THE CASE OF THE CLOCKWORK TEETH

It began with an appeal from a man doomed to be hanged and ended with a confrontation between Wilfred Woolfitt – famed Supernaturalist – and one of the world’s most notorious villains. Even Inspector Gamely, that greatest sceptic of all things Strange & Unusual was forced to change his mind. Although, as always, his was a far more pedestrian explanation:

“French anarchists, that’s all there is to it,” was his assessment after Commissioner Thaxton Meadows’ intervention. “And nothing extraordinary in this case. Nothing as outlandish as Wilfred Woolfitt maintains.”

But to assess whether Inspector Gamely was right, we must go back to when Wilfred Woolfitt was contacted by a certain Julius Dewar, QC.

“‘It is unusual, I admit, that one might find such openness from a barrister,” Woolfitt – unkempt, uncombed, and sipping on a small flask of grog as usual - explained to Eldritch Monthly in an exclusive interview. “Even after his client was so insistent on contacting me. But it seems Dewar was not unfamiliar with The Monthly, and desperate in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, he visited my offices on Eerie Street. It was all to do with that terrible incident at Nanny Willoughby’s Naughty Treats. You remember?”’

Eldritch Monthly did indeed remember. A peculiar circumstance. And pertinent to the case. For it was just three weeks ago when Henry Turrell, a mild-mannered bank manager, with no history of violence, was caught hastening from that very sweet shop late one night, and just before it exploded in a great concussive blast.

“’There was no doubt as to whom was responsible for this uncharacteristic act of destruction,” Woolfitt admitted. “The prosecution even discovered bomb-making equipment in Turrell’s cellar, quite unbeknownst to his wife. Yet the oddity was, Henry Turrell insisted he had no memory of making the bomb or instigating the act that followed. Indeed, it was only because a passing soldier, returning to his barracks after a night’s leave wrestled Turrell to the ground just after the incident, that the poor man was detained so quickly.”

THE ACCUSED, HENRY TURRELL, DELIVERING THE BOMB!

But what made Turrell believe so ardently that there was something Strange and Unusual at play? Surely there was a more ordinary explanation?

“If there had been, I wouldn’t have been called upon,” Woolfitt said, pursing his lips. “No. Turrell had never demonstrated any mental aliments. He was a man of mild temperament. A loving father and husband. Nothing to suggest he had a mental incapacity. His only vice, it seemed, was for sweets. Which, of course, the prosecution made a big show about. They insisted that Turrell had a deep seated, psychological hatred of all confectionaries. After all, he had been to the dentist many times to fix his cavities and had a fear of the dentist’s chair as a result. This had driven him to experience several moments of psychological disassociation, splitting his personality in two. One was the honest, hard-working family man, the other the manic bomber.”

At least, that was the prosecutions story. One which Woolfitt was uncertain of as soon as he interviewed Turrell at Stonegate Prison.

“Call it instinct,” Woolfitt murmured, with a far-away look in his eye. “Call it years of experience with the Strange and Unusual. There was just something about the prosecution’s side of things that didn’t seem right, as credible as they appeared. Turrell seemed so lacking in any kind of mania despite his woeful predicament, that I was convinced something else was at play. Indeed, the only compromise to his health, either mental or physical, was a sore jaw after he lost a tooth in his altercation with the soldier. Therefore, for a small fee, and a deposit on account, I took on the case and began my investigation.”

The first stop for Woolfitt, was the ashen bones of Nanny Willoughby’s Naughty Treats.

“That was a sad state of affairs,” Woolfitt reflected. “I had myself been a patron to that establishment when I was a young lad and Nanny Willoughby herself had been serving at the counter. My favourites were cherry whipples and sherbet sneezes – so named because the sherbet was so powerful it streamed out one’s nose if too much was consumed. But now, it was little more than a charred husk. Such a ruin, in fact, that it was not surprising that the police could find no other evidence to incriminate Turrell but the mangled pieces of the homemade bomb that had caused so much destruction. Still, the police had one singular disadvantage when it came to the Strange and Unusual.”

