Looking over the stair rail, I saw a pair of boots, belonging to a man sitting in the hall. True enough, they had come from Scotland Yard, according to the tradition which enables any detective to be recognized at a glance by any criminal. One of those detectives had been sent down on the false rumor, and probably hoped to find Doctor Crippen and Ethel le Neve disguised as Pierrot and Columbine on the pier.
Ashton and I decided to have a game with the man. We wrote a note in block letters, as follows:
“ARE YOU LOOKING FOR DOCTOR CRIPPEN? IF SO, BEWARE!”
By a small bribe, we hired a boy to deliver it to the detective, and then depart quickly.
The effect was obviously disconcerting to the man, for he looked most uneasy, and then hurried out of the hotel. Doubtless he could not understand how anybody in Bournemouth could know of his mission. Ashton and I followed him, and he was immediately aware that he was being shadowed. He went into a public house and ordered a glass of beer which he did not drink. Ashton and I did the same, and were quick on his heels when he slipped out by a side door. We kept up this game for quite a time, until we tired of it, and to this day the detective must wonder who shadowed him so closely in Bournemouth, and for what fell purpose.
Curiously, by the absurd chances of journalistic life, I became mixed up in the Crippen case, not only by having to describe the trial, but by having to write the life story of Ethel le Neve. That girl, who had been Crippen’s typist, was quite a pretty and attractive little creature, and in spite of her flight with him in boy’s clothes, the police were satisfied that she was entirely innocent of the murder. Anyhow, she was not charged, and upon her liberation she was immediately captured at a price, by The Daily Chronicle, who saw that her narrative would make an enormous sensation. They provided her with a furnished flat, under an assumed name, and for weeks The Daily Chronicle office was swarming with her sister’s family, while office boys fetched the milk for the baby, and sub-editors paid the outstanding debts of the brother-in-law, in order that Ethel le Neve should reserve her tale exclusively to the nice, kind paper! Such is the dignity of modern journalism, desperate for a “scoop.”
Eddy and I were again associated in the extraction of Ethel le Neve’s tale. Eddy, as a young barrister, now well-known and prosperous at the Bar, cross-examined her artfully, and persistently, with the firm belief that she knew all about the murder. Never once, however, did he trap her into any admission.
From my point of view, the psychology of the girl was extremely interesting. Just a little Cockney girl, from a family of humble class and means, she had astonishing and unusual qualities. It is characteristic of her that when she was staying in Brussels with Crippen, disguised as a boy—and a remarkably good-looking boy she appeared—because she knew that Crippen was wanted by the law for “some old thing or other,” which she didn’t bother to find out, she spent most of her time visiting the art galleries and museums of the Belgian capital. She had regarded the whole episode as a great “lark,” until at Halifax detectives came aboard and arrested the fugitives on a charge of murder. She admitted to me that, putting two and two together, little incidents that had seemed trivial at the time, and remembering queer words spoken by Crippen—“the doctor,” as she called him—she had no doubt now of his guilt. But, as she also admitted, that made no difference to her love for him. “He was mad when he did it,” she said, “and he was mad for me.” That was the extraordinary thing—that deep, sincere, and passionate love between the little weak-eyed, middle-aged quack doctor, and this common, pretty little Cockney girl.
I read Crippen’s love letters, written to Ethel le Neve from prison, immensely long letters, written on prison paper in a neat little writing, without a blot or a fault. All told, there were forty thousand words of them—as long as a novel—and they were surprising in their good style, their beauty of expression, their resignation to death. These two people from the squalor of a London suburb, might have been mediæval lovers in Italy of Boccaccio’s time, when murder for love’s sake was lightly done.
In a little restaurant in Soho I sat with Ethel le Neve, day after day, while all the journalists of England were searching for her. Many times she was so gay that it was impossible to believe that she had escaped the hangman’s rope by no great distance, and that her lover was a little blear-eyed man lying under sentence of death. Yet that gayety of hers was not affected or forced. It bubbled out of her because of a quick and childish sense of humor, which had not been killed by the frightful thing that overshadowed her. When that shadow fell upon her spirit again, she used to weep, but never for long. Her last request to me was that I should have Doctor Crippen’s photograph made into a miniature which she could wear concealed upon her breast. On the morning of his execution she put on black for him, and wished that she might have died with him on the scaffold.