‘He just sat down,’ said Jones. ‘And then his head exploded.’
There are a couple of mundane things that can make your head explode, high-velocity rifle shot for one, so the Murder Team spent some time eliminating them from our inquiries. Meanwhile, I’d figured out what had caused the explosion inside J. Sheekey’s, which was just as well because by that time the Anti-Terrorist Squad and MI5 were starting to sniff around the case, which nobody wanted.
The answer came from the experiments I’d been conducting, semi-covertly, into why my phone broke. I had no intention of using my laptop or even another phone as a guinea pig, so a quick trip to Computers For Africa, who refurbish abandoned computers and donate them abroad, netted me a bag full of chips and a motherboard that I suspected came from an Atari ST. I used masking tape to set marks at twenty-centimetre intervals along the length of a bench and once I had a chip placed at every mark, I carefully positioned my hand and cast a werelight. The trick in science is to try and change only one variable at a time, but I felt I’d gained enough fine control to produce the same intensity of werelight consistently each time. I spent an entire day conjuring up lights and then checking each chip for damage under the microscope. All to no avail, except for pissing off Nightingale who said that if I had that much time to waste I should be able to tell him the difference between propositions of the accusative and the ablative kind.
Then he distracted me by teaching me my first Adjectivum, which is a forma which changes some aspect of another forma. This Adjectivum was called Iactus, which combined with Impello should, theoretically, have allowed me to float an apple around the room. After two weeks of exploding apples I’d got to the point where I could reliably whoosh an apple down the length of the lab with a fair degree of accuracy. Nightingale said that the next stage was catching things that were thrown towards me, which took us back to exploding apples, and that’s where we were the day the clocks went forward and we paid our respects to Father Thames.
It was while I was in the interview room watching Seawoll gently pluck the facts from Willard Jones’s testimony that I had my breakthrough. Magic, it turned out, was just like science in that sometimes it was a question of spotting the bleeding obvious. Just as Galileo spotted that objects accelerate under gravity at the same rate regardless of their weight, I spotted that the big difference between my mobile phone and the various microchips I’d been experimenting on was that my mobile phone was connected up to its battery when it got fried.
Just connecting up my collection of second-hand microchips to a battery seemed far too random and time-consuming, but luckily you can a get ten generic calculators for less than a fiver – if you know where to go. Then it was just a matter of laying them out, casting the werelight for precisely five seconds and sticking them under the microscope. The one placed directly under my hand was toast and there were decreasing levels of damage out to the two-metre mark. Was I emitting power as a waste product, which was damaging the electronics – or was I sucking power out of the calculators, and was it that that was doing the damage? And why was the damage principally to the chips, and not the other components? Crucially, despite the unresolved questions, it implied that I could now carry my mobile phone and do magic – providing I took the battery out first.
‘But what does all that mean?’ asked Lesley.
I took a pull on my Becks and waved the bottle at the TV. ‘It means that I’ve just figured out how the fire was started.’
The next morning Lesley emailed me the fire report, and after I’d checked that I tracked down a retail equipment store that could deliver a till just like the one used in J. Sheekey’s Oyster Bar. Because of Nightingale’s No Visitors in the Folly, Not Counting the Coach House rule, I had to carry the bloody thing from the tradesman’s entrance down into my lab all by myself. Molly watched me staggering past and covered her smile with her hand. I figured Lesley didn’t count as a visitor in this instance, but when I called and invited her over for the demonstration she said she was busy running errands for Seawoll. Once I had everything in position I asked Molly to ask Nightingale to meet me in the lab.
I cleared an area in the corner, away from any gas pipes, mounted the till on a metal trolley and plugged it in. When Nightingale arrived I handed him a lab coat and eye protectors and asked him to stand on a mark six metres from the till. Then, before I did anything else, I removed the battery from my mobile phone.
‘And the purpose of this is what, exactly?’ asked Nightingale.