Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters

by anonymsly

Summary:

Harry Potter, ex-Quidditch player and resident of a quiet village, receives a posthumous request from a man he met on holiday: investigate an injustice. He's given no other information. Naturally, he accepts.

Notes:

• For Faithless_3105.

This work is inspired by Faithless_3105's HP Classics series. I very much enjoyed their Persuasion HP rewrite 'Learning to Trust One's Judgement' and decided to try my hand at it, so now I am a copycat twice over.

This story is an HP rewrite of Agatha Christie's Nemesis, which is one of my favorites. It is fully written, and I will be posting chapters once or twice a week as the mood takes me. Comments are loved and adored, as always.

Chapter 1: A Death Notice

In the afternoons, it was the custom of Mr. Harry Potter to unfold his second newspaper. He had two delivered to his little home in Ottery St. Catchpole every morning. The first was the Daily Prophet, which he read quite probably exactly as most of wizarding England did: at breakfast, propped precariously against a juice-glass or teapot or, if one had a delicate enough touch with the wand, levitated conveniently at eye-level with pages turning as directed.

Harry had privately nicknamed this morning read ‘the Daily All-Sorts’ because it really had gone downhill even in the few years he could have been said to be a regular reader. He just about remembered, during his early school years, that the Prophet had been a proper newspaper, but owing to the longterm peace of the wizarding world - what with the almost quarter-century of silence from You-Know-Who - and the need to keep readers interested, it was now mostly non-news items. The latest fashions in robes, celebrity gossip (Celestina Warbeck is dating three people! One of her polycule is a vampire! IS IT CELESTINA HERSELF?? See page 5. And then page 5 would be more of the same), competitions for children and familiars, a thick wedge of all things Quidditch including fantasy league statistics, and complaining letters from witches and wizards disgruntled by nothing in particular. All of that had pretty well managed to shove real news off everything but the front page, or to some obscure corner where it was impossible to find.

Harry wondered if perhaps he was somehow old-fashioned at the ripe old age of twenty-four. He preferred that his newspaper be a newspaper by giving him news.

Hence his second subscription, The Quibbler, which he read more carefully and treated in a way highly unlikely to result in jam being spread on it. He’d have treated it more kindly in any case, as it was run these days by his old friend Luna Scamander (technically Harry had been friends with her husband Rolf first, but over time he had become more Luna’s friend), but while the Quibbler still had its fair share of oddball articles and bizarre interviews, what it also reliably had was news. Its front page was often much the same as the Prophet’s, if rather less sensationally written, but elsewhere it contained regular coverage of Wizengamot cases and decisions, Ministry updates, news of various sales at Diagon and Knockturn Alleys, a thick sports section covering both Quidditch and Muggle sport but only real teams (no fantasy nonsense), and even a daily sort of scholarly article, usually about potions, which Harry enjoyed looking at and consciously deciding not to read.

The Quibbler also contained what could be called ‘vital news’ and it was this that had most likely bumped its subscription numbers up to the level of respectable publication rather than trash rag. Births, marriages, deaths. Harry, like most people who took the Quibbler, always surveyed the vital news. Unlike most people, though, he knew he’d never see anything relevant to him in it.

He had no family of his own, and never had done. People hearing that for the first time generally fluttered and cooed about how sad and what a tragic life but Harry had never much seen the point of that. He’d been left, barely born and wrapped in a blanket with his name pinned to it, outside a Muggle hospital one August night. He’d been taken into care immediately and had led, if not exactly a happy life with various foster families, not an actively miserable one. Receiving his Hogwarts letter at age eleven had changed everything, and what felt like nearly immediately after arriving in a new world he’d also been welcomed into a new family, that of his friend Ron Weasley.

No, Harry would never read any news directly vital to himself in the vital news. It was either very nice or very sad, depending on one’s perspective, and Harry himself went back and forth on that a bit.

His friends who were married were already married, and those that weren’t would tell him personally if the situation changed. He wouldn’t have to read about it. Similarly, he tended to be aware of births in his sphere of acquaintance. Ron and Hermione, for example, would never let him hear about a new baby from the Quibbler first. He also wasn’t old enough to start seeing the names of friends in the death listings. Now, if the death listings listed grandchildren of the deceased, he might have seen something that caused a ding of recollection. Oh, the Creeveys’ nan has passed. I shall have to send them a card. That sort of thing.

In today’s listing of deaths, amidst the R’s, was a name that caught Harry’s eye. Riddle. Riddle? Something stirred. That name was familiar. Riddle. Belford Park, Maidstone. No, he couldn’t recall anyone with that address. No flowers. Tom Riddle. Oh well, an unusual name, very Muggle. Perhaps he’d just heard it somewhere and it’d stuck in his head. Names would do that sometimes, even when there was no earthly reason they should.

Harry laid down the Quibbler, glancing idly through the crossword (a seven-letter word for ‘the most annoying creature in existence’ was probably Weasley rather than Murtlap judging by the clues around it, and Luna would no doubt get some entertainingly shrieky letters about it, maybe even a Howler from Molly Weasley herself) while he tried to remember, again, why the name Riddle was so familiar.

It would come to him.

In the meantime, he levered himself out of his chair and headed into the garden. Technically, according to the parade of Healers that Ron and Hermione kept springing on him, he shouldn’t do anything physically strenuous at all. He was still recuperating, they said. Harry knew better, but had stopped trying to argue with them about it. One never really healed from injuries like his.

To the surprise of no one who’d known him at the time, Harry had accepted a quite lucrative contract to play Quidditch professionally immediately after he’d graduated Hogwarts. Oh, a few people had remarked on his facility for Defense Against the Dark Arts and skill as an amateur duelist and thought he’d go for Auror training, but anyone who actually knew him knew that he didn’t like fighting and didn’t go looking for trouble. That trouble had found him on a distressingly regular basis had never actually been his fault at all.

It wasn’t his fault when it found him on the pitch, either. He’d just started his fourth season with the Chudley Cannons (not the best offer he’d received, but they were Ron’s favourite team, and that had made up for any purely monetary benefit to other contracts) when about an hour into the first away game of the season both Bludgers had decided to go for him exclusively. They’d moved too fast for the Beaters, too fast for even Harry to dodge, and slammed into him over and over and over. They’d even kept beating him after he’d fallen from his broom and hit the ground.

Most of his bones had been shattered. Some key tendons had been torn. He’d been bleeding internally, and had a concussion. As many healers as could be gathered in a hurry, casting spell after spell and pouring potion after potion down his throat, had handled what was thought to be the worst of the damage, but it turned out that the Bludgers had been cursed (of course they had), and one serious injury they’d caused, to his left knee, resisted all attempts to heal it properly.

Ron and Hermione said you’re still healing, give it time even now, three-ish years later. Harry preferred to think that he’d done as much healing as he was going to, and holding on to his old dreams would only poison him. He’d been wise enough to save most of the money the Cannons had paid him, and they’d quite generously paid out the rest of his contract as well, once it was certain he’d never play again. It had been enough to buy his little cottage free and clear, situated close enough to the Burrow that he could reach out to the Weasleys anytime he needed help (which wasn’t often), and managed frugally the remaining proceeds would keep him for the rest of his life.

He wasn’t supposed to get on his knees and garden, but he did. He had quite a nice little patch of herbs and useful flowers, and regularly donated its product to St. Mungo’s for use in their potions. Some of them were really quite pretty too, like that coneflower – a lovely shade of pinky-red, almost like hibiscus but not quite….

Hibiscus. Oh, of course. Mr. Riddle. That trip to the Caribbean the year before, the one Ron and Hermione had all but begged him to take after the entire Weasley clan had clubbed together. St. Honoré, it had been. Ron had said You shouldn’t keep yourself shut away like this, mate, people’ll think you’ve gone funny and Hermione had said Just try not to get mixed up in anything Dark, please, Harry, you know it’s not good for you.

Well, he hadn’t wanted to get involved in anything, but it had happened anyway. Just because an old Auror who told a lot of repetitive boring stories all the time had told exactly the wrong one at exactly the wrong time. (Poor old Mr. Scrimgeour.) Yes, Mr. Riddle and his secretary-companion Miss… Miss Nagini, that was it. She’d spent a fair amount of time as a snake, but hadn’t liked to. Harry hadn’t been entirely sure what her situation really was, except that she had been endlessly loyal to Mr. Riddle and had, it turned out, truly dreadful taste in men otherwise. It all came back.

Well, well, so old Mr. Riddle had died. He’d known he was going to even then. Ave Caesar, morituri te salutamus he’d said to Harry as they’d left the hotel and St. Honoré. He’d probably hung on longer than the Healers had expected. He’d been like that. A strong man, an obstinate man – a very rich man.

Harry continued to weed his garden, hands working automatically to the direction of his eyes, but his mind remained on the late Mr. Riddle and remembering all he could. Now that he recalled, he wondered how he’d ever forgotten the man. He wasn’t easy to forget. So pale as to be genuinely white, bald as an egg, with dark eyes that seemed to burn. A body too-skinny too-frail too-oddly-small, he’d required Nagini’s assistance to get around….

Harry remembered thinking that he’d probably been very handsome indeed as a young man – it had been nearly possible to trace good looks in the ruins if one paid attention, and Harry had paid attention. And such a personality! Secretive, irritable, demanding, shockingly rude sometimes – not that anyone ever minded the rudeness. Wealth at the level Mr. Riddle possessed bought a good deal of tolerance most of the time.

Harry had, during that Caribbean vacation, taken up sketching. Once, Mr. Riddle had fetched up near him and demanded Put that thing away! I cannot abide that Muggle scratching. Harry had almost laughed at him while putting his sketchbook away, not meekly but like someone humouring a fractious child.

Oh, have I offended you?

Not at all, sir. I make allowances.

No flowers, the death notice had said. Not that Harry would have ever dreamed of sending flowers to Mr. Riddle. Had the man wanted flowers, he’d have bought out all the nurseries and greenhouses in England. And they hadn’t been friends, or on any terms of real affection. They’d been allies, for a short and exciting time, and he had been an ally worth having.