Which was? Eldritch Monthly asked.

“They did not have my Inklings.”

Ah yes! Wilfred Woolfitt, like many of the best Supernaturalists, had a sixth sense for the Strange and Unusual. And while he found nothing untoward in the wreckage, on the street he happened upon something glinting in the late afternoon light.

“It was a tooth,” said Woolfitt. “A human tooth newly filled, that I saw sparkling in the sunlight. Doubtless it was Turrell’s. The result of his wrestle with the soldier.

A PASSING SOLDIER WRESTLED TURRELL TO THE GROUND.

But I wouldn’t have happened across it if something hadn’t led me to it; something that told me it was significant to the case. However, even before I could examine it any further, my eye drifted across the street, whereupon I was arrested by the sight of a short, but very round young fellow loitering in an alleyway. He seemed to be watching me, beneath the fringes of his perfectly round haircut, and there was a furtiveness to him that once again nagged at my Inklings.

“‘You there!’ I called out at once. ‘I say! Might I have a word with you?’

“But no sooner had I raised my voice than he suddenly turned about and with surprising alacrity for one so plump, made off on his toes.

“I shouted after him to no avail so immediately gave chase. Of course, in my younger days I had enviable athletic abilities and would have caught him in a trice. Had I not been called to Supernaturalism, I might have easily given exhibitions of strength and speed around the country. But after an attempted knee-stealing in The Case of the Knee Thief had left me with a gammy right leg, I only caught up with the lad when he found himself hemmed in by an omnibus accident on Vauxhall Bridge. Even so, he was not about to answer any of my questions. Rather, he turned on me in an exasperated panic, his round, pink face crawling with sweat and cried: ‘“Stay back! Stay back or you’ll be sorry!’

“I was sorry already. I could hardly catch my breath from my exertion. Nevertheless, I managed to croak out: ‘I only wish to talk a little.’

“But the lad was in no mood for that and cried: ‘I shouldn’t have come here. As soon as I saw you, I realised it was a mistake. You see, I know who you are, Mr Woolfitt. I know you’re all for upsetting the apple cart. Well, I’m warning you that you’d do best to leave well alone. If you stand in his way, you’ll be next.”

“Stand in whose way, boy?”

But the young man’s bottom lip set to quivering. He looked as he was about to burst into tears as he wailed: “I can’t say…I’m not supposed to say.” And then he slapped his free hand against the side of his face and an odd expression surfaced there. He blinked a few times rapidly, as if exposed to a flickering light, and when he spoke again his voice had lost all of its wariness and anguish.

“You have been warned,” the young man intoned, “You must not pursue this course any longer. Let Turrell hang. Do this or face great consequences…” And at this, before I could reach out to stop him, the young man tipped backwards and over the side of the bridge.

“Well! I raced to the railings and looked down into the oily water of the Thames but saw no sign of the boy. He had been dragged away by the strong current. And because of the omnibus accident, nobody seemed to have been paying attention either and so looked at me blankly when I hollered for help. It was if the lad had simply disappeared off the face of the earth.”

Woolfitt, shocked by what had occurred, returned to his offices in Eerie Street in something close to a daze himself. It was only when he was entrenched in his apartment above his place of work, and after a few glasses of grog, that he remembered the tooth that he had thumbed into his waistcoat pocket.

“This seemed to be a vital clue,” he said. “Perhaps the very thing that could save Henry Turrell’s life. But how? Why? I turned it over in my fingers by the candlelight, certain that it held a secret for me to find, when I noticed a chip had been taken out of it. What’s more, after I grabbed a magnifying glass from my bureau drawer, I made the most astounding and Strange and Unusual discovery.”

Woolfitt paused then, before continuing, as if still surprised by what had been revealed to him. But it was as much to do with nature of the discovery as the discovery itself which prompted him to reach for his glass again and take a deep swig; a feeling of dreaded familiarity resurfacing in his mind.

