Mystery in Moon Lane Read online

  His eyes flashed and his teeth threatened to jump out of his mouth of their own volition. “Odd stuff!” he howled. “Do you know what that equipment is? Do you know what you’re in the presence of—what epoch-making scientific advances are in the making in this very room, Smith?”

  I shrugged and answered: “I’m sure I dunno, sir. I ain’t had the schoolin’ to understand science. I reckon most of it is gammon.”

  “Gammon! You call scientific investigation gammon?” he exploded. “Why, man, here in this very place, miracles are about to be performed upon any objects or persons placed within the electrical field of my machine. Only this morning I concluded calculations which will have far-reaching results—results hitherto undreamed of, even by a fool of a Frog named Duclois who is the bane of my existence.”

  I was beginning to think that both Duclois and Chaffin must be totally mad.

  It was at this point, with Chaffin in such close proximity to me, that I dropped the notebook that I had been concealing behind my back all the time. Sod’s law decreed that it landed on the grimy floor wide open, with my rough sketches fully visible and Chaffin saw them.

  He gave a howl. “Sketches, by God! You’ve been sketching my equipment! You’re no ratcatcher—you’re a damnable spy! You’re employed by Duclois, I’ll warrant!” He made a dive for the book, but I, being younger and more agile, reached it first. As I stowed it in my pocket, he grappled with me, clutching the lapels of my jacket.

  “Give me that book, you scoundrel!” he snarled.

  Locked together, we reeled across the room, grunting and clawing at each other. Then, near the glass containers and the lever, we fell over and smote the lever with the combined weight of our two bodies. It creaked over from the upright position as the two of us went sprawling, still struggling. It seemed to me that we fell into something like a tunnel, to the accompaniment of a thundering and rushing confusion of sound, and I was dimly aware that Chaffin was there with me, going through the same experience. Then came an abrupt stop to the falling, and I was lying on the ground in what I believed was the same warehouse building.

  It was dark and, somewhere in the darkness, I heard the voice of Amos Chaffin shout something incomprehensible that was at once drowned out by more noise—such noise as I never before heard. It was a crashing and banging and thundering of loud explosions and a constant, thrumming droning sound. Then the whole warehouse shook under a dull, shuddering reverberation and there was suddenly light behind us, the blazing yellow and crimson flickering of flames. It briefly illumined the grotesque form of Chaffin in his slop coat and tall hat, running away from where I lay—presumably to escape the flames that were threatening us.

  He had barely covered a few yards when a rafter came crashing down on him from the roof. I somehow got to my feet and, in a chaotic welter of swirling smoke and dust, tried to stagger towards where I last saw Chaffin, hoping to help him. I made hardly any progress because I could only blunder around, coughing and half blinded in the confusion.

  Then dimly, in this hellish nightmare, I heard a man’s urgent voice shouting something like: “Here—Harry, Nobby, Jack—get the hoses over on this side—there seems to be a bloke trapped under a rafter…quick about it…alert the Rescue.…” Before I realized it, I had somehow wandered free of the building, which was no longer a building but a tumbled mass of bricks, just visible through a swirl of smoke and flames.

  Holding my hands against my ears and trying to clear my throat of smoke and dust, I staggered across broken cobbles and shattered bricks, found the doorway of a building and plunged into it, seeking cover and trying to recover my breath. Out of the confusion came a man in a strange costume, though I recognized his greatcoat as something like a Peeler’s. He had an odd helmet like an upturned pudding basin and made of metal. Sure enough, though, the word Police was painted on it in white capitals. His face was smudged with black marks and, like myself, he was choking in the smoke. Coughing, he joined me, leaning against the closed door.

  “Hello, mate. You all right?” he shouted over the din when he found his breath. He looked at me enquiringly in the dancing light of the flames, and grinned.

  “Cor! Where’ve you come from in that get-up—out of a pantomime? That battered old topper of yours is no protection in this lot. You want to watch out for your head, and there’s a cut on your face. There’s a first-aid post a bit down the lane. Go and ask ’em to clean it up for you.”

  He slipped away into the smoky, blazing chaos, leaving me more bewildered than before.

  Now that my head had cleared, I remembered Amos Chaffin, trapped under a rafter in the warehouse. I had to get back to him—had to help him out. I was beginning to see that our predicament had something to do with his electrical equipment, which our grappling must have accidentally activated. I recalled what Chaffin had said—something about objects or people being affected by the electrical field of his machine.

  Though I was no scientist, it seemed to me that if I was to get back to where I belonged, I had to be within the influence of that field, which lay somewhere within the warehouse.

  Crouching into the smoke and flames, I scrambled over humps of rubble towards the wreckage of the warehouse on which the men in the strange costumes and metal helmets were playing jets of water onto the flames. I got within a section of shattered wall and blundered onward until I believed I was somewhere near where I last saw Chaffin. Then I heard a hoarse voice, yelling above the explosive cacophony: “Hey, come back! You can’t go in there! What’re you up to—looting? Come back, dammit—come back.…”

  The agitated voice thinned, became distant then merged into that same whirling, rushing sound which had accompanied the fall through the tunnel and, indeed, I was falling through the tunnel again, being whelmed breathlessly away into darkness.