Harry had known he would be, which was why he’d pushed his bad knee to run through the Caribbean night to shake the man awake and demand his help. He’d been wearing his pyjamas and some hideous pink fluffy bathrobe thing (Molly Weasley would keep giving him pink things, he had no idea why) and Mr. Riddle had looked at him and laughed, a high, delighted laugh. Harry had used one particular word, and Mr. Riddle had laughed even harder.

He'd stopped laughing in the end and done what Harry asked him to do. They’d solved three murders, prevented a fourth, and then gone their separate ways. Harry had never expected to see him again, and indeed hadn’t ever seen him again. But it had seemed oddly possible now that he came to think about it, like any minute an owl could have arrived with a letter suggesting they meet again.

It was very odd indeed to realise that he’d had some kind of bond with a man upon reading a barebones notice of his death.

It was even odder to realise that he’d been pulling up flowers rather than weeds in his distraction. Rather ugly purple snapdragons that he didn’t remember planting at all. Perhaps whoever had looked after his garden during that Caribbean trip? Harry pulled up another one with a vicious yank. Purple didn’t match. “Sulphur yellow, that’s what I wanted here,” he said out loud to the uprooted plant.

“I beg your pardon?” said a voice from the lane-side of the fence. “You said something?”

“Oh, no, I was just talking to myself.” Harry looked up to see a person he didn’t know.

This was odd, because by now he knew most people in Ottery St. Catchpole by sight, if not personally. This was a thickset woman in plain work trousers, an emerald jumper, an open robe, and sturdy workboots. She had a knitted brown scarf wrapped around her neck and head, not quite containing flyaway dark hair, and a curious expression on her face. “You’ve got a nice garden here.”

“It’ll be nicer once I’ve gotten rid of these purple things,” Harry groused. “I should never let anyone else touch it, I always end up having to fix things.”

“Oh, I understand just how you feel.” The woman grinned at him. “My mum’s had a few professional gardeners and none of’em are worth the sickles they charge. They come and drink tea, and do some light weeding, and plant the most horrendous things because they’re hard-wearing or fine specimens or what have you. I’m quite a keen gardener myself, but Mum’s never let me have a go at hers.”

“No offense, but you’re also not getting a go at mine.” Harry grinned back to hopefully take any sting out of the jibe. He meant to be friendly, but it may not have come out that way. “Are you new to the village?”

“I’m boarding with Mrs. Shoreling down the road a ways.” The woman gestured vaguely along the road. “She’s been trying to get me to mix with the neighborhood, so I think she’s described just about everybody. You’d be Harry Potter, right?”

“That’s me.”

“Seeker for the Chudley Cannons for a minute, yeah?”

“A bit longer than a minute, but yes.”

“Keep up with it at all?”

“Not really, no.” There had been a number of painful weeks, months even, where Harry had wondered what the point of him even was. He didn’t really have any real skills but Quidditch, and that had been taken from him. After that had passed, he’d avoided Quidditch like someone carefully not prodding at an open wound. Now it was just habit.

“Well, look me up if you do want to talk about it. Or flowers or anything really. I’m Bartlett, by the way. Mary Bartlett.” The woman grinned again, showing even white teeth.

Harry wondered whether she was trying to flirt, and if he needed to find a delicate way to inform her that he was in fact gay and thus not interested in her even conceptually. But Miss Bartlett just waved jauntily and bounded off down the road in a decidedly un-ladylike and non-seductive fashion, punctuated by a pretty spectacular near-trip over empty air, so he decided she’d just been trying to be friendly to a new neighbour. Or maybe she’d specifically sought out the one-time Quidditch star to get an eyeful. Either or.

Rather than continue to pull up flowers, Harry pulled himself up and went back inside. Perhaps he’d actually go through the Prophet and see if there was an obituary for the late Mr. Riddle. Harry doubted it. He had been an interesting man, perhaps a kind one at times in his demanding and high-handed way (certainly his treatment of Miss Nagini had been kind on the whole), but he had not been famous or even well-known. He had been rich, but not loudly so. If his death had been anything but quiet, Harry would be very surprised.

Chapter 2: Masters Rookwood and Runcorn, Solicitors

About a week after Mr. Riddle’s death notice in the Quibbler, an owl flew smack into Harry’s kitchen window and had to be picked up out of the flowerbed. A little water and space on Hedwig’s perch (she seemed happy enough to share) brought the owl – a handsome dark barn owl – around enough that he let go of the letter clutched in his beak. Harry opted to read it instead of the Prophet that morning.

It was headed Masters Rookwood and Runcorn, Solicitors, with an address near the Ministry offices in London. It asked him to call upon their office one day in the following week, to discuss a proposition that might be to his advantage. They added that they were the solicitors to the late Mr. Riddle, with whom they understood Harry had been acquainted.

The letter was a puzzle, and as such was very interesting. The idea that Mr. Riddle had left Harry his vast fortune was entirely laughable, and anyway the man had made a point of telling Harry outright that he’d already settled ‘all that legal nonsense’ long before. He’d said something like ‘I’ve only changed my mind once in my life, so don’t you expect me to do it again’. (If he’d expected Harry to inquire about that once, he’d been disappointed. Harry had had other things on his mind at the time.)

There was no real point in wondering or trying to guess what the answer to the letter’s puzzle was, when getting the answer outright was as easy as agreeing to meet with the solicitors. Harry scrawled a mostly-polite but very informal note indicating that he’d call at their office on the next Monday in the early afternoon. The barn owl took the note and flew off, very efficiently trying to make Harry and Hedwig forget that he’d tried to fly through a closed window not an hour earlier.

*****

“He’s due in a quarter hour,” Master Runcorn said to Master Rookwood, glancing at the clock to make sure he’d got the time right. “Wonder what he’ll be like.”

“He’s a has-been Quidditch star,” Rookwood replied. “Got himself injured and retired to some dingy hole in the country where he can be a big fish in a little pond. Nothing special.”

“This is all very odd, Rook. I don’t like it.” Runcorn glanced at the clock again. “Didn’t you-know-who say anything to you at all?”

“Of course not. He gave me instructions, and I am obeying them.” Rookwood drummed his fingers on his desk. “It might… might, mind you… have something to do with Snape.”

“What? Why now? That was all dealt with ages ago, why would he care all of a sudden? Why would anyone care?”

“I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. We’ve done well enough, you and I, by doing what we’re told. We were told to knock off and play nice, and we did. We didn’t keep going and land in Azkaban like some I could name. I’m not going to stop doing what he tells me now, dead or not.”

“You think he’s-“

A brisk knock at the door interrupted whatever Runcorn was about to say, but Rookwood glared at him anyway before schooling his face to professional neutrality and calling, “Come in!”

Harry Potter entered the room and looked at them curiously. They looked back, not particularly impressed. They were both sternly professional wizards in robes, where Harry was dressed in somewhat oversized tee-shirt and jeans, very Muggle, and worn trainers. They were meticulously groomed, and Harry’s hair did whatever it wanted at all times (generally it wanted whatever was the opposite of 'tidy') while his glasses constantly threatened to fall off the end of his nose. They stood firmly on their own feet, Harry leaned on a cane and swayed slightly from the effort of several flights of stairs.

Harry didn’t mind their expressions. He knew he wasn’t impressive.

After a few seconds of staring, Rookwood seemed to shake himself out of his reverie. “I apologise, this is an old building. No lift. Please have a seat. I’m Mr. Rookwood, this is my partner Mr. Runcorn.”

Harry nodded to them both and sat. He didn’t offer up any nervous small talk or meaningless pleasantries, which was not what either man was used to from people they’d summoned to their office.

Rookwood took a seat at his own desk, while Runcorn all but vanished into the woodwork. “You’re wondering what this is about, I expect.”

“Something about Mr. Riddle’s will and a proposition. You said as much in your letter.”

“I… understand he was a friend of yours?”

“Not really. We met briefly about a year ago in the Caribbean, we were staying at the same hotel. We spoke a few times, and I never saw him again.” All true, but not complete. For some reason, Harry had an aversion to saying anything real to Mr. Rookwood. He would not understand. “I live very quietly, you see, and my understanding was that he was completely devoted to his work.” Whatever it was.

“That is true, he was. Did he give you any idea at all about the proposition I’ve been directed to make to you?”

“I have no idea what kind of proposition Mr. Riddle might have wanted to put to me after he died.” Had he not been dead, Harry might have had some idea, however fantastical, unrealistic, and not wholly welcome that idea might have been. “I’m frankly stunned he thought of me at all, in any way.”

“He had a very high opinion of you.”

“Can’t think why.” Harry shifted his cane to rest against his chair instead of his leg. “I’m nothing special.”

Rookwood forced a scowl off his face. If Potter knew anything, he wasn’t saying. “The purpose of this appointment is as follows. I am strictly charged to tell you that a sum of money has been laid aside to become yours absolutely at the end of one year, conditional upon your acceptance of a certain proposition with which you will be acquainted.” He removed a wax-sealed roll of parchment from his desk drawer and offered it to Harry. “Read it, take your time, answer yes or no.”

Harry did take his time. He broke the seal and unrolled the parchment right there in Rookwood’s office, and read through the missive at least twice. After that, he sat quietly for a full five minutes, then rolled up the parchment and glared at Rookwood. “This is nonsense. It doesn’t say anything.”

“I wouldn’t know. The parchment was delivered sealed, with instructions on what to do with it. I should add at this time that the sum of money being held for you is one hundred thousand Galleons.”

Harry stared. “That’s… pardon my French, but that’s a fuckton of money.”

“A drop in the bucket, I promise you.” To Riddle, anyway. Maybe not to a former sports professional previously attached to the worst team in England and now too injured to play.

“Yes, I know.” Harry fidgeted in the chair. “Strictly speaking, I should say no. It’s a lot of money for no good reason that I can see, and I don’t understand it. It feels like a trap. That should be enough to make me run the other way and not look back.”

Rookwood raised an eyebrow. “Is that what you’re doing?”

Harry thought about it, looked down at the roll of parchment, then unrolled it and read it again.

To Mr. Harry Potter, resident in the village of Ottery St. Catchpole

This will be delivered to you after my death by my solicitor, Mr. Augustus Rookwood. He is scum of the highest order, but quite skilled at his work and loyal enough in his way, so I trust him to deal with my personal affairs. You, however, may trust him no farther than you can kick him, which is to say not at all. This matter is to be entirely between you and me.

