one on the left or the one on the right—and focus directly on that choice, hoping he’s picked correctly. And he doesn’t always, I can tell you. He had a five-minute conversation with me once and addressed all his remarks to a ficus plant. Anyway, the doctor went to see him in the governor’s mansion, of course. Only right and proper. You couldn’t expect someone important like that to come to the surgery. This place isn’t the same. We don’t seem to get any famous people in here,’ she added with a sigh.

  Her breathless enthusiasm made Hawley smile despite himself. When she looked out of the window—which she did frequently, dreaming of bigger and better things—he stole the opportunity to stare at her breasts, the tops of which were visibly straining against her low-cut bodice. A stranger to women, he found himself drawn to Charlotte Bell.

  Their friendship continued over their many lunches, and within a month he had agreed to accompany her to the theatre for an evening out to see a production of King Lear at the Detroit Playhouse. The actress Alice Darson was playing Cordelia, even though she was clearly twenty years too old for the role; her slim figure and some carefully applied make-up ensured that she did not look too much out of place. Her eyesight must have been getting worse, for she refused Goneril’s kingdom rather than her father’s, and she balanced precariously over the orchestra pit, almost falling in on several occasions.

  It was Charlotte who had bought the tickets to the play and who invited him to join her, a forward step which both shocked and excited him. She found it difficult to decipher Hawley’s frame of mind when they met outside the Playhouse. Expecting him to be nervous and gentlemanly, she found instead that his hands were bunched into fists and, although he was being polite and courteous towards her, she could tell that he was preoccupied. She hoped he hadn’t thought her forward by inviting him to the play, but she had done so because she had enjoyed their conversations so much and she sensed in him a quiet, lost soul, the type she found fascinating. Throughout the performance, whenever she looked across at her companion he seemed to be distracted and staring off into the wings, much as the Governor of Michigan might have done if he was speaking to someone directly in front of him.

  ‘I don’t think you enjoyed toni
ght,’ she told him quietly as they strolled along the river when he walked her home.

  ‘You’re quite wrong, Miss Bell,’ he said. ‘On the contrary, I enjoyed the play a lot, although I confess I know little of the arts. And . . .’ He hesitated for a moment, wondering whether he was being too forward in saying such a thing but decided that he had little to lose ‘ . . . also I enjoyed your company very much,’ he added. ‘Very much indeed.’

  ‘You’re very sweet,’ said Charlotte, turning to look at him with great affection. In the half-light of the night-time streetlamps his face took on a more defined look as he walked along, tall and erect, his moustache neatly combed, his thin, sharp nose lending him an almost aristocratic appearance. If only he was a little bit taller, she thought to herself. For although he was pale, his hair a little mousy, his voice a little weak, and his manner a little more reserved than she would have liked, she thought him a much nicer sort than any of the other young men whom she had gone out with on evenings in the past—especially that Dr Anthony Lake, who had given her a cheap meal at a local restaurant before practically dragging her back to his house, which she had left without allowing him to have his way with her. ‘Château Lake’, he had called it and she had been forced to bite her lip to stop herself from giggling at his pomposity. She had nearly lost her job for refusing to sleep with him, but somehow, in a moment of boredom, he had decided to allow her to stay at the surgery and had simply ignored the event ever since.

  They stopped outside Charlotte’s front door, where a light was on in the porch. Hawley noticed the curtains twitching slightly, and he frowned. ‘Mother and Father will still be awake,’ she said after an embarrassing pause. ‘Would you like to come in to meet them? Have a cup of tea perhaps? It’s been such a lovely night.’

  Hawley shook his head. ‘Not tonight,’ he said. ‘I believe I should return home now. Thank you very much for agreeing to accompany me, however.’