Crippen: A Novel of Murder

by John Boyne

  ‘It was you who agreed to accompany me,’ she said, laughing. ‘I was the brazen hussy who invited you along, remember?’

  He was surprised by her language, but it amused him too. He couldn’t help but break into a smile, and this made Charlotte smile too. She almost never saw him grinning like this; it made him seem more boyish, not the serious-minded young doctor he aspired to. She reached forward and placed a hand behind his head, enjoying the sensation of his hair against her fingers, then she pulled his face to hers, kissing him lightly on the lips, his first kiss. She lingered for only a moment before releasing him and opening the door to her home. ‘Goodnight, Hawley,’ she said, smiling at him one last time before disappearing inside.

  ‘Miss Bell,’ he whispered, thoroughly bewitched.

  Reader, they married. And with their marriage came a change of circumstances. Dr Anthony Lake decided that Dr Crippen’s upstairs room was too small for two people to share; although he did not hold a grudge against Charlotte following her rejection of him, he could not fathom how she could turn down his offer and yet marry a man like Hawley Crippen, so clearly his social and sexual inferior. Neither Hawley nor his new wife was particularly concerned about that, however; Charlotte had told her husband of the advances her earlier suitor had made towards her, and they had both agreed that they should find a new place to begin married life. However, to add insult to injury, Lake also decided that Charlotte could no longer work at the surgery.

  ‘Doesn’t look good, Crippen,’ he explained, leaning against the wooden frame of the door in his room as Hawley packed. ‘A married woman working like that. Sure, if you were both poor and she wanted to take in washing a few days a week, that would be one thing. But you’re not poor. You’re almost respectable.’

  ‘We have barely two cents to rub together,’ Hawley protested.

  ‘Yes, but you’re not in the gutter, are you?’ he replied, frowning. ‘And what would people think if they knew that you were sending your wife off to work every day, eh? They’d think you a poor excuse for a husband. Even Charlotte might. That’s no way to start a marriage. Do you think my marriage would be such a success if I packed Mrs Lake off every morning with two sandwiches and an apple to some godforsaken office?’

  Hawley raised an eyebrow; he wasn’t sure the Lake marriage was the one he should be using as a standard. ‘Very well,’ he said finally. ‘I’ll tell her myself, though, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Don’t mind at all,’ Dr Anthony said, already visualizing the interview procedure for the new receptionist. He thought it would be a nice idea to hold it at the house rather than the surgery. Perhaps in the evening. Over a glass of wine. ‘I’m delighted you see it’s for the best. A new start for both of you. Best thing in the world, if you ask me.’

  Hawley nodded, but it took a few moments for those words to settle in. ‘For both of us?’ he queried. ‘Why both of us?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Crippen,’ the other said with a false air of bonhomie, punching Hawley casually on the arm as if they were old friends. ‘You don’t want to stay around our stuffy old surgery, now do you? You need to find yourself a position with some prospects. What if you were to have a family? How would you survive then? Children cost, you can take my word on that. Believe me, I’m doing you a favour.’

  ‘You’re firing me?’ Hawley asked, astonished.

  ‘I’m opening up new opportunities for you.’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ said Hawley, summoning up the courage within himself to debate the point. He could hear the nervousness in his own voice as he spoke more loudly and he cursed his own weakness. ‘I work for your father, not for you. You don’t have the right to let me go.’

  Dr Anthony breathed heavily through his nose and stared at the floor for a moment, shaking his head as if he was being put in an impossible situation and couldn’t understand why. ‘I have spoken to Father,’ he said. ‘I’ve made him see that it’s for the best. I’m not letting you go, he is. So don’t shoot the messenger.’

  Hawley felt a sudden urge towards violence. He didn’t want to throw a punch—he knew that he would come off worse in any such confrontation—but if he could disable this man in some way, he could think of a far more suitable punishment for him. His mind swam with images from his abattoir days. He pictured Dr Anthony stretched out on his work table, unable to escape, while Hawley set about him with a saw and a No. 9 blade knife, his blood pooling on the tiled floor below before being washed down the drain.