He will have told you about the money. It is true, and the sum is yours if you do this task for me. I do not believe that you will be motivated by money, but it is the only method I have left to me with which to accomplish my goals.

Our code word is Nemesis. I don’t think you will have forgotten, as I have not, when you spoke that word to me. Over the course of my life – not as long as it could have been! – I have learned one thing. When I wish to employ someone, that someone must have a flair for the particular task I wish them to complete. It is not knowledge, it is not experience. It is a natural gift, an inclination to something. A flair.

I believe you, my dear Nemesis, have a natural flair for justice, and that has led you to a natural flair for injustice.

I wish you to investigate an injustice for me. Root it out. Destroy it utterly. I give you a year to complete this task. Quite good, is it not? A year is traditional for impossible tasks. I offer this to you as an alternative to whatever your life is now.

I see you sitting in a chair, some comfortable thing constructed to ease whatever pains you. I see you scratching at a sketchpad with your pencil, or with a catalogue of seeds and bulbs for that garden you once spoke of. I see you as I saw you when you barged into my room that night – a crippled mess of a man in overlarge pyjamas and a cloud of pink.

If you prefer to remain there, that is your decision. Burn this parchment and think no more of it. If you prefer instead to serve the cause of justice, I hope you will at least find it interesting.

Let justice roll down like waters.

And righteousness like an everlasting stream.

Yours, T. M. Riddle

Harry rolled the parchment up again. Mr. Riddle was right, he wasn’t that interested in the money. It was a lot of money to be sure, and it would serve to make many things more comfortable for him, but he could walk away from money without feeling anything much at all. The mysterious ‘injustice’ grabbed at him, though. Riddle had his number, all right – Harry wasn’t the type to let something go when it was wrong and he could do something. Was this, maybe, the old man’s version of running through the night to drag Harry out of bed and make him help? Or was it some kind of trick?

Did it matter? “No,” he said finally. “No. I’ll do it.”

Notes:

As always, comments are wondrous, especially on a mystery story. I long to hear thoughts and feelings!

Chapter 3: Down the Garden Path

Neither of the solicitors had anything further to offer Harry, and true to the advice in his letter Harry didn’t take either of them into his confidence. What would he say, really? I’ve basically been asked to go on a quest to right some wrong, but I don’t know what wrong or to who or when it happened or anything, and I have a year to solve it. It sounded mad.

He had to trust that Mr. Riddle had a reason for being so vague, or some kind of plan. If not, well – he didn’t actually need the money, and it was the old man’s own fault if his impossible task was actually impossible. In the meantime, Harry wanted to do what he’d always done when presented with a problem to be solved.

He went to Ron and Hermione.

It wasn’t as easy as it had been when they were all at school. Then, it had been a simple matter of pulling them to one side in the common room or at mealtime, or huddling together in a corner of the library. Now, Ron and Hermione had careers as well as a baby, and Ron’s job as an Auror tended to uncertain hours at best.

Perhaps they felt the increased distance between them and Harry as well, because Hermione’s response to Harry’s Floo call to suggest lunch or tea was to immediately insist that Harry come to their flat for dinner that very evening. Molly Weasley, she said, had been itching for time with little Hugo and would no doubt jump at the chance to babysit for a whole evening. Her last meeting ended at five, and Ron was catching up on paperwork so he wouldn’t be late home either.

Harry sometimes resisted and resented Hermione’s automatic assumption of authority and dictatorial tendencies, but he wasn’t inclined to argue with her this time. Sooner was better than later, under the circumstances, so he simply agreed to be at their home at six.

It turned out that Molly Weasley, when she came to collect her grandchild for an evening of spoiling, had also dropped off a significant amount of food. Ron was thrilled, Hermione less so. Harry, having seen much the same with the spouses of Ron’s brothers, agreed more with Hermione’s view. He loved Molly nearly as a mother, of course, but she was given to these gestures that were nearly as spiteful as they were kind. Like this one, dropping off a cooked dinner as if to say something like I know you’re not a good cook or I know you don’t pay as much attention to your housekeeping as I do. It was one of many reasons he'd never seriously considered trying to attach himself to any Weasley. (Molly had, before he’d come out, tried to throw him in with Ginny. After, she’d tried to aim him at Charlie, her only remaining unattached son. Neither had gone anywhere – Ginny was too female, and Charlie was even less interested in Harry than Harry was in him.)

Still, not having to cook was not having to cook, and even Hermione was ultimately practical enough to hold her offense this one time, especially once Harry started to explain what his week had been like so far. He hadn’t talked about what had happened on St. Honoré before, as he’d gotten involved in Dark things even after being asked not to, but he had to start there in order to explain anything. Ron was impressed, Hermione exasperated enough to lecture on the necessity of Being Careful While You Are Recuperating From A CURSE WOUND Harry for a solid fifteen minutes. (She stopped only when she realised that her husband and best friend were both timing her and dessert was gone.)

“Anyway, that’s not exactly important. I just needed to explain Mr. Riddle, you see,” Harry said into the silence of Hermione’s glare (mostly at Ron), and unrolled his letter to let them read it. Hermione, unsurprisingly, was the one to pick it up.

“Seems creepy to me,” Ron said. “I mean, that assistant he had, you said she was a snake sometimes but not an Animagus? There’s not a lot of things like that, and they’re all pretty Dark. Which means Riddle probably was too.”

Harry shrugged. “I don’t see that it matters, Ron. He helped me when I needed it, and I never saw him do anything, you know, evil. He was bad-tempered and rude, but not… I don’t know. Worrying about the sort of person he was isn’t going to help me with this, especially since I’ve already agreed to do it.”

“But to do what, Harry?” Hermione said. “He says ‘investigate an injustice’ but nothing else. That could be anything! It could be something you don’t know anything about. He was rich, maybe he thought someone had – I don’t know – cheated him in some deal or other. Someone had got one over on him. How would you know? How could you ever find out? I mean, you never took Arithmancy, do you really think you’d be able to find something like that, that Gringotts or someone hadn’t already?”

“I dunno,” Ron said, finally taking the letter away from Hermione to at least pretend to read it himself. “I think maybe you’re thinking too big here. If it’s not just Riddle having a dead old laugh, he’d want the best man for whatever the job is. He had this thing he wanted fixed, and he thought of Harry. There’s tons of things no one’d ever think of Harry for. Sorry, mate.”

Harry frowned. “No, I think you’re right.” What would he be good at? He had no idea. He was good at talking to people. He was good at listening and paying attention when he wanted to be. None of that was anything special, really. Loads of people were good at those things. But…. “He wants me to investigate an injustice. So there’s got to be a crime somewhere.”

“But there’s so many crimes!” Hermione put in again. “Theft, fraud, embezzlement, assault, trespassing-“

“It’s murder,” Ron said quietly. “’Course it is. You were mixed up in murders on the beach, not fraud or anything. Two of’em-“

“Three,” Harry corrected.

“Yeah, okay, three. Plus one more that didn’t go off because you stopped it.” Ron nodded. “If I were him, the only injustice I’d think of you for is murder.”

It was strange to hear that kind of reasoning from Ron, and Harry thought that probably he was a very good Auror, actually. “Yeah. Yeah, that sounds right too.”

Hermione looked back and forth between them, entirely unused to being on the back foot where thinking was concerned. “Fine, a murder. An injustice. You’re to catch someone who’s gotten away with a murder, or… or prove that someone’s innocent of a murder they’re accused of. Or stop one from happening in the future, maybe.”

“There’s a lot of people in the world. Loads of murders and murderers, and I bet loads more who just haven’t been caught. I don’t think that’s actually narrowed much down.”

“No, we have. You said it earlier.” Harry waved his hands, trying to illustrate his thoughts. “You did. You said if Mr. Riddle isn’t having a laugh, then he’d want the best man for the job, and he thinks that’s me. He was rich. He could hire anybody he liked. Aurors. Curse-Breakers. Muggle detectives, even. People who’re actually trained. But he picked me, who’s not. He’d only do that if he thought it was possible I could and if I was the only one who could. Anything else’d waste his… well, his money. Can’t waste his time anymore. So either I’ve already got everything I need to get this done, or it’ll come to me.”

“You definitely don’t have everything you need,” Hermione said, and Ron nodded emphatically.

“So what I do now is wait and see what happens.” Harry felt unaccountably lighter. No, he hadn’t actually gotten anything from his friends that he hadn’t already worked out on his own, but it felt better to have them following along, ready to tell him when he was being dumb and stand beside him anyway. It felt better to hear that the insides of his head were reasonable, or close to it.

“Sounds like it!” Ron agreed cheerfully, cutting off Hermione's incipient worrying. “Now, I’ve got a really important question, Harry. It’s crucial.”

“Sure, ask me.”

“You and Riddle. Did you have a crush? Is that what this is about? Because mate, I have to tell you, you really need to get out more if that’s your thing. He was ancient.”

Harry threw a wadded-up napkin at him, laughing.

*****

Three or four days after that cheery dinner, another letter arrived by owl post. Harry was annoyed to see that it was the same handsome dark barn owl that had delivered the letter from Rookwood and Runcorn, meaning that they had, too, had more to give him and hadn’t done so at the time. Well, he’d been warned not to trust them and so he hadn’t.

The letter was more interesting anyway, in the same handwriting as the first letter:

Dear Harry,

By the time you read this, I will be dead and buried. Not cremated, I’m happy to say. I have always wondered how likely it really is that anyone could rise up from ashes in an urn to haunt the living should they wish to do so. Rising from a grave to haunt the living is by contrast nearly commonplace. I do not know if I shall wish to do this. Perhaps, if I do, I will come and speak to you.

By now Rookwood, if he knows what’s good for him – and he is entirely reliable about that much, in my experience - will have communicated with you. I hope that you have accepted my proposition. If not, have no regrets. It is your choice, and I truly intend that every part of this that may be your choice, will be your choice. It is important to me that this is so.

This letter should reach you, if solicitors and owls do what they are told, on the 11 ^th of the month. (Yes, I know which month. I do not have a choice of month anymore, and I make no long-term plans.) Two days from now you will receive a communication from a Diagon Alley travel bureau. I hope what it proposes will not be distasteful to you.