“The mechanism was so small and perfect, only a person with the greatest skill could have created it. A person with both a precise and diabolical mind. The only person alive could have done it. And it filled me with a fear so terrible, I was forced to open another bottle of grog.”

But what had Wilfred Woolfitt discovered? And who had been responsible?

“It was a clockwork mechanism, hidden beneath the gold filling,” Woolfitt explained. “This had become slightly dislodged, and the hard enamel cracked, but there it was none-the-less, although now defunct of movement. As to the man who had created it, I recognised it as the work of Dr Xorbus McCracken at once – the man with the mechanical mind! It was that very same evil genius who had been responsible for the automaton invasion of Hamburg. The cunning villain behind the attempted assassin of the Empress of Austria with an exploding fork. And the very same fellow who had been last seen fleeing the authorities in a flying bathtub after they tried to corner him in a Turkish sauna, now over six years past.”

Wilfred Woolfitt took the tooth at once to his Contraption Room: a chamber in the bowels of his offices filled with all manner of peculiar apparatus, many of which were designed by himself.

“I knew at once that the clockwork mechanism secreted inside the tooth was my only way of proving Henry Turrell’s innocence. And after prising out the gold filling and examining the delicate instrumentation in detail, I soon began to realise the clever purpose for which it was designed.”

Woolfitt leaned forward then, assuming a conspiratorial pose. “Control,” he murmured, narrowing his eyes. “McCracken had taken his automification process one step further. No need to create complicated clockwork puppets to carry out his nefarious plans, as he had done in Hamburg, New York, and Swindon. With these tiny wheels, springs, and pistons, he had found a way of attuning to the frequencies of the human brain and making it a plaything for his evil purposes.”

Yet, what those purposes were was not immediately clear to Woolfitt, even as he pored over the miniscule apparatus.

“All I knew was that the tooth acted as a kind of transmitter, sending signals to the brain. These were enough to bend him to the will of the mad inventor who created the mechanism in the first place. And that gave me an idea. It was slim hope, you understand, but it was enough for me to spring into immediate action. Well, after I had had a spot of late supper and a few ales at the Monkey and Parrott, of course.”

The hope that Woolfitt clung to was that the same signals designed to interfere with Henry Turrell’s free will could be tracked like footprints in the snow. For Woolfitt was convinced that the clockwork was itself not responsible for relaying its demands. It had to come remotely.

“And after fiddling with the intricacies of the clockwork and connecting it to my spirit compass which, as you know, is designed to point in the direction of anything Strange and Unusual, I had my bearing. The truth awaited. And soon enough, I was on my way, hailing a hansom to take me at once to the nearest police station to show everything I had gleaned.”

But if Woolfitt had hoped for a positive reception from Inspector Gamely, who just happened to be on duty that night, Woolfitt was sorely mistaken.

“As usual, he was dismissive…” Woolfitt grumbled.

“’More tall tales and supernatural nonsense,’ Gamely had sniffed. ‘The man behind bars is the man that did the deed. All evidence points to it, and showing me some piece of manufactured claptrap, no doubt fashioned in your very own cellar to gain notoriety, won’t change my mind.’

“So I was on my own,” Woolfitt said grimly. “If Henry Turrell was to live, I had to save him myself. And hopping back into the waiting hansom, I told the driver that no officers of the law would be following, and we took off into the midnight streets of London.”

As it happened, Wilfred Woolfitt didn’t have far to go. Not an hour’s journey from his offices, his compass led him to a narrow alleyway not far from Harley Street. And after paying the cabbie, Woolfitt approached the only door that seemed appropriate to the circumstances.

“The brass plaque pinned to the wall suggested I had arrived at the right place. It read: ‘Dr Proteus – Expert Dentist. Specialist in the relief of cavities.’ I even allowed myself a smile. Proteus, as any schoolboy will tell you, was a primordial god of the sea and the father of the sirens. McCracken was not without a sense of humour, it seemed. But my smile soon faded. This was too serious a business. A man’s life was at stake. And quickly sobering, I tried to door only to find it locked. No wonder given the late hour, but I was determined to get inside, and so headed around the back of the property.