  In the end, however, cowardly and uncertain of himself, there was no outlet for these emotions and he had little choice but to carry on packing his bags and he arranged to meet his new wife at her parents’ home as originally planned. There, he told her the bad news and, after a long night’s discussion, they made what plans they could for the future.

  He found his next job in much the same way as he had found his last: through the Appointments section of Scientific American. A new ophthalmology hospital in Utah was set to employ a dozen trainees to work in their research department, and Hawley applied eagerly for the position, although Charlotte was not so sure about moving to another state.

  ‘Utah?’ she asked. ‘What’s in Utah?’

  ‘Well, what’s in Michigan, my dear? Nothing much. Utah will be a fresh start for us.’ He frowned when he heard himself repeating the words and sentiments of young Dr Lake but dismissed the memory quickly. ‘It looks like the hospital will be one of the most advanced in its field. It will be tremendously exciting for me to work there.’

  ‘But the baby, Hawley,’ she said. ‘Is it a safe place for us to bring the baby up?’ By now, Charlotte was six months pregnant, something of a miracle in itself. ‘I hear that crime is a real problem in Utah, that people get murdered there every day.’

  ‘Crime is everywhere, my dear,’ he replied. ‘Murders take place every day. You’d be surprised how many average people wake up in the morning, and before the night is over they’ve taken a life. It doesn’t just happen in Utah.’

  Over the course of the next three years they lived quite comfortably on the top floor of a house that was owned by a retired couple who lived downstairs and who protested constantly about the noise that little Otto made, despite the fact that he was an uncommonly peaceful child. Hawley enjoyed his work at the hospital, although the hours were long and he was not given as many responsibilities for research as he had hoped for. Indeed, of the original dozen new employees who had been hired at the same time, only three had been promoted high enough to earn the right to plan their own research projects. The others, Hawley included, were little more than assistants to the more trusted members of the team. He could tell that his employers did not think highly of him and he resented the fact that yet again he was being held back from advancement.

  Married life was also proving difficult for him at times. Charlotte Bell was the first female whom he had ever kissed. Needless to say, their wedding night was the first occasion when he made love to another human being—although it was more Charlotte who found herself making love to him, rather than the other way around. At first their intimacy was embarrassed and unfulfilling. As time went on, it also became infrequent. Otto’s conception had come about on a rare evening when Hawley had drunk too much brandy and Charlotte had taken advantage of him, for she was desperate to have a baby.

  ‘Your mother has written again,’ she stated over the breakfast table one morning as Hawley was reading the newspaper. He looked over the top of it irritably; she knew that he did not enjoy conversation first thing in the morning and yet she insisted on it. If they used up family discussions now, what would they speak of tonight when he got home?

  ‘Has she indeed,’ he commented in a dry tone.

  ‘Yes, she wants to come on a visit,’ said Charlotte, turning the pages of the letter quickly and scanning through it for any unpleasant news, before returning to the start and reading it more carefully. ‘Or she wants us to visit her. Says it’s up to us which we’d prefer.’


  ‘I would prefer neither,’ said Hawley. ‘Should we write and tell her that?’

  ‘She wants to see little Otto again. She must miss him dreadfully.’

  Hawley frowned. ‘The last time she saw him, she walked straight into the living room and doused him immediately in holy water. It startled the poor child so much that he burst into tears and couldn’t look at her for days.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Charlotte, trying to suppress a smile. ‘She thought she was doing the right thing.’

  ‘She was wrong.’

  ‘She thinks we’re not Christian enough.’

  ‘We are perfectly Christian enough for our needs. I do not need Mother coming here and telling us how to bring up our own child. She has the most outdated ideas. I told you how she made me hide copies of my research magazines—’

  ‘Under the bed, yes. You have mentioned it once or twice,’ said Charlotte in an exasperated tone. ‘Really, Hawley, that was years ago. I do think you might try to move past it.’

