Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch [68]
‘A harmonious noise,’ said Willard Jones. ‘In this age of materialism and hypocrisy, no other form of spiritual realisation is as effective as the chanting of the maha-mantra. It is like the genuine cry of the child for his mother …’ He went on like this for some time.
What was not harmonious was the cowbell, which Willard Jones knew was a genuine cowbell because his father and brothers were genuine failing Welsh hill farmers. ‘If you’ve ever heard a cowbell,’ said Jones, ‘you’d realise that they are not designed to be harmonious.’
At approximately two fifty, Michael Smith produced a huge cowbell from somewhere about his person and started ringing it with great sweeping movements of his arm. On duty as uniformed doorman that day was Gurcan Temiz of Tottenham via Ankara. As a typical Londoner, Gurcan had a high tolerance threshold for random thoughtlessness; after all, if you live in the big city there’s no point complaining that it’s a big city, but even that tolerance has its limit and the name of that limit is ‘taking the piss’. Ringing a huge cowbell outside the restaurant and disturbing the patrons certainly constituted taking the piss, so Gurcan stepped up to remonstrate with Michael Smith, who clubbed him repeatedly with the bell around the head and shoulders. According to Dr Walid, the fourth blow was the one that killed him. Once Gurcan Temiz was on the ground two more devotees, Henry MacIlvoy of Wellington, New Zealand and William Cattrington of Hemel Hempstead rushed over and proceeded to kick the victim. This didn’t cause the damage it might have, because both devotees were wearing soft plastic sandals.
At that point an incendiary device exploded behind the bar inside J. Sheekey’s. The clientele, despite being a mix of thespians and tourists, evacuated the premises in an orderly but rapid fashion. Those that went out the back fire exits dispersed via Cecil Court; those that went out the front streamed past the bodies of Gurcan Temiz, Henry MacIlvoy and William Cattrington, who were already dead. Most registered that there were bodies and that there was blood, but they were all vague about the details. Only Willard Jones had a clear view of what happened to Michael Smith.
‘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