I will not say more. I wish you to have open eyes and a clear mind.

Take care of yourself. I believe you will manage to do that. You are a shrewd man and a survivor. I believe I may know that better than anyone, after what we have shared. I wish you the very best of luck, and may your guardian angel be at your side looking after you. You may need one.

Your friend,

T.M. Riddle

The style of the letter was much less formal and much more affectionate, indeed, than the first one. Harry felt that was because this letter had been written after. Perhaps Riddle had been quite close to death. He’d put everything else in place, whatever breadcrumbs he intended to toss out, and then he’d written this. Practically warm, especially from someone like him.

Had he had cause to write to anyone else, say any other good-byes? Harry had thought him quite solitary, though not lonely, in the Caribbean. A man consumed by the work of his life, with nothing left for mere personal concerns.

How sad, really, if what amounted to hiring a non-detective to do some detective work was the warmest thing at the end of a man’s life.

Ron would never see this letter. The teasing would be endless.

Two days later, exactly as predicted, another letter arrived. Harry tore it open immediately, eager to see what this ‘travel bureau’ had been directed to send him. The letter itself, when unfolded, dropped quite an attractive pamphlet thing on his kitchen table, but Harry opted for the letter first.

Dear Mr. Potter,

Obeying instructions given to us by the late Mr. Riddle, we send you particulars of our Tour No. 37 of the Famous Houses and Gardens of the Wizarding World which starts from London on Thursday next – the 17 ^th .

Our Tours last between two and three weeks. Mr. Riddle believes this Tour will be particularly pleasant for you as you will visit parts of the country which as far as he knows you have never visited, and includes some really very attractive scenery and gardens. He has arranged for you to have the best accommodations and all the luxury available that we can provide.

If you wish for more particulars or have questions to ask, we invite you to visit our office on Diagon Alley at any time during regular business hours. Our Mrs. Crabbe who is to accompany the tour will be very glad to ensure you have all pertinent Tour information. If you do not require additional information, please arrive promptly on the 17 ^th to the location described in our pamphlet, and we look forward to hosting your holiday!

Harry looked through the pamphlet (there really were some lovely prospects on offer) and made a note of the time and address. He didn’t have any particular questions, or at least not any that he knew needed to be asked. It was enough, for now, to know that the first breadcrumb had been tossed his way. Riddle wanted him to tour Famous Houses and Gardens, and so he would. No doubt the path would open up from there.

Chapter 4: Dramatis Personae

Less than a week later, Harry surrendered a new suitcase packed with not-new clothing to the coach driver to be Reduced and tucked away, then introduced himself to a large, broad-faced and smiling woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Lucrezia Crabbe. She handed him a little booklet containing the itinerary for the Tour with a little handwritten passenger list clipped inside. Mrs. Crabbe, noting Harry’s cane, encouraged him to board the coach early and “Do get yourself settled, dear! You’ll be doing enough walking, no need to tire yourself out before we’ve even got started.”

Harry wasn’t feeling defiant enough to stand around outside when there was a comfortable seat to be had, and anyway, if he’d already boarded the coach he could maybe get a good look at his fellow Tour-goers before they realised he was there. He’d arrived early to try and get a good look, anyway.

Some of them were bound to be important. One (or more) could be the victim (victims) he was meant to save, or the murderer he was meant to catch. Some might have information he needed, whether they knew it or not. Some he might be able to dismiss out of hand and thus save his time and energy for what was really important.

He started with the list:

Mrs. Augusta Longbottom

Mr. Neville Longbottom

Mr. and Mrs. Walker

Mr. and Mrs. C. Fudge

Miss Sybill Trelawney

Professor Alastor Moody

Mr. Anthony Goldstein

Mr. Igor Karkaroff

Mrs. Arabella Figg

Miss Pippa Macmillan

Miss Dora Cooke

Mr. St S Prince

Mr. Harry Potter

Fourteen people, not including Harry himself, Mrs. Crabbe, and the driver. One likely pair of relatives, two definite couples, eight solo travelers or less obviously attached travelers. Harry didn’t have long to wait before his fellow Tour-goers started to arrive.

First was an elderly lady with quite an authoritarian manner. She carried no bags of any kind, and her younger male companion (Harry judged the man to be about his own age, and likely fairly good-looking when he wasn’t being hectored to distraction) carried several. A few sharp calls of “Neville!” aimed at the young man settled him as Mr. Neville Longbottom, and the elderly lady therefore as Mrs. Augusta Longbottom. Grandmother and grandson, Harry rather thought, and added another tick to his mental approval column where Neville was concerned. He was a good man, to accompany and look after his grandmother on a lengthy trip. If this had actually been a holiday for him, Harry might have done some careful investigating to see if, perhaps, Mr. Neville Longbottom was interested in company.

But this wasn’t a pleasure trip, and Harry rather thought that even a dead Mr. Riddle would not appreciate his Nemesis getting distracted.

Next, three middle-aged ladies popped into the small courtyard where the coach was located. At first, Harry thought all three were traveling together, but after watching them for a few seconds he thought perhaps they’d just shared a Portkey. They were coming from some distance away, then, or not good at Apparition, or both. Most likely, just based on the list, these were Mrs. Figg, Miss Macmillan, and Miss Cooke. Two of them did seem to be traveling together, they walked very closely, and the third… Harry frowned. She looked familiar, just a little bit. Like someone he’d seen in passing or sat across from on a train. None of the three names were familiar to him, though. He penciled question marks next to all three.

Next was an older gentleman with a most peculiar false eye. It wasn’t set into a socket but rather a headband of sorts, and rolled around on its own rather distressingly. The eye took over everything else about the man – he was heavy-set and solid, thinning greying hair trapped under the headband thing and poking out, probably quite plain looking, probably anywhere from thirty to forty years or more older than Harry, though it was of course quite difficult to place wizard ages. (It was difficult for Harry, anyway, raised Muggle as he had been. Age was much more straightforward among the non-magical, he felt.) The man had only an overnight bag, which he refused to hand over to the coach driver, and he moved to lean against one wall of the little courtyard to watch his fellow travelers like Harry was doing, but more obviously. This man seemed to Harry like a Professor Moody. (Professor of what, though? Somehow Harry doubted it was something like History or Arithmancy. Something with a little danger, maybe. Something that could lose one an eye.)

Seconds after the probable Professor two more arrived – a rather scattered-looking older lady in spectacles that made her eyes look huge and an older gentleman with shoulder-length dark hair and an impressively pointy beard. The lady had some presence, for all she seemed like the sort of person who’d drop handkerchiefs she didn’t even realise she was carrying. She knew the man with the false eye propping up the wall enough to exchange nods with him. Harry didn’t think they were friends, though, as they didn’t approach each other or speak to each other. Passing acquaintances, perhaps similar social standing?

He rather thought both she and False Eye knew Pointy Beard, too, but only because they both seemed determined to ignore him. Theirs wasn’t the lack of acknowledgement of strangers, it looked more like a purposeful cold shoulder.

Interesting. Harry made a note of it. He also decided that the lady was Miss Trelawney as the only solo lady left on his list. A brief snippet of conversation with the driver when he handed over his suitcase to be stowed revealed Pointy Beard to have a decided accent. Russian, it sounded like to Harry’s very inexperienced ears, so he did not hesitate to label the man Mr. Karkaroff.

The next three arrived nearly simultaneously, a definite couple and a single traveller. The couple was loud and cheerful, obviously American by their accent, prepared to be absolutely in love with everything they saw. Frankly quite boring, but even if they hadn’t been they’d have fallen immediately into the background when compared to the single traveller.

Quite tall. Quite pale. The kind of thin that got described as wiry – nothing as attractive as slender, nothing as clumsy as lanky. Wiry, with its implication of secret strength, or just plain thin. Shoulder-length black hair that looked like it tended to be oily and lay flattish no matter what its owner wanted. (Harry sympathised immediately, even though his own defiant hair tended to be more explosive than sullen.) Not a handsome face – no one with that nose would ever be described as handsome except by a mother or lover – but striking, perhaps. Harry would believe striking. He’d certainly made the most of his dramatic black-and-white colouring by wearing an entirely black ensemble including, conservatively, about three million buttons. Even his luggage was black – two smallish cases and an overnight bag.

The man himself was interesting – not pretty, or athletic, and Harry would have bet the hundred thousand Galleons he didn’t have yet that he wasn’t nice – but he was nothing to the reactions he got. The almost-familiar middle-aged lady startled briefly upon seeing him, but covered it up by pretending to trip. Or maybe she actually tripped from surprise. It was hard to tell. False Eye at the wall stared with both eyes, speculative but not hostile, then looked away with his real eye while the false one stayed trained on the dark man. Pointy Beard, though, all but cringed away, and didn’t seem to have the presence of mind to turn it into something else the way the middle-aged lady had or simply own it the way False Eye did.

Harry had no hesitation in labeling the dark man Mr. Prince. Mr. St. S. Prince of no first name, only initials.

The last single traveler (a thin, intense young man about Harry’s age, Mr. Goldstein by process of elimination) and the last couple arrived (Mr. and Mrs. Fudge for sure – they’d almost certainly timed their arrival for last so they’d have the biggest audience for it, and certainly a few people seemed interested in them) but Harry was still too occupied with Mr. Prince to pay them any mind. He didn’t seem to care at all about the reactions to his presence, but Harry was sure he’d marked them – either they weren’t important, weren’t surprising, or both. He didn’t seem interested in his fellow travelers in general, honestly. Nearly everyone else had perused their booklet and little list immediately, and Harry had seen eyes flickering up and down, trying to tag names to faces by guesswork, much as he himself was doing. Mr. Prince didn’t even glance at his, just shoved the entire thing into his overnight bag. If he had any reaction at all to anyone, Harry rather thought he spent a few extra seconds looking at Mr. Longbottom. Not any amount of time long enough to be noticed by anyone not paying very close attention in the first place, but… Harry didn’t know why he found those few seconds of extra regard disquieting.

He made a note of it, with question marks.