  ‘I’m a scientist, my dear, not a priest.’

  ‘Well, shall I tell her that she can come on a visit then?’

  ‘Heavens, no. Tell her that we’ll come to Ann Arbor after Christmas. Then, when it gets to late December, we’ll write and say that Otto has the croup.’

  ‘Hawley! Don’t tempt fate!’

  ‘There is no fate, my dear. We are masters of our own destiny. And believe me, my suggesting that Otto will get the croup will no more bring the illness on him than my saying that we will today inherit a hundred thousand dollars or that I will succeed to the throne of Sweden. Really, my dear, you are very sweet about such things, but quite an innocent.’

  Hawley believed implicitly in what he was saying about fate and destiny, but nevertheless Charlotte did not think it very nice to joke about their child’s health. She pretended that it was not the case, but she could tell very well that her husband found it difficult to demonstrate love for his son. She could accept his intimate rejection of her; after all, they managed to live together perfectly peacefully, with only the rarest of arguments. She had long since stopped hoping that he might become a slave to his passions overnight or that he would begin to show her any real affection other than the most formal kind. She had chosen her life and was content to live with it. But his awkwardness with Otto pained her. It wasn’t that he was cruel to the boy, or resentful of his presence; nothing as stark as that. It was simply that he seemed at pains not to be left alone with him. When she watched them playing together she always got the impression that he wanted to be elsewhere, and his conversation with the child was stilted and formal. Sometimes she felt that she was conducting two separate relationships in their home, one with a man, one with a child, and that she was not part of a family at all.

  These were the thoughts which ran through Charlotte’s mind as she walked down McGraw Way towards the centre of town, wheeling Otto in his perambulator in front of her. It was a cold day and she had wrapped the child up warm in two jumpers and a blanket, but she had neglected to do the same for herself and regretted wearing neither hat nor gloves when leaving the house. She had spent the morning composing a letter to Jezebel Crippen, replying to all the questions which had been asked in the previous letter, thanking her for the many prayers she was offering up for all three of them and informing her, as Hawley had suggested, that they would be delighted to visit their relatives during the Christmas holidays. As she considered the letter she would have to write some months later cancelling the visit, her eye was taken by a young couple across the street.

  They were not much older than Hawley and her—no more than twenty-five or twenty-six years of age—but they were laughing as they walked along, the young man’s arm wrapped protectively around the woman. Suddenly, without any warning, he whisked her up off the pavement and spun her around in his arms, while she gave a squeal of delight and begged to be returned to the ground, pounding on his shoulders while laughing. As he did so, their lips met and they kissed passionately. Charlotte watched as the woman’s hand moved to the back of her lover’s head, pulling it closer to hers in order to make their kiss even firmer and more urgent. Their bodies were pressed very close to each other—almost indecently so—and she was amazed by the wanton display of their embrace. And envious of it. A rush of colour came to her cheeks and she sighed as a stirring within her made her realize that right then, at that very moment, she would give up everything, her husband, her life, even her child, to be locked in such a passionate embrace with a man. To feel loved. To feel sexually alive. She grew almost weak with hunger as her eyes focused directly on them, while her mouth became dry and her body stirred within itself; she did not even notice the other people who walked past the couple, either ignoring them completely or staring at them distastefully. Charlotte was so removed from her own body at that moment that the strong wind saw its opportunity and whisked the letter she had written to Jezebel Crippen out of her hand, spinning it in the air, arcing it along for a moment or two then allowing it to fly back and forth over the road joyfully, before depositing it firmly in the middle of the road.

  ‘Oh my,’ said Charlotte, snapping out of her daydream and watching as the letter disappeared into the air, ‘my letter.’ Without giving it a single thought, her other hand let go of the pram and she jumped out into the road to retrieve the letter, looking neither to left nor to right as she did so. The streetcar which was coming towards her was only a few feet away at the time and had no opportunity either to stop or to alert her to her danger. Within a second her body was pushed forward by the speeding bus, her heels were dragged under, and its wheels crushed her beneath its carriage. It drove over her almost immediately before pulling to a screeching halt as people in the street screamed and looked away from the bloodied, mangled body which lay on the ground before them, legs stretched apart, one arm almost ripped from its socket. A couple of teeth rattled along the road towards the kerb, stopping just short of a drain.

