Mystery in Moon Lane. A. A. Glynn

I started.

      “Where are you?” finished the elderly man. “Why in the St. Giles Cholera Hospital, where we’re doing the best we can in this awful epidemic. A charitable gentleman saw you staggering in the street near Moon Lane, thought at first you had been imbibing, then felt you had fallen victim to the cholera. He put you in his carriage and brought you here. I’m a doctor and you plainly haven’t caught the disease, though you’ve been here the better part of the day, delirious and mumbling. There’s no sign of any drink on you, but you look as if you’ve had a hard time of it. Not been attacked by one of those street ruffians, have you? You have a cut on your face which we dressed with a strip of court plaster and generally cleaned you up.”

      I felt my face and discovered that my false beard and moustaches had somehow become lost. I was still in my disguise as a workingman and hoped that was what the doctor took me for. I assured him I had recovered and was able to make my way home and he, kindly man, fortified me with a glass of brandy and water before allowing me to leave.

      For a couple of days, I kept to my rooms, recovering my strength and wondering about the strange and alarming bout of delirium I had endured. But was it really delirium?

      I kept an eye on the papers and on the second day, saw a paragraph stating that the landlord of a set of warehouses in Moon Lane was seeking one of his tenants who had unaccountably gone missing. He was a Mr. Chaffin, a gentleman of reclusive nature who was apparently engaged on some kind of scientific research.

      And of M. Auguste Duclois I had no word. He did not appear on the appointed day to pay me the remainder of my fee, but then I had hardly earned it.

      A week after my strange experience, the ever-helpful newspapers gave me startling information. It concerned the fatal explosion of the boilers of the steam packet Lily of France en route to Dieppe, one of the shocking tragedies of 1855. Among the list of dead passengers was the name of M. Auguste Duclois, known for his somewhat eccentric contributions to scientific studies.

      This gave me pause. It looked as if he was hastily departing the shores of England. Could it be that, alerted by news of the search for Amos Chaffin, he took fright thinking that someone who knew of his bitter opposition to Chaffin might go to the police with the suggestion that he had something to do with the disappearance?

      Hoping that if anyone saw a youngish man in rough clothing and with a scrubby beard and moustaches entering the warehouse in Moon Lane just before Chaffin’s disappearance, they would not identify him as myself, I lay low for a spell.

      I hoped, too, that the next client to come along would be as liberal with his funds as the much-lamented M. Auguste Duclois.

      Extract from a letter written in 1965 by Mr. Kenneth Spence to his friend Mr. Jim Morton. Mr. Spence, a retired Chief Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police, died four years later. He joined the police service in 1922 and retired in 1952. During the London blitz of 1940 onwards, as an Inspector, he had charge of a large portion of central London, coordinating operations between the police and the various branches of the Civil Defense services.

      Mr. Morton was his lifelong friend from schooldays. Although a chartered accountant by profession, during the Second World War he was a Column Officer in the Auxiliary Fire Service and by coincidence, carried out his duties in the area of London covered by Inspector Spence Mr. Morton died in 1973.

      Dear Jim,

      A couple of letters ago, you mentioned that strange affair of the corpse in old-fashioned clothing taken from a burning building in Moon Lane by your chaps and the rescue people during the Blitz at Christmas 1940. You’ll remember how his get-up made us think at first that he might have come from some panto or Dickensian show but, by then, the Blitz had reached such intensity that even the bravest of brave showbiz people had closed up shop. A story went about that someone else in antique clothing was seen in the region and one of my bobbies swore he’d met him and spoken to him while both were sheltering in a doorway. He even gave me a description of him, but he was never traced. Ever afterwards, the PC claimed he’d met a ghost.

      “You’ll no doubt remember Moon Lane. It was all but falling in when Goering’s people flew over to demolish it. All that area of London was razed and redeveloped by London County Council long before, but Moon Lane somehow lingered on, though it was scheduled to be demolished when the war stopped all slum clearance. Such a place might well be haunted.

      “As for that corpse, many aspects of it were truly odd and I don’t think I ever told you about all of them. You’ll remember dropping me a private note, saying you found his costume and sidewhiskers and everything else about him strange. Because of the pressures of the Blitz, we could not hold inquests and burial was usually quick and without real investigation, but your note caused me to drop in at the emergency mortuary to see the body. As you told me, he was a middle-aged man, pockmarked and, even naked as he was when I saw him, he looked distinctly old-fashioned.

      “I was lucky in that old Jock McAllen was in charge of the mortuary. He was a veteran pathologist who came out of retirement to help in the emergency. He’d had an unusual career, starting out in dentistry, then changing to surgery. However, he kept up an interest in the history of dentistry and had written a book on it.

      “Looking over the body with me, he said he was baffled by the fact that all the clothing was of a style around a century before. He even had antique underwear. A couple of Queen Victoria sovereigns and some pennies and silver, all dated around the 1840s and 1850s, were found in his trousers pocket, and Jock kept them to hand over to the police.

      “‘You’ll notice his pockmarks,’ said Jock. ‘That was typical in the middle of the last century. Smallpox was common and a great many people recovered from it but were marked for life. But it’s the teeth—those false teeth—that intrigue me. There’s no doubt, Inspector Spence, that they’re Waterloo teeth!’

      “I asked what Waterloo teeth were and he told me that, when creating false teeth was an imperfect art, there was a demand for real teeth to be used—sound teeth from young corpses. Because so many soldiers of all sides killed at Waterloo in 1815 were mere youths, there was afterwards a wholesale digging up of corpses, and ‘Waterloo teeth’ were manufactured all over Britain, France, and Belgium. Old Jock said that, even late in the century, people were chewing with the teeth of young men killed in 1815.

      “‘A man of 1940’, said old Jock, ‘might deck himself out in the full costume of the nineteenth century and, by coincidence, even be heavily pockmarked, Inspector, but is he likely to wear a set of waterloo teeth, even if he inherited them from his great grandfather? Frankly, I’m totally bewildered’.

      “And so am I, Jim. I’ve been bewildered all these years. It was as if the man had been somehow transported from the middle of the nineteenth century to the thick of our turmoil in 1940. But that is utterly impossible. Well, it is. Isn’t it…?”