The Electrician had never quite encountered something like it. He knew about the family by the coast, everyone did. No one could stop talking about it. Then he found out, just as he was called to do a routine work-up on a home, by the coast that it had been that very house. He had been in that house. He shivered still at the thought. Initially, he assumed that a fussy homebuyer wanted an assessment. He could be called in for such jobs for very specific clients or if the house was old. He would be referred by another home inspector or older clients he'd worked with before but he had not had the details before. Even as he arrived to start the work, he saw out of the window, a police officer and another man in a suit. Trouble, trouble. The Electrician, thought. He'd do his job and get out of the way. He made to park his car at the bottom of the drive but was waved up by the police officer. The man in the suit waved as the Electrician got out of the car.
"You find it, alright?"
"Yes, thank you." The Electrician nodded. "I'll be out of the way soon enough." He nodded towards the policeman. He and the other man exchanged glances.
"This is the house." The man said.
"Pardon?"
"The house by the coast. This is it. I understand if you would rather not… We just tried calling other people and… I just want a second opin-"
The policeman cleared his throat.
The Electrician decided to continue with the job. He had been in some homes in his day. That was part of the job afterall. Plumbers had it worse, his mentor had said. Before they cleaned up, whatever was left there when the lights went off. It could be jarring, those were the worst jobs, at night, understanding parts of a person, part of a family's existence through torch beam. He decided to go in because it was day and that everything had been moved and cleaned (he hoped). Usually, he would circle the outside, making sure there wasn't anything too obvious and decide on the best way to approach the job. Outside in or inside out. He didn't want to talk himself out of doing the work so he went inside.
There was nothing there. Or rather, there was no furniture. He had half expected to find them all still there. But the house was empty like someone had moved out. What was there however were jammed up electric plugs, outlets covered in dust. The first outlet he checked was dusted over grey at the openings. Then the second and third, the fourth and so on. He wiped his finger across part of the outlet, rubbing his index finger and thumb together. How strange, he thought. He made to stand up and turned jumping up startled. The policeman was standing at the doorway.
"Try not to disturb anything."
The Electrician nodded. He went toward the door to check the other outlets in the house and had to squeeze past the policeman who pivoted on his feet and stared the Electrician down without blinking. Years later, when discussions about evidence and fingerprinting and criminal profiling were common parlance, the Electrician woke up in a cold sweat imagining that his fingerprints had been entered into some database somewhere and he was still secretly being considered a suspect in the McKinnon murders. His own granddaughter had rolled her eyes and told him, if he was there probably they had already collected all the evidence anyway and the policeman was just being intimidating because that was part of his job and that made sense to the Electrician so the thought never bothered him again. Over the years, he considered, in the strange way that memory can work to sooth a thing to softness that, maybe, it hadn't been dust at all, but fingerprinting powder left behind from earlier in the investigation but his granddaughter didn't have anything to say to that because he hadn't told her that part. And anyway, it had been dust and like an even stranger part of memory, he knew deep down, that it had been.
One thing did survive all those years earlier. The Electrician wrote out a report. Not much was off. The electricity worked. They had turned the power back on for the inspection. The panel that contained the breakers, the outlets everything was in the same state and he had said as much.
"Well?" Asked the man in the suit. "What does that mean?"
The Electrician didn't want to say really. He didn't want to ask too many questions, infer, speculate or judge the lives of the people who had lived here. It really was a tragedy. All of them gone like that.
"It may mean several things…" The Electrician started.
The policeman rolled his eyes. He was so used to people and their theories and he hated them all. People loved to think that something insignificant, something they had discovered of course, was the key to understanding entire crimes. They'd be thrown a parade, he was sure, snorting with derision.
"…but…" the Electrician had said pointedly not turning to face the police officer, "anymore dust and this would have been dangerous."
"How so?" Asked the man in the suit ignoring the quiet exchange between the two other men.
"Well, dust can lead to fires but you would need much more of it…"
"Hmm," nodded the man in the suit.
"Good thing we put out the fire on time then." The policeman said flatly.
"What I can tell is that there isn't much of anything in the way of electricity that might have directly caused this."
The Electrician handed over the paperwork to the man in the suit and left so agitated that he had temporarily forgotten that he had been in the house.
Rufus Scrimgeour did not know what an electrician was or did. He could guess that they did something with electricity but what exactly wasn't entirely clear from the muggle police report. He had however, instinctively stopped at the mention of the dusty outlets, especially since the Electrician's professional opinion was that the house was in good working order. He had read enough reports, both muggle and ministry issued to realize there was some reason this might have been mentioned. The structural engineer, the Plumber and the gas technician had all reported the house was in good working order. There were no gas leaks in the case of the other family. The city insisted that the pipes had been replaced less than fifty years ago too but were still investigating further. Nothing in the house had caused the issue.
Alastor had offered to find out as he too was unsure of the nature of the job. Dorcas asked why he needed to know. It still startled her when these very common ideas and terms stumped wizards of this level and caliber but she understood why he was asking her and not someone else. Just in case the answer was simple and it was.
"They make sure that the electrical power is in good working order." Alastor nodded. She could tell he did not know what she was talking about. She asked Alastor why he had asked. Rufus Scrimgeour had asked.
"Why had he asked?"
She knew, Alastor thought. She knows. He explained the report but left out all the information, the information she might have known. He didn't mention he was talking about the McKinnons. Dorcas felt the prickle of something at her shoulders. She wanted to twitch to get rid of it but stretched her neck instead. Something was changing something had changed. How had she never noticed such an obvious difference?
"They were wizards? "
"What?"
"The people you're talking about. They were wizards."
Alastor said nothing.
She wandered around the house. None of the lamps were plugged into outlets, in fact some of them, the ones bought in Diagon Alley didn't have chords at all. Dorcas motioned for him to look at the lamp and Alastor shrugged.
"There's nothing odd about it to you?" He shook his head. "It's not plugged into the wall." Alastor felt very much confused. Dorcas flicked the light switch on and off and made herself sick. The prickling returned stronger.
That night she and Alastor stayed up talking. Mostly she talked and Alastor listened and sometimes asked more questions. Dorcas explained everything she knew about electricity, electric bills, powerlines, manholes, gas mains, trains that did not run using magic but steam or coal. She explained airplanes and automobiles, petrol and that she didn't know how to drive.
Rufus Scrimgeour found out through Alastor who had found out through Dorcas that the muggle police force was just as fractured in their communication as any auror department even though they had, and this wasn't something Rufus completely understood because he had not been their for the conversation, the idea of telephone. The police had been unable to do what Rufus had insisted on, getting a copy of the McKinnon's electricity bill. If they had they would have, as muggle adults, had the context to understand what they were reading which Rufus did not have. The investigation would have been made more complicated for them in ways they could not have been able to reconcile. This is what the bill might have told them: the McKinnon's paid it on time, and the bill was, almost exclusively, the cost of service. They only paid the cost of having electricity routed to their home but they did not use any. Rufus considered finding the Electrician and discussing it with him but he wouldn't have learned anything new. He couldn't understand the significance of the bill or the Electrician maybe because it would not have told him anything he didn't already know about the McKinnons.