As all travelers had arrived, Mrs. Crabbe started herding everyone else onto the coach. A number of them, as they boarded, were startled to see Harry already seated. They hadn’t noticed him earlier. Somehow, Harry hadn’t expected Miss Trelawney to be among that number, but she seemed genuinely shocked to see him, even… horrified? Behind her spectacles, her eyes bulged even further when they met his. But no, surely not. Why should she be upset? He had no idea who she was, and she could not possibly know who he was. Somehow, he doubted very, very much that Sybill Trelawney was enough of a diehard Chudley Cannons fan to recognise him three years after he’d stopped playing.

There were enough seats on the coach that anyone who wished to sit alone could do so, so Harry paid attention to who sat with who. Mr. Longbottom helped his grandmother to a particularly fine seat near the front by a window, then retreated to the other side of the coach to join Mr. Goldstein, with whom he struck up an immediate conversation. Two of the middle-aged ladies were twittering a conversation as they boarded, and they sat together as if it were a matter of course. Traveling together, for sure. The two couples sat together as well, predictably. Also predictably they sat near each other, clearly aiming to develop a sort of friendship based in mutual couplehood. The familiar middle-aged lady sat just behind Mrs. Longbottom but did not draw her attention to the fact. Miss Trelawney sat towards the front, surrounded by a bubble of personal space. Oddly, Mr. Karkaroff joined Professor Moody and tried to start talking about something but had to switch languages back and forth between English and Russian every few words. Professor Moody seemed to follow it, but did not participate. Mr. Prince sat as far back as he could and folded his arms as if daring anyone to join him.

No one tried to join Harry, of course. He hadn’t expected them to. Probably it hadn’t helped that he’d laid his cane across the seat next to him.

The coach started rolling smoothly, on what the booklet helpfully advised was a northwesterly course out of London. They stopped for lunch at quite a pleasant riverside hotel, and the groups (or lack thereof) that had begun to form when people boarded the coach became more prominent. Harry was amused to find that Neville and Anthony aimed right for him, likely as a fellow Young Person. They eyed the cane askance at first, but once it was clear that it wasn’t going to be the source of endless complaints about health or pain, they ignored it in truly friendly fashion. Also amazingly, neither seemed eager to talk Quidditch, which was in Harry’s experience the commonest icebreaker topic among people his age. Neville was very much interested in Herbology and looking forward to some Famous Wizarding Gardens, and Anthony was an aspiring architect with a great deal to say about Arithmantic and Runic influences on building design. It was fascinating to listen to, even if Harry couldn’t really participate usefully all that much.

It had been, he realised, quite some time since he’d really interacted with anyone outside of Hermione, Ron, and the rest of the Weasleys. It was truly pleasurable to sit and think here, perhaps, might be two new friends.

But that led him to wonder if maybe Mr. Riddle hadn’t intended something like that as a secondary aim, and that brought him back to considering his mission. These people were potential victims, possible murderers, or sources of information, and it would be best if he sorted out the probabilities while he could.

For sure, Neville and Anthony weren’t killers. Well, Anthony wasn’t, and he didn’t feel like a potential victim. Harry could almost, almost, picture Neville killing his authoritarian grandmother, but only in a fit of rage if she somehow managed to push him too far. He wasn’t a calculating killer, and Harry couldn’t see how either of the Longbottoms could have crossed paths with Mr. Riddle except in purely social circumstances. They might just possibly have useful information, but Harry thought on the whole they had nothing to do with his task. There would be no harm in being friendly, but he needn’t put effort into them.

The pair of middle-aged ladies traveling together, whom Harry now knew to be Mrs. Figg and Miss Macmillan, were likewise unlikely killers or victims. They were probably gossips, and as such might know things they didn’t realise they knew, but even that wasn’t very likely. The third lady, Miss Cooke by process of elimination, would be a question mark until Harry worked out how he knew her, if indeed he did.

The Fudges and the Walkers were sightseers. Mr. Fudge, Harry now recalled, was some Ministry official or other (one that had annoyed Hermione on multiple occasions) and as such could possibly be a candidate for murder victim. But who would kill him? His wife seemed genuinely attached, and Harry had seen any number of actually-not-that-attached couples – he could spot the difference. The Walkers were clear tourists who had nothing to do with anything. Unless he got specific information otherwise, Harry felt he could dismiss all four.

The last four couldn’t be dismissed at all. Miss Trelawney was strange. She was scattered and dreamy, but moved through the world with absolute confidence, and she didn’t act like a sightseer – always looking into the distance as if seeing something not quite there yet. She was something, and he needed to learn more about her. Professor Moody, Harry was oddly sure, could kill, and perhaps he had in the past – one didn’t lose eyes in safe and nonviolent endeavors, did one? That didn’t make him a murderer, necessarily, but it might make him someone with enemies. Or useful knowledge. Mr. Karkaroff was scared, either because he was a nervous person or because he had enemies – he could be a victim. Certainly he seemed the type to kill when backed into a corner, and maybe also the type to specifically flee to corners when pushed. Harry would watch him. Mr. Prince, with his sullen hair and black everything and antisocial attitude, all but screamed here’s your murderer, job done in bold lit-up script, but that seemed far too easy and far too much to hang on looks and some reactions from other people Harry didn’t know. No, he’d definitely have to put some time into the solitary Mr. Prince.

Chapter 5: Nettlebed Manor

After lunch, the afternoon was to be given to Nettlebed Manor. It was not a particularly Famous House and did not have a Famous Garden either as far as Harry knew, but it was quite old and, according to the booklet, had a truly amazing hedge maze. Anthony all but vibrated at the prospect of actually poking around in the house; apparently what had qualified Nettlebed Manor for the Tour was its spellwork. Layer on layer of Disillusionment and Notice-Me-Not and Muggle-Repelling charms that had managed to last over five centuries without once having to be repaired or renewed. Anthony said no one had ever figured out how it was done, and so no one had ever been able to duplicate it. Most of the group seemed, in fact, perfectly happy to follow Anthony through the house and listen to his impromptu and over-technical lecturing, so perhaps it really was as interesting as he thought.

Harry, for his part, made short work of viewing the house in favour of getting out into the gardens and, possibly, that hedge maze. But the gardens, certainly. They had some really lovely arrangements of non-magical flowers, which was fairly unusual – most gardens of any wizarding house of any pedigree were practical more than pretty – potion ingredients and such.

He was so occupied with a gorgeous and insanely bushy rhododendron (clearly added to the garden much later than most other things, how on earth had it got there? whose idea had it been?) that he didn’t notice he had company until a deep voice spoke behind him. “No interest in the house, Mr. Potter?”

Harry jerked to attention and nearly spun around to face Mr. Prince. He just about managed not to stagger at all or lean any more on his cane than usual, but there was no hiding his surprise. “Oh, it’s not that. I just have sort of a hard time going over houses sometimes.” When in doubt, Harry fell back on ‘chatter like you haven’t got two brain cells to rub together’. It was, in general, a very effective tactic in that people tended to talk more candidly when they thought he wasn't really listening or understanding. “I’m never sure which furniture can be used as furniture and which is just for looking at. I’ve made the mistake before, thinking ‘I’ve been on my feet for hours, let’s have a rest’ only to find out I’ve somehow managed to park my arse on some impossibly valuable antique. Even worse is when there’s two things that look just the same, and one is for looking at while the other is for use. It’s like a trap! Gardens are easier. If there’s a bench, it’s for sitting.”

“I see.” The man seemed amused rather than annoyed by Harry’s inane chatter, like he knew it was at least a little put-on, and Harry wasn’t entirely sure he liked that.

So he doubled down. “Of course, today I’ve been sitting quite a lot already, so really I don’t care about benches or furniture, I just wanted to be out in the fresh air. And the rhododendron. Have you seen this thing? It should not be here. I mean, it’s a fine specimen and all, but it doesn’t fit in.”

“There are, or were, beehives elsewhere on the grounds,” Mr. Prince said, with the air of one providing a useful explanation.

Harry did not get it. “Um… so?”

The other man sighed. “Certain species of rhododendron have poisonous nectar and pollen. When honey is made by bees feeding on these species – azaleas as well I believe – that honey is poisonous. Ready access to a natural and unusual poison is, in some circles, quite valuable.”

“Oh.” Was that meant to be a threat somehow? Just popping up and bringing a perfectly harmless subject like flowers around to poison? No, subject matter aside, it felt like they were having a perfectly civil conversation. Certainly, it could have sounded threatening, if you were already inclined to be worried, and Harry suddenly had no doubt that Mr. Prince had experienced precisely such misunderstandings before. He smiled, to ensure no misunderstanding here. “I had no idea! Are you a Herbologist, Mr. Prince?”

“No. I pay attention, that’s all.”

Harry had to admit that that was probably true. The man was staring at him with frankly unnerving intensity. It was like he was looking for something, or expecting something. “I’m not either, honestly. I’ve got quite a nice little garden at home – well, a mostly nice garden, I keep ending up with purple where I want yellow, you’re not interested in that – but it’s nothing special. Gardening isn’t really Herbology as one of my best friends always reminds me.” Harry started moving in the direction of the hedge maze, mostly to see if the other man would follow him.

He did, keeping easy pace with Harry’s shorter legs and hampered movement. “I’d have thought gardening would be difficult for you. With your….” He gestured at the cane, as if unsure how to refer to it.

“Technically I’m barred from gardening, yes. You’re still healing, Harry – that’s the chorus! I shouldn’t be on my knees for any reason, let alone to pull up weeds or deadhead or prune.” It wasn’t until the words had actually escaped Harry’s mouth that he realised talking about being on his knees to an interesting man at whom he tended to stare might be taken… not exactly as he’d meant it. And he couldn’t blush or smack his forehead or even chatter more to cover it, or it definitely would be.

Fortunately, it seemed Mr. Prince was oblivious to Harry’s accidental flirtation. “Is your injury so recent, then? I’d thought it a long-standing difficulty.”

So Harry was one of the things Mr. Prince paid attention to. That felt a little thrilling, but also, for the first time, a little threatening. Harry, in all his observation of the older man, had completely missed being observed by him in turn. “It’s neither, really. Three years isn’t recent or long-standing, to my mind. But I do feel I’m as healed as I’m likely to get, and I don’t see why I should act like anything will change when it won’t.”

“Quite right. Only fools refuse to accept reality, and life is… unkind to the foolish.”

