The Mysterious Incident of the Glass Eye - Final Part.
The next
day, Ruddles called Bailey and Jones into his office.
“Forensics
got back to us, lads.” he announced. “Had a look through that
book you discovered.”
“And?”
Bailey asked.
“Apparently
old Cyclops was an experimental scientist,” Ruddles explained.
“He'd found a way to restore vision to people who had lost their
eyes. His glass eye was a prototype. Although it worked perfectly,
he couldn't get the medical companies to take it on on Health and
Safety grounds.”
“How
so?” Jones was intrigued.
“Well
…” Ruddles went on. “Turns out that in order to work, the
glass eye had to be filled with nitro-glycerine. It was sealed
within the eye and seemed stable. The flaw in the design was that
there needed to be some conductivity between the prosthesis and the
optic nerve. Lining the back of the prosthesis with magnesium worked
best. You know about magnesium, right?” Bailey vaguely remembered
science lessons when he was fourteen; his teacher pulling strips of
magnesium from a jar of oil and then holding them in the air, only to
watch them burst into blinding white flames.
“Vaseline!”
Jones called out. “That's what the Vaseline was for.”
“I
don't follow,” Ruddles answered, irritated.
Bailey
nodded. “Magnesium bursts into flames upon contact with the air,
right?” Jones went on. “Vaseline would be the perfect material
to exclude the air from the magnesium, whilst allowing the electrical
signals to be conducted to the optic nerve. It's perfect.”
“Ah.” Bailey added, the penny finally dropping. “The jar of Vaseline I found in the B and B was empty. He must've woken up that morning but couldn't scrape quite enough out of the pot. He was probably on his way to the chemist's when the magnesium started to burn.”
“And he
ran into the doctor's in the hopes that they could help him,” Jones
added. “I don't s'pose he was thinking logically by that point.”
“No,”
Bailey went on. “The magnesium heated the nitroglycerine to the
point where an explosion was inevitable. He literally lost his
head.”
The End.
© Annie Bell 2012
© Annie Bell 2012
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