Mystery in Moon Lane. A. A. Glynn

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      “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 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 СКАЧАТЬ