Harry sneaked a look at the man beside him. Mr. Prince was staring straight ahead, body stiff in a way that, had they been moving any faster, meant his robes would have flapped around him. Has life been unkind to you? he did not ask. “I’m not sure I’d put it quite that way, but yes. One tries to be happy with what is instead of pining for what was.”

Mr. Prince did not respond to that, and they walked in more or less companionable silence through the turns and coils of the hedge maze. Which was, it turned out, genuinely quite remarkable – Harry rather thought that it was meant to be a sort of meditation aid. You walked in, made whatever turns you liked as they were presented, and just kept going until you wanted to leave. It wasn’t very extensive, not really, but the magic on it ensured it could go on forever. Really quite clever, and possibly quite cruel as well, if someone could stop it letting people out again.

He was pondering how many people that might have happened to in the distant past when Mr. Prince spoke again. “I knew a Potter in school, many years ago. Might he have been a relation of yours?”

Harry felt an unaccountable little sting of disappointment. Had the man only approached him to catch up with some old friend at secondhand? “I’m sorry, I doubt it. I’m thoroughly Muggle born and raised.”

“Hmm.” The noise seemed skeptical, or perhaps disappointed, but accepting.

“It’s quite awkward, isn’t it, how many wizarding family names are so common in the Muggle world? I went to primary school with no less than three Muggle Woods - sisters you know - and yet my Quidditch captain at Hogwarts later was Oliver Wood, and I’m nearly sure he was as pureblooded as they come.” Harry shook his head. “Do I remind you a great deal of your friend? I’m inclined to apologise for the confusion if so, though I’m sure I can’t help it.”

At this Mr. Prince actually laughed, if only a little and very quietly. “Don’t trouble yourself. Having spoken to you, I find there’s no resemblance at all.”

Not friends, then – a friend would be disappointed by a lack of resemblance, Harry thought. A friend might have wanted to trace a resemblance, or been comforted by one. Perhaps this other Potter fellow had just been an excuse, something to say. Harry used similar tactics sometimes, when silence wasn’t desirable but he had no ready topics in mind. Say something and hope for the best.

The hedge maze let them out a few minutes later. Harry was quite sure that he hadn’t asked it to, but it turned out that he and Mr. Prince had been wandering in the hedge maze for quite a bit longer than he’d have thought. Mrs. Crabbe was herding all of her charges back onto the coach so that they could move on to the next hotel where dinner and beds waited for them.

Dinner was largely a repeat of lunch, despite Mrs. Crabbe’s best effort at getting everyone to mix. The couples stayed together, the older ladies (now including both Miss Trelawney and Mrs. Longbottom) chatted more or less amiably at each other, Mr. Karkaroff seemed very disinclined to be far from Professor Moody, Mr. Prince glared a challenge at the group in general, and Harry was claimed once more by Neville and Anthony.

Anthony was rather quiet, Harry got the feeling that perhaps he’d talked himself out over the course of the day. That just meant, however, that Neville controlled the conversation, and as it fell to plants and gardens Harry had more to say. Apparently Neville had gotten ‘lost’ in that impressive hedge maze as well – they spent an entertaining several minutes theorizing why such a thing might have been spelled and wondering how finicky the spells really were if a groundskeeper was able to maintain such a thing – but had somehow missed the large and healthy rhododendron. Harry went into great detail about it, not sparing Mr. Prince’s opinion that the flowering almost-tree was there, at least in part, in service to beehives and poisoned honey.

What Harry found fascinating, Neville seemed to find deeply disturbing, to the point that Anthony stirred himself and changed the subject abruptly. To Quidditch, unfortunately, but as it had been bound to happen at some point, Harry tried to put the best face on it that he could. He answered briefly or evaded everything about his own career, particularly the end of it, and turned as much as he could to others. Oliver Wood’s likelihood of being selected as Britain’s Keeper for the next World Cup, Ginny Weasley’s ongoing star turn with the Holyhead Harpies. He had to admit to being more or less Ginny’s brother, but managed to avoid the particulars of how that came about.

Eventually Neville recovered from the blight on his mood that had been poisonous honey, and re-entered the conversation. Harry – uncomfortable, imagining greater pain in his knee for it being talked around, and very tired – withdrew from all topics and let the other two speak.

When he went to bed, it was pure relief to be alone, as the ‘best accommodations and luxury’ Mr. Riddle had arranged for him included not being assigned a roommate/companion in this small hotel. (It would have been no wonder in a larger sort of place, but it was admirable and welcome foresight in this one.)

While waiting to fall asleep, Harry considered his first day on the job, as it were. What had he learned? He had met or at least identified everyone else on the Tour. That he was concerned with a murder, past or future, he had already been sure of, but now he felt confident in thinking that none of the Famous Houses or Gardens he was set to view were really important. It had to be the people. He’d eliminated several from real consideration as Persons of Interest, but of those remaining had only managed to actually speak to one.

Mr. Prince remained as much a mystery as he had before their conversation, though, and Harry found himself both annoyed by it and eager to try again. He hadn’t taken advantage of the opportunity at all, and on reflection he was inclined to believe that the older man had got more of what he wanted than Harry had. All Harry had learned was that there had once been a different Potter, that there had been a spurious and easily-disregarded resemblance between Harry and this other, and that Mr. Prince and he had (probably) not been friends. Nothing, probably, of any consequence to Harry’s task even if it had been on the whole quite a pleasant interlude.

“Here endeth the first day,” Harry murmured out loud to himself as sleep rose up to claim him. “Hopefully I’ll do better in future.”

Chapter 6: Miss Sybill Trelawney

The small Queen Anne Manor House on the agenda the next day was once again not a particularly Famous House. (Despite this only being the second full day of the Tour, Harry was already inclined to wonder a bit if there actually were any proper Famous Houses or Famous Gardens on this Famous Houses and Gardens Tour. If not, the pamphlet had been designed very well; he hadn’t noticed until now how non-Famous everything was.) The coach ride to it was pleasant, it was a charming-looking place with – according to the booklet – quite an interesting history, and it had a very beautiful and unusually laid out garden.

There was nothing special enough about the house that Anthony felt the need to lecture as he had at Nettlebed Manor, so the caretaker of the place took charge of the Tour group. He almost gleefully told stories involving dramatic arguments and duels amongst the long-ago denizens of the house, culminating in a story about Lord So-and-so stabbing his wife’s lover to death on the hearthrug. (Actually stabbing, no curses involved!) Mrs. Fudge was particularly charmed by this and started claiming that there was quite an atmosphere to the house, she could feel it, and her husband – enormously proud - explained to everyone that his dear wife was indeed very sensitive to atmospheres, and that her prescience had saved his life on more than one occasion.

Three people trying to make their very important statements heard all at once was a bit much for Harry and a few others to handle politely, so they edged gently out of the room. Harry found himself joined by Miss Cooke as he edged down the (really excellently moulded) staircase down to the ground floor. “Some friends of mine had quite a horrible experience last year,” he remarked to her, because she was quite decently keeping pace with him and he preferred that she get on with it. “A dead body face-down in a creek.”

“Really?” Miss Cooke was interested instead of chased off. “An accident?”

“No, it was murder. A woman pushed in and held down. Blonde, but her hair was dyed, she was really brown-haired, and – oh!” Harry broke off, eyes fixed on Miss Cooke’s greying yellow hair before he wrenched them away and covered his break in speech by misplacing his cane and stumbling a bit.

He’d just realized how he knew Miss Cooke; it had come to him just as he’d told himself it would. Her face and build were rather different, her style of dress very different, and her hair had been black, but he was prepared to swear all the same that Miss Dora Cooke was in fact Miss Mary Bartlett, who’d chatted with him about gardening before any of this had got started. The very day he’d read Mr. Riddle’s death notice.

How interesting!

She didn’t appear to notice his arrest or realisation, and was in fact occupied with making sure she didn’t fall down the stairs herself, having seemingly managed to trip over a cane jammed wrong several feet away from her. They both managed to reach the ground floor in one piece, where they were met by Mrs. Longbottom at her most imperious, who loudly opined that there would be rain before the morning was out and they should all go view the gardens before it started. Either that ‘suggestion’ fell in line with what others near her wanted to do anyway or the authority in her voice convinced them, but everyone within hearing obediently followed her out some French doors and into the (currently) morning sunshine. Mrs. Longbottom claimed the American couple and marched off with them, while others wandered down different paths.

Harry himself made a determined beeline for a garden bench – stairs were no more his friend than they were Mrs. Longbottom’s, and the false trip he’d used to cover his realisation about Miss Cooke had in fact wrenched things a little. His sigh of relief once he sank down on it was entirely genuine, and was echoed moments later by Miss Sybill Trelawney as she took a seat next to him.

After not very long, she spoke. “I have much less patience for lecturing than I used to. I enjoy really immersing myself in the past, of course, so much more peaceful than the future, but listening to someone talk about it is like flies buzzing around my head.”

“Of course, everything we’ve been told is very interesting.” It was the polite response.

Miss Trelawney’s eyes, magnified hugely by her spectacles, goggled at him. Humor, he thought, but couldn’t be sure. “Do you think so?”

Harry looked back at her, as innocent as could be. “Don’t you?”

“No.” That seemed to be that, until some minutes had passed. “This may interest you, then. This garden was designed by a Mr. Holden, some two hundred years ago. He died young, as geniuses so often do. It was a great pity, but I wasn’t alive then to warn him.”

“It’s so sad when anyone dies young,” Harry said.

“I wonder,” said Miss Trelawney, almost meditatively – not like her usual scattered dreaminess at all.

“They miss so much, though. So many things!”

“Perhaps they escape so much. I always see so much to be escaped.” Miss Trelawney, Harry remembered hearing, had been Headmistress at Fallowfield, the girls’ school version of Hogwarts (which was co-ed while he attended, but had been a boys’ school in the past), and prior to being Headmistress had taught Divination.

So perhaps she did see a great deal. “As young as I am, I suppose I can’t help feeling early death means missing things. I should certainly miss a lot, if I were dead.” He didn’t mention how hard won that perspective had been, at times.

“And I, spending as much time as I do in the mists of the future, tend to see lives as complete in themselves. Fate will not be denied, we come and go as it dictates.”