  Hawley took the news of his wife’s death with little emotion. He remembered when they had met and how she had seduced him. He recalled their evenings at the theatre and the weight of responsibility he had felt to marry her. He thought about much of their three years of married life together, but the one thing he could not remember was having ever loved her very much. Oh, he knew she was a perfectly pleasant woman without a malicious side to her. He believed her to be an excellent mother and a sensible lifelong companion for him. But love? That had not been part of it. And so he did what he had to do in order to move on. He organized a funeral, he buried her, and he put Otto on a bus to his maternal grandparents, who had agreed, much to his relief, to take over responsibility for his upbringing.

  At the age of twenty-eight, Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen was once again a man alone.

  5.

  The Passengers of the Montrose

  The Atlantic Ocean: Thursday, 21 July 1910

  Mr John Robinson had never experienced much trouble in sleeping until the start of February, when events had seen to it that his nightly eight hours rarely went uninterrupted. But the first night on board the Montrose had been almost unbearable. Edmund and he had finally separated and climbed into their two separate bunks at around 11 p.m., Edmund taking the top one and falling asleep almost immediately. Mr Robinson, on the other hand, had lain awake in the lower bunk for over an hour, feeling so warm in the cabin that he was forced to take all the sheets off his bed and try to sleep uncovered. The first-class cabins were of a decent size, second only to the Presidential Suite, whose occupants he had not yet met, but the air was restrictive and he swore that he would leave the porthole open all day from now on. The rocking of the boat made it even more unpleasant and when he finally drifted off, some time after two in the morning, he dreamed that he was dancing around the edge of the tallest building in the world while wearing roller-skates and it was all he could do to keep his balance. When he finally slipped and fell in the direction of the traffic on the street below, he awoke with a start, dr
enched in perspiration, and immediately reached across to the bedside table for his pocket watch so as to check the time. Three thirty. He sighed in exhaustion and wiped his face, trying to eliminate the bad memories which floated before his eyes. From then on, he slept only in fits and starts and shortly after seven o’clock he rose quietly, attempting not to waken Edmund, and washed himself in their small bathroom. His eyelids were almost stuck together with exhaustion but he believed that a turn around the deck and the early morning air would bring him back to life. Dressing in yesterday’s suit and tie, he closed the door to the cabin behind him and made his way towards the stairs.

  It was a bright, warm morning that first day, and he immediately felt cheered by the blue sky and sparkling sea; the sun caught the waves as they pressed against the ship and they sparkled in the morning light. Sea birds squawked as they dived into the water in search of their breakfast. Walking towards the railing, he looked overboard, leaning slightly forward so that a little of the spume from the water caught him in the face from time to time. Squinting, he could make out the dark shadowy shoals of fish swimming alongside the boat, their speed surprising him, for they were keeping pace perfectly, while the Montrose, he reasoned, must have been travelling at about ten or eleven knots. With a good harpoon, he thought, I could kill some of them.

  Despite the early hour, there were already several people on deck, passengers like him who had found their first night on board ship to be less than comfortable. Billy Carter, the first officer, was accustomed to these early-morning strollers, although there were a few more on this occasion than he expected as he surveyed the deck from the helm. He noticed two sailors standing together, talking and smoking cigarettes, and he called them over to him, issuing what were always his first instructions of the morning, a task neither one looked particularly happy about undertaking.

  ‘Get some buckets of water, lads,’ he told them, ‘and go around the sides of the ship, pouring them down the stern. The boat will most likely be covered in sick from people who haven’t been able to keep last night’s dinner down, and any passenger looking out to sea today doesn’t want to be confronted with that.’