“It was here I found my ingress. Prising a loose window open, I climbed inside and turned on my electrical torch, finding myself in a small waiting room. A line of chairs where nervous patients must have prayed for painless procedures was against one wall, while a table offering the latest newspapers and periodicals was set in the middle. But my eye was for the connecting door and pushing this gingerly aside I found myself in a dentist’s treatment room, complete with a hulking chair, and a trolley glittering with wicked looking instrumentation. Nothing looked out of the ordinary, however. Nothing to incriminate this so-called Dr Proteus and save poor Turrell from the noose. That was, until my eye settled upon the back of the room.

“An archway, secreted by a heavy curtain, revealed the evidence I was searching for! For here was a small antechamber crowded by a workbench against a window littered with the tools and the materials necessary for clockwork. A fur cloak, favoured by Dr McCracken, was hanging on the back of a chair. His spectacles were even lying on the bench next to a cup of tea. And it was only then that I realised that a Gaslamp was shedding a thin pool of light across the instrumentation and the tea was still steaming.

“I stiffened like a slug on a hot roof. Then I heard the sound of a toilet flushing from a door across the room. And the next thing I knew a great swathe of light fell across me, throwing my shadow up and against the wall.

“Dr Xorbus McCracken was a thick-set, lantern jawed, pale faced fellow with a ginger beard and plumes of red hair surrounding his bald pate. To anyone who saw him for the first time, he cut an imposing figure. But it was his hairless head that was most incredible. For how his brain had been replaced by that ticking clockwork puzzle, and housed beneath that thick glass dome, had been the subject of conjecture for years. Some said the grey matter had been stolen when he was a child by a race of advanced beings from another planet. Others suggested he had had a terrible head injury in the Switzerland and was saved by a mad toymaker. No-one knew for sure. All I that could be agreed upon was that the machine that ticked and whirred where Xorbus McCraken’s brain had once been had warped him into a villainous rogue. And it was certainty that he and he alone was behind the bombing of Nanny Willoughby’s, using poor Henry Turrell as his stooge. The question was – to what purpose?

“‘And who, may I ask, are you?’” McCracken demanded in a surprisingly light and lilting Scottish accent for such a big man. He had spent many years abroad, but the sound of his birthplace still came through.

“’Me?’” I cried. “’Why, I’m Wilfred Woolfitt, sir, London’s foremost Supernaturalist. And I am arresting you as citizen for the bombing of Nanny Willoughby’s Naughty Treats! Henry Turrell is innocent of the crime. You are the real culprit. Using your nefarious mechanisms to impress a poor man into your destructive schemes.’”

“McCracken looked at me dumbfounded at this. He was doubtless shocked to be bettered by a man without the advantage of a clockwork brain. But then a narrow look came over his face, and he sneered. ‘So, Wilfred Woolfitt, is it? I might have known. You’re August Swiftsure’s apprentice, aren’t you? He always said you were clever. And when Eric saw you at the scene of the crime and attempted to warn you off for your own good, I should have known you couldn’t be persuaded. Still, Mr Woolfitt, you have no proof. No way of connecting me to the crime.”

“’Oh, don’t I? What if I was to tell you I found Turrell’s tooth. The clockwork intact inside. It led me here. And there’s enough evidence to connect that tooth to this room and your involvement.”’

‘“You have Turrell’s tooth?’ McCracken’s eyebrows crawled up his forehead in surprise.

“I do indeed.”

Only for McCracken’s eyebrows to crawl back down again. He even smiled. “But that won’t be enough, Mr Woolfitt. You’ll need a motive.” At which point, McCracken’s eyes skated across the room to a satchel by his chair.

I knew then that McCracken’s reasons for the bombing was doubtless all laid in that bag. And before McCracken could react, and despite my gammy leg, I leapt forward grabbed hold of it. I cried out in triumph:

“’Ah hah!’

Only for the pleasure of my success to quickly evaporate when I looked up and saw that McCracken had a revolver trained on me.