“I guess I can see what you mean, a life of any length is a life, but….” Harry paused and let his face visibly screw up a bit as he thought. It was never a harm if people thought you were stupider than you were. “I don’t know. I think a life can be unduly short. Less complete than it should be. You know?”

“Yes.” Miss Trelawney imbued that word with unspeakable sadness, but Harry was given no opportunity to delve into it as she continued, “Are you on this Tour for the houses or the gardens?”

“Both, really, but I expect I’ll enjoy the gardens more.” Harry smiled a little, remembering his prattle the previous day about the difficulties of houses. “A very kind friend gave me this trip as a gift, I’m very grateful. I don’t get out as much as I used to. And you, which are you here for? Houses or gardens?”

“Oh. Oh, neither.” Miss Trelawney looked down at her hands, than at Harry again. “I think you want to ask why I am here.”

“I think,” Harry said slowly, “that would be a very personal sort of thing to ask.”

“It would,” she agreed, staring at him quite intently. “Make a guess instead, then. I’d like to hear it. Perhaps I know what you’ll tell me.”

Harry stared back at her. Huge-eyed and scatty and odd she certainly was, but there was something there. He remembered thinking at first sight that she wasn’t on the Tour to sightsee, that she had some purpose or other in mind, even if it only made sense to her. “I don’t know anything about you, really, so this is just a guess. But I think you’re – it sounds really dramatic, I’m sorry – you’re on a sort of quest.”

There was a period of silence, then Miss Trelawney said, “That’s as good as anything. Yes. I’m on a quest.”

Harry decided to throw out a line and see if there was anything to fish up. “The friend who gave me this trip died recently. A Mr. Riddle. Did you know him?”

“Tom Riddle? By name and reputation only, I never met him. He once gave a large endowment to my school, I was very grateful. It came at a difficult time. So he was an old friend of yours?”

“Not really. We met briefly about a year ago, on holiday in the Caribbean. We were thrown together a bit by circumstance, you know – two people who found it hard to get around in the same place at the same time. I wanted to know more about him, but he… didn’t encourage questions. Was your school running short when he gave to it or something?”

“Not like that. Second Sight and Third Eye is very convenient financially, as I’m sure you’re aware.” Miss Trelawney shook her head. “No. There was a… a tragedy. I’d made a prophecy, and it went… oh, it went wrong. It’s very bad for any Seer to get things wrong, and it would have reflected quite badly on Fallowfield as a result, except for Mr. Riddle’s endowment coming when it did. It shored up faith in me as Headmistress and kept the school from suffering.”

“Mr. Riddle was really quite kind.” Difficult and abrasive, a nightmare to deal with – but in certain specific ways and means very kind. He’d wanted the best for people, at least when Harry had known him, and been frustrated when they wouldn’t help themselves. “But I’ve never heard of any prophecy about Fallowfield! How long ago was this? What was the prophecy? If you don’t mind me asking, of course.” Even if she did mind, really, but Harry was prepared to go around her if he had to.

“It was twenty-five years ago or so, I don’t remember the exact words anymore. Seers don’t, as a rule, that’s why other people have to record what we say.” Miss Trelawney shook herself slightly, putting Harry in mind of a hen ruffling feathers. “A child born as the seventh month ends, to those thrice defiant of the Dark Lord, marked as his equal, fated to defeat him with power he knows not. There was more and that’s not the actual thing, but that’s what I remember.”

It seemed enough like a prophecy to Harry, but he remembered from taking Divination at Hogwarts (one of his least favourite subjects, but he’d stuck with it because it was a good tea break in the middle of the day) that with prophecies, exact wording could be very important. “How did it go wrong?”

“There was a girl, one of my students. The loveliest and sweetest creature you can imagine, clever and skilled too. Everyone loved her. Lily, her name was.” Goggle eyes shone behind spectacles, but no tears fell. “She met a boy, as girls do. A number of boys, some quite unsuitable, but never mind. She was going to have a baby, as girls will. She wrote me to ask would I consider being a godmother, since her own parents had died. I didn’t think of the timing, I didn’t think what it might mean.”

“What happened to her?” Harry asked quietly, almost a whisper.

“She died. One of the Dark Lord’s servants, one of his Death Eaters, killed her. It was… awful. Brutal. He killed some other people, too, I heard. And Lily’s baby died with her, before she was even born.” Miss Trelawney gulped. “And then You-Know-Who just up and disappeared anyway, and I was just some crackpot pretend-Seer.”

A murder. Multiple murders, if you looked at it right and Miss Trelawney was right about ‘some other people’. Was this it, then, was this what Mr. Riddle had set him on? Or was it just a sad story from a sad woman who’d managed to get herself haunted by the past and the future simultaneously? Miss Trelawney was weeping in earnest now, so Harry put an arm around her in comfort and let her cry while he thought his own thoughts until it was time to go.

Chapter 7: Old Manor House

The rest of the day passed quietly. Luncheon was more or less the same as it had been the day before, except that Harry escaped having to focus any attention on Neville and Anthony by taking shelter – he really thought of it as taking shelter – with Mr. Prince at his already-usual solitary table. The man had been surprised by it, but opted for cold silence as a method of discouraging Harry, perhaps feeling that any conversation with a young man he knew to be chatty would do quite the opposite of chase him off. Unfortunately for him, silence suited Harry’s aim perfectly, so Harry had a pleasant meal quietly occupied with his own thoughts, and Mr. Prince was left to seethe.

Had the morning not involved a weeping old Seer, Harry might have tried to tease him out of that mood. He was quite good company when he wasn’t coiled up and ready to pick a fight, after all.

After lunch, Harry opted to miss out on the afternoon’s excursion and rest up at the Golden Boar, their hotel. He wasn’t terribly interested in old churches (this one apparently had some quite clever hiding-places where witches and wizards not inclined to accept being hanged or burned – for heresy or something, not witchcraft in most cases - had hid out during bad times) even if they had lovely stained glass, and he’d looked ahead to the next day’s program. It promised to be strenuous: a lengthy and athletic hike to reach some rather long and steep coastal paths and a lighthouse. Lovely views of the sea, interesting and rare marine plants and creatures – neither a Famous House nor a Famous Garden, and very tiring for someone with only one reliably functioning leg. Taking the afternoon to rest before such a day seemed like a good idea, and it didn’t take much convincing to get Mrs. Crabbe to agree.

The next morning, as Harry went down to breakfast (after talking himself out of writing a letter to Hermione describing how very responsible he was being regarding his health), his plans changed. A smallish rather plump man in a tweedy sort of suit stood up from a chair in the front hall area and walked right up to him. “Excuse me, are you Mr. Potter? Harry Potter?”

“That’s me, yes,” Harry replied, more than a little surprised. He didn’t know the man at all, and he wasn’t the sort of person who ever got recognised on the street.

The man smiled happily. “I’m Peter. Peter Pettigrew, I live near here with a couple of friends, and we – well, we heard you were coming, so-“

“You heard I was coming?” Harry repeated like a ninny, but surprise had deepened to clear astonishment. How?

“Oh yes! Yes. A very dear old friend of ours wrote us. Three weeks ago, give or take, I think? Anyway, he asked us to make a note of this date, the Tour. He said a great friend of his, or possibly a relation, I wasn’t quite clear… anyway, he said you’d be on the Tour. Our old friend Tom. Tom Riddle.”

“Oh!” Mr. Riddle again. Harry made an effort to pull himself together and pay attention. “You do know he’s-“

“Dead, yes. It’s so sad. Why, writing to us about you must have been one of the last things he did!” Peter nodded, and his smile slipped very slightly. Harry thought he actually was sad, even if he was doing his best to be cheerful. “So we felt, my friends and I, a sort of urgency to do what he asked, as a last request and all. He suggested that perhaps we should offer to have you stay with us for a night or two. It was quite puzzling, because I know these Tours are really very well-organised and comfortable, but-“

Harry grinned back. “But now you see this,” he tapped his cane on the floor, “and you realise that the next bit was going to be rough on me?”

“Yes! Exactly, yes. Exactly.” Peter nodded vigorously enough to almost look like he was bouncing. “So we’d be quite pleased for you to come and visit, and give all that a miss. There’s some local sights we can guide you around, or you can just rest or… or whatever. We’re only ten minutes or so away, and I’d be happy to side-along you so you needn’t walk at all if you like.”

Harry hesitated a moment. He liked Peter already – warm and open and friendly, a little overenthusiastic maybe. Rather puppyish, falling over himself in eagerness to please, and who didn’t like puppies? Besides, this was certainly the next breadcrumb he’d been waiting for – Mr. Riddle wanted him to visit these three friends, clearly. And yet, something twanged on his nerves. Perhaps he already felt himself at home in the Tour group, had started to make progress there, feared losing ground by leaving?

He'd never once considered himself the sort of person who needed groups like that – he liked people and liked socialising, but he’d never clung. Peter was starting to look anxious at the silence, so Harry grinned at him again. “You know what? I think I will. It’s really kind of you.”

Peter only increased Harry’s puppy impression of him by all but exploding into action. He herded Harry into the room where the rest of the Tour was having breakfast, nudged him towards a table, and claimed his room key with some excited chatter in the line of You have breakfast, all right? I’ll fetch your things, don’t worry at all, no no, I’ll take care of everything, you’ll see.

Harry, bemused, sat down to a plate of eggs and toast and bacon, and bore being Looked At. Neville and Anthony seemed flummoxed – wondering, perhaps, at Harry’s tendency to collect older people. Peter now, before that Miss Trelawney in the Queen Anne garden, and before that Mr. Prince in the hedge maze. That man in particular had gone quite stiff at Harry’s entrance and completely avoided looking at him, though why that should be Harry didn’t know.

Worried that Harry was going to try and join him again, maybe?

But Harry didn’t. He ate quickly and met Peter as the man came down the stairs with Harry’s suitcase in hand. He met Peter’s “All set?” with a nod and answered “Sure you don’t need another cup of tea?” with a decided negative. Peter, after a brief pause to consider logistics, shifted the suitcase so Harry could take hold of him with his right arm, and not risk losing balance on his bad leg. It was considerate, and Harry warmed further to the plump little man – he’d made the adjustment without calling attention to it or requesting gratitude for the basic kindness. Not everyone did.

They Apparated, and Harry managed to keep his breakfast on the inside.

