‘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…?”
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