“’All right, Mr Woolfitt,’” he said. ‘Drop the satchel. Besides, it won’t make any difference after you’re dead what you know.’

“’You mean to kill me then, is that it?’

“’But of course! One less Supernaturalist in the world will be no loss. All your poking around in darkened corners has only unbalanced the unnatural order of things. The world is run from the shadows, after all, Woolfitt, by people like me and those I serve.’

“’And bombing sweet shops is how the unnatural order is maintained, is that it?’

“’Oh, how naïve you are, Woolfitt. Nanny Willoughby’s wasn’t the only the sweet shop. There have been several attacks across Europe. All instigated by me and carried out by my human marionettes. How easy it was to trap them in my scheme too. All of them had a sweet tooth, and all of them needed dental surgery. I merely offered a cheap and professional service, and they eagerly came to me. Then, with a little sleeping gas, I was able to fit my clockwork mechanisms. And why? Because each and every one of those confectioners that were targeted were supplied by Smeets Sweets, the flagship of British confectionary since 1773. You know how powerful Cyril Smeets, the owner of that sweet manufacturer has become? Why he has the ear of most every sweet-toothed head of state in the world. It’s helped make Britain the most powerful empire has ever seen. Well, no more. Wunderschmack, the German confectioners’ time has come. The winds of chaos are beginning to blow, Mr Woolfitt. Before too long, only those shops who accept Wunderschmack will be survive. The rest will perish.’

“So, McCracken had given me his whole plan, after all. Not that it mattered. I was facing death. And while I’d been in tight situations before, I couldn’t see how I might wriggle out of this one. But then a stroke of luck. There was a loud thumping on the surgery’s door outside, and brash shouting. Lights bloomed through the window of the treatment room.

“‘Who the devil is that?’ McCracken demanded.

“I had no idea. But rather than shoot me, McCracken headed to a nearby window and peeked out.

“‘The police!’ he hissed. ‘You brought the police with you?’

“I was as surprised as he, but said, ‘Obviously. You think I’d come here alone?’

“McCracken’s jaw tightened. Behind his spectacles his small eyes glinted. ‘Well, it seems you have a reprieve Wilfred Woolfitt,’ he said. ‘But this isn’t over. You mark my words.’

“And before I could stop him, he turned and fled back into the privy, flinging the door closed behind him.

“I rushed to try and stop him. I feared he was going to try and climb out through the toilet window. But it was much, much worse than that. As I grappled for the door handle, there was a great gushing roar. And as I opened the door, a huge white cloud of steam overwhelmed me. I was too late. Through the haze I briefly saw Xorbus McCracken seated on the toilet bowl, his hand firmly grasped on the flushing chain. Then he gave it a hard yank and the whole facility prised itself from the floorboards and lifted into the air. An aperture in the ceiling opened like a flower, and off McCracken went, like a firework, into the darkened skies.

“Not that the police saw any of this. By the time I arrived at the door to let them in, McCracken was gone, and I had a lot of explaining to do.”

Yet while Inspector Gamely didn’t believe Woolfitt at first, and even arrested him on the spot for breaking and entering, once the contents of the satchel were revealed, and the story came to the attention of Thaxton Meadows, the Police Commissioner, everything changed.

“Meadows was an old friend of Cyril Smeet, the President of Smeet’s Sweets,” Woolfitt explained. “Apparently, Smeet had warned Meadows that an attack upon a sweet shop in Britain was imminent, especially after a number of other confectioners throughout Europe had suffered a similar fate. However, like Gamely, the presumption had been that anarchists had been behind the campaign. Until the contents of the satchel revealed the detailed plans of McCracken’s and Wunderschmack’s involvement, including the next shops that were supposed to be targeted. I was quickly released from jail. Turrell, blubbering like a baby, was also set free. But no praise was forthcoming. The whole incident was covered over.”

So once again, Wilfred Woolfitt saved the day. Xorbus McCracken, that evil genius, was once again on the run. And thankfully, for now at least, the sweet shops of Britain were safe.