  * * * *

  “How are you feeling now, my good man?” asked the man in the frock coat who seemed to appear out of nowhere. “You’ve taken a bad turn, but at least it’s not the cholera.”

  I was sitting in a chair and the elderly man in the frock coat was hovering over me. I saw a woman in a white cap and with a white apron over her crinoline go past. At least I was in surroundings I understood, away from nightmarish explosions, fires, and men in grotesque clothing, struggling against a hellish background.

  “Where…?” 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 w
eek 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…?”

  THE MODEL

  “My father knew him, you know,” said George Fennister. “In fact, they were pretty close towards the end of Costigan’s life. They were in the same platoon in the army, thrown together by sheer chance: my father, the aspiring art historian and Costigan, the rising young painter. My father never forgot how he met his end one night in 1917. Costigan was sent out with a wire party and the Germans opened up with heavy artillery while they were in no-man’s land. Nothing was ever seen of them again. Probably, they were just blown to bits. That was the way of things in that war.”

  The old man shrugged and pushed a faded brown envelope across the table towards me. “Half a dozen photos my father left. You’ll spot Costigan, of course. My daughter’s had enhanced copies made for her family album, so you can have these. They’re a bit battered but they might be useful for your book.”

  I opened the envelope eagerly, reflecting on the generosity of the old gallery owner in so willingly parting with these precious relics of this long dead father. They were indeed battered but clear enough, sepia visions of young soldiers of First World War vintage, acting the fool in some obscure French village behind the line. They were cavorting with the desperate merriment common to that generation of unwilling citizen-soldier, so obviously aware that every next minute might easily be their last one.

  “My father’s the one with the little moustache which he hoped would grow into an impressive military one—if he was spared,” commented Mr. Fennister. “You’ll recognize Costigan easily enough.”

  I did. There he was, Fred Costigan, the unpredictable wild man of the pre-1914 art world, looking astonishingly boyish and vulnerable without the famous beard. In one picture, he was grinning, waving his steel helmet in the air. In another, he held a wine bottle to his lips, as if trying to capture an echo of the roaring nights he drank away with the bohemian set of Camden Town.

  “They’re wonderful, Mr. Fennister,” I said. “I’m so grateful to you. They’ll help towards the human picture of Costigan I hope to give, showing him as something more than an arrogant drunkard.”

  “My father considered his wild behavior to be mostly an act,” replied George Fennister. “He had a softer side which he tried to keep hidden. He was once madly in love, but there was a row and the girl disappeared before they could make it up, and Costigan became morose. When the Great War started, he enlisted very early, probably to escape a life which had become pretty empty, and his remarkable early promise as a painter was failing to flower. He somehow survived in the trenches until as late as 1917.”

  “The girl?” I asked. “She would be the unknown model whom he painted? They rowed over heaven knows what and Costigan destroyed the picture.”

  “It sounds as if you’ve been reading McArdle’s book
on Costigan, written in the twenties, Mr. Jevons.” Fennister gave a tolerant smile.

  “Of course, it’s the only available source—but it’s badly flawed. McArdle made a big thing about knowing Costigan, but the truth is he hardly knew him. They moved in different circles and were associated with different art schools. McArdle was at the Slade while, as you know, Costigan was at Readly’s, where you are. They had only a slight acquaintance. McArdle was a hack on the make.”

  He rose from his chair, looked at me levelly and said: “You know, I like you, Mr. Jevons, and I admire your work as a painter. I’m pleased to know you are trying to produce a decent book on Costigan. He deserves some proper treatment, even at this late date. Now that we’ve met face-to-face, I can see you are genuinely interested in the subject. The fact is, I have some rare relics of Costigan, which I’ve hung on to ever since my father’s death. One, indeed, is of enormous interest. Now that I’m leaving London for good, I have a mind to give them to you. I think they’ll open doors for you in your research.”

  “Relics of Costigan and you’re giving them to me?” I said. “But they must be valuable. You can get a good price for them.”

  The old man shook his head. “What, from some rich collector who’ll just let them gather more dust? No, I’m not badly off for money after sixty years in the top bracket of the art game. They’ll be better off in your hands. Come with me.”

  He led me from the small room at the rear of the gallery which he was soon to sell up, took me to a back stairway tucked away behind his main showroom, and we climbed its creaking and uncarpeted treads.

  “You see,” said the dealer as we went, “Costigan must have had a premonition about his death, because he made a will bequeathing certain property to my father, probably feeling that, as a man who was interested in art history, he would appreciate them. There are some papers, which will help you. For instance, a few minutes ago, you spoke of the girl he painted as ‘an unknown model’, because you relied on McArdle. But, as you’ll see, she was not unknown. Her name was Katherine Cranshaw and he was certainly in love with her.”