He laughed. “Devices with no gain,” he said. “They’re called ‘passive electronic components’ or ‘passive devices.’ ”
“So?” I said, none the wiser.
“Transistors provide gain,” he said. “They can be used as amplifiers to give a signal gain, so, for example, it can drive a speaker in a radio. The signal received by the aerial is very, very small, so, in simple terms, it has to be amplified by a series of transistors in order to drive the speaker so you can hear the music.”
“The higher the volume, the greater the gain?” I said.
“Just so,” he said. “But transistors need a power supply. They must either have a battery or be connected to the mains for them to work, so this little sucker can’t have transistors.” He held up the tiny electrical circuit from the broken grain.
“Passive electronics,” I said.
“You’ve got it,” he said, smiling.
“What are you two on about?” asked Betsy suddenly from the backseat.
“This,” said Luca, carefully handing her one of the unbroken grains.
“Oh, I know what that is,” she said rather condescendingly.
“What?” Luca and I said together.
“It’s a chip for dogs,” she said. “We had one put in our Irish setter last year.”
“What do they do?” I asked over my shoulder.
“They’re for identification,” she said. “They’re injected under the skin using a syringe. We had one put in our dog so Mum and Dad could take her to France without having to do that quarantine thing when she came back. She simply got scanned by customs to check she was the right dog with the right vaccinations.”
“Like horses,” I said.
“Eh?” said Luca.
“Horses have them too,” I said. “To check they are indeed who their owner says they are. All of them have to have chips inserted or they can’t run. I read about it in the Racing Post ages ago. I just didn’t know what the chips looked like. I don’t know why, but I somehow expected them to be bigger, rectangular and flat.”
Luca looked again at the tiny electrical circuit.
“It must be a passive arfid circuit,” he said. “This little coil must be the antenna.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said. “What’s an arfid when it’s at home?”
“A radio frequency identification circuit, R-F-I-D, pronounced ARE-fid,” he said slowly as if for a child. “You put a scanner close by that emits a radio wave. The wave is picked up by the little antenna, and that provides just enough power for the circuit to transmit back an identification number.”
“Sounds complicated,” I said.
“Not really,” Luca replied. “They exist all over the place. Those alarm things in shops that go off if you try and take things out without paying, they use RFIDs. They simply have the tags on the items, and the scanners are the vertical things by the doors you have to walk between. Also, the tube and buses in London use them in the Oyster cards. You put the card on the scanner, and it reads the information to make sure you have enough credit to travel. They’re very clever.”
“So I see,” I said.
“Not everyone is keen on them, though,” he went on. “Some call them ‘spychips’ because they allow people to be tracked without their knowledge. But I think they’ll soon be on everything. You know, instead of bar codes. The supermarkets are already experimenting with them for checkout. You only have to walk past the scanner and everything is automatically checked out without you even having to take it out of the cart. One day, your credit card will be scanned in the same way, and the total deducted from your bank account without you having to do anything except push the whole lot out to your car, load up and drive away.”
“Amazing,” I said.
“Yeah. But the trouble is that, theoretically, the same RFIDs could also be used to tell the cops if you broke the speed limit on the way home from the store.”
“Surely not,” I said.
“Oh yes they could,” he said. “They already use RFIDs in cars to pay road and bridge tolls in lots of places-E- ZPass in New York, for one. It’s not much more of a step for them to calculate your average speed between two points and issue a ticket if you were going too fast. Big Brother is definitely watching you, and, even if he isn’t now, he will be soon.”
“How do you know so much about these RFID things?” I asked.
“Studied them at college, and I also read electronics magazines,” he said. “But I’ve never seen one this small before.” He held up one of the tiny glass grains.
So why, I thought, had my father had ten of them in his luggage? Perhaps they were something to do with the photocopied horse passports.
“Is the black remote thing a scanner?” I asked.
Luca pointed it at the chip and pushed the ENTER button. The red light came on briefly and then went off again, just as before.
“It doesn’t have any sort of readout, so I doubt it,” said Luca. “I’ll ask at my electronics club, if you like.”
“Electronics club?” I said.
“Yeah. Mostly teenagers,” he said. “Making robots or radio-controlled cars and such. Every Friday night in the local youth center in Wycombe. I help them out most weeks.”
I thought about whether I should give the device to him, or to the police, along with the money.
“OK,” I said. “Ask at your club if anyone knows what it’s for. Take the glass grains as well, in case they’re somehow connected.”
“Right,” he replied, smiling. “We love a challenge. Can we take it apart?”
“I suppose so,” I said. “But make sure it goes back together again.”
“Right,” he said again. “I’ll take it with me tonight. I’ll let you know in the morning if we get anywhere.”
I dropped Luca and Betsy in High Wycombe, and then I went to see my grandmother.
Her room at the nursing home in Warwick was a microcosm of my childhood memories. On the wall over her bed was a nineteenth-century original watercolor of a child feeding chickens that had once hung over the mantelpiece in the family sitting room. Photographs in silver frames stood alongside little porcelain pots and other knickknacks on her antique chest of drawers as they had always done in my grandparents’ bedroom. A framed tapestry of the Queen in her coronation coach shared wall space with a hand-painted plate that I had given them in celebration of their ruby wedding anniversary.
Each item was so familiar to me. It was only my grandmother herself who was unfamiliar. As unfamiliar to me as I sometimes was to her.
“Hello, Nanna,” I said to her, leaning down and kissing her on the forehead.
She briefly looked up at me with confused recognition and said nothing. The nurses told me that she could still chat away quite well on some days but not at all on others, and I personally hadn’t heard her speak now for quite a few weeks.
“How are you feeling?” I asked her. “Have you been watching the racing on the television? And the Queen?”
There was no reply, not a flicker of apparent understanding. Today was clearly not one of her good days.
The decision to place her in a nursing home had been both a difficult and an easy one. I had realized for some time that she had been losing her memory but had simply put it down to old age. Only when I was contacted by the police, who had found her wandering the streets in her pink nightie and slippers, had I taken her to the doctor’s. There had been a period of testing and several visits to neurologists before a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s had been confirmed. Sophie had abdicated all responsibility in the caring department, which was fair enough as she had her own problems to worry about, so I arranged for a live-in nurse to look after my grandmother in her own house. I was determined that she shouldn’t have to live in a care home full of old people who sat in a circle all day staring at the floor.
Then one day, when I went to spend an evening with her, she became very agitated and confused. She didn’t seem to know who I was and continually accused me of stealing her wedding ring. It was more distressing for me than it was for her, but it was her live-in nurse who was the most upset.