The house they landed in front of had definitely seen better days. It was, or had once been, quite a fine old big house – it was well-proportioned and well-built, with what had probably been quite an extensive and pleasant garden surrounding it, but it was old, and shabby, and overgrown. Harry thought that the house was not much loved, and had not been in many years. It wasn’t falling apart or decrepit, it just… showed its age very plainly.

Peter didn’t seem to notice. Of course he wouldn’t, as he lived there. He just led Harry through the front garden towards the door, quite conveniently as their arms were linked. “Welcome to Old Manor House, Harry! My friend Sirius, who you’ll meet presently, inherited it from his uncle Alphard almost thirty years ago, and he quite kindly invited the rest of us to come live here with him. We hadn’t money or family or anything, we’d have had a rough go for sure, but he’d always do just anything to help his friends. He’s like that, you’ll like him. We all do. Remus, my other friend, is a little more complicated, but I assure you he’s also perfectly nice really. He’s just… well, you’ll see, I’m sure.”

Harry felt a little like he’d been caught in a riptide of information, and all he could do was nod along and commit whatever he could to memory in hopes of being able to sort through it once the waters had calmed.

The inside of the house matched the outside well enough – furniture and décor that had once been quite nice but was now aged and hopelessly behind the times, not particularly well cared-for. This was the sort of house that had probably had several house-elves looking after it at one point, but Harry would have been surprised if there was even one in the house now. House-elves, in his admittedly limited experience, were quite house-proud and would never let their homes or families decay this way.

Once again Peter took no note of the shabbiness around him, in fact he seemed quite pleased when he brought Harry into a sitting room occupied by two men playing chess. “And here we are, just as I said. Harry Potter, meet Sirius Black and Remus Lupin, my very very dear friends and housemates.” He pointed to each in turn. Sirius was a tall man with dark curly hair and grey eyes, handsome to the point of beautiful, the kind of natural beauty that probably required no particular effort to turn heads. Remus, by contrast, could have reached ‘plain but pleasant’ by probably a lot of effort – he was thin and worn, with heavily greying brown hair and lines of obvious scars on his face. “Padfoot, Moony, this is who Tom wrote about, remember? Asked us to have him for a visit while he was in the area? Of course you do.” He beamed around, then hefted Harry’s suitcase. “I’ll just take this up to your room. We’ll show you up later, but in the meantime have a seat! Get to know each other a bit. I’ll get some tea sorted too-“ He exited the sitting room still burbling happily to himself.

His housemates weren’t nearly as happy as Peter was to have a guest, Harry thought. They didn’t seem surprised as such, so he was fairly confident that there really had been a letter from Riddle and he really had asked them to play host, but Harry thought it was entirely possible that Peter’s breezy we’d be happy to have you was more in the line of wishful thinking than anything. Still, he smiled politely and took a seat in a comfortable enough chair. “Don’t let me interrupt your game, please.”

“Harry Potter, he said?” Remus asked. “Harry Potter-“

Sirius reached under the table to touch his friend’s knee. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry.” He looked over at Harry and smiled, an empty expression with no real warmth. “Peter doesn’t understand that we’re not exactly pining for company, is all. We live alone and we like it. But sure, welcome to the Manor.”

“I wondered.” Harry let his expression go a bit sheepish. “Peter’s a bit eager to please. Reminds me a little of my mum,” he didn’t normally refer to Molly Weasley as such, though she was the closest thing to a mother he had, but something made him want to seem as normal and unthreatening as possible, “at least in that he may not see that what he likes isn’t something everyone likes. It’s only for a couple of days, anyway. And I’m grateful, the next bits of the Tour I’m on would be hard for me.” He made a little show of resting his cane against the side of his chair.

Remus fell on the offered topic with some eagerness. “I can see how that could be, I’ve heard there’s some hiking and climbing involved with those. But if you don’t mind me saying, you’re awfully young for… is it arthritis, or something…?”

“Quidditch injury,” Sirius said, turning an almost mocking look on Harry. “Harry here was Seeker for… the Cannons, wasn’t it? Got beat up pretty badly and quit.”

“Close enough.” It wasn’t an uncommon opinion – people would think magic could heal anything, and curse wounds that wouldn’t heal properly weren’t exactly common. “My knee,” he added to try and soothe Remus, who seemed to be responding to Sirius’s semi-veiled hostility with anxiety. “It doesn’t bend properly anymore, and it can’t take much weight or use.”

“Why should that stop you playing Quidditch?” Sirius asked. “It’s not like you’re running up and down the pitch.”

Harry had no hesitation in placing him as his least favourite of the three friends. Quite probably people put up with him because he was nice (very nice) to look at, as he’d noticed they put up with Mr. Riddle’s rudeness because he was rich, but unlike Mr. Riddle there was some real hostility behind Sirius. Harry had no idea what he could have done, apart from being a semi-unwelcome guest, to earn it. “Well, no. But there’s a lot of steering one does with legs and feet on a broom, and the increase of drag if I hold my leg straight means I’m actually a lot slower. Clumsier too. I can fly, just not well enough to play professionally. My little sister says I fly like a nan now.” And it still stung. Ginny meant well, she meant to be playful and tease, but… well, being a Seeker, being fast and agile on a broom, had been the only thing he’d ever done really well. Harry could happily laugh along with a lot of teasing, but not that, not yet.

“Huh. Hadn’t thought of it like that.” Whether Sirius actually accepted the explanation or whether he’d just noticed Remus touching one of the scars on his face – evidence of magic not healing everything – Harry couldn’t tell. Either way, the man returned his attention to the chessboard with the attitude of someone (graciously) declaring a cease-fire.

I bet you never think at all, Harry did not say. He wasn’t here to pick fights with shut-ins twenty or more years older than him, and he did need to stay for two days or however long Mr. Riddle’s mysterious plans actually involved. So instead he just sat in his chair and watched as the two men picked up their game again.

Despite Ron’s best effort in the form of hundreds of games over the years, Harry remained quite bad at chess. He thought that probably Remus had been winning handily when he’d come in, but judging entirely on his tense body language and the unhappy glances he kept sneaking at both Harry and Sirius, his game was falling apart now. Sirius didn’t appear to be happy about the turn of fortune – and no wonder, if he was used to losing. He knew something was wrong, and it irritated him.

Remus, Harry decided, might have been well-cast as an older Ophelia in one of those very traditional Shakespeare productions where all the parts were played by men. Thin and sad… and afraid, Harry suddenly thought, and knew he was right. Something scared Remus Lupin, and Harry rather thought something always had done. What could it be? At any rate, it was easy to imagine Remus breaking under whatever gripped him and falling all to pieces in a dramatic and tragic way.

Sirius wasn’t like that even a little. If fear touched him at all, it would only make him angry, Harry thought, and he ran through his (minimal) knowledge of Muggle classics to see if he could assign him any role. It wasn’t until he moved on from literature to mythology that he remembered Clytemnestra. Harry thought he could see that sort of passionate determination, the confidence and strength of will to stab a husband in his bath, even exult in it. Sirius could be a magnificent Clytemnestra.

Peter was difficult to fit in mind. He was any number of comic sidekicks, Harry thought. Exactly the person who came on stage to make you laugh and provide a break from the probably heavier narrative of the rest of the play. Well liked, even loved, but not much thought of. Not a leading role, almost never played by anyone of note, but always a pleasant presence.

Sirius did eventually win the game, right as Peter bustled back in with tea. Two trays, one with actual tea and the other floating along behind him with food. Sirius and Remus set the board back up for another game, Sirius ignoring Harry completely and Remus following his lead. Peter was left to carry on a slightly anxious conversation with Harry about nothing much, and Harry set himself to the sort of dim chatter that people tended to expect from him.

There was something about this house. Remus was scared, Sirius angry, and Peter danced around between them keeping what now appeared to be a peace fragile enough that just the presence of a fourth person could almost shatter it. There was something, indeed, something old and sunk in, something the men in this house lived with like fish lived in water, and noticed as little.

Harry shivered suddenly.

Chapter 8: Thoughts and Prayers

The guest room that Peter showed Harry to after a mostly-quiet and somewhat tense dinner was an unusually nice example of the kind. It seemed oddly less worn and shabby than other rooms of the Old Manor House that Harry had seen, and much more personal than guest rooms tended to be. It was easy to imagine someone actually living in this room, having decorated it to their personal taste. Following that trail of thought to the end, though, only added to the oppressive sense of something off that the place had in general, so Harry pushed that away so he could actually get some sleep.

He woke early the next morning, as he often did, and brought out his sketchbook. He got some basic drawings of the room, of the view of the back garden out the window, and some attempts by memory of his fellow travelers on the Tour as well as his hosts. No new thoughts occurred to him while he worked, but he wasn’t really expecting them to.

He’d been awake for some time – an hour or two perhaps – when a few diffident taps sounded on the door. Harry called a come in! and the door opened to admit Remus, who looked around and at him with real dismay. “Oh, Peter,” he sighed, then came into the room fully. He was carrying a jug in one hand and a tray with toast and a cup of something – tea probably – in the other. “Good morning, Harry. I apologise, I didn’t realise Peter had put you in this room. There’s another down the hall that… well, never mind. I’ve brought you some hot water and a sort of breakfast. There’s a bathroom one floor down, but I thought… you might appreciate not having to go up and down so much.”

“I do, thanks.” It was very kind, and showed genuine thoughtfulness. But Harry was less interested in that than the possibility that he’d correctly estimated this room as belonging to someone. “What’s wrong with this room? I’m sorry, I had no idea. I can move-“

“There’s nothing wrong, you’re fine. Well, Sirius might have something to say, but it shouldn’t be to you.” Remus shook his head a little and moved to the window, seemingly to busy himself opening curtains. “There used to be four of us here, that’s all. Sirius, Peter, me, and our friend James. James Potter which I expect is where Peter got the idea of putting you in here. It’s just like him to think it’d be nice to have another Potter in James’s old room.”

That it was in fact the opposite of nice was obvious. “Was there a falling-out of some kind? Did he leave?”

“No, nothing like that. He’s… he died. During the war, twenty some-odd years ago. He was an Auror.” Remus took a deep breath. “He was all our friend, but James and Sirius were particularly close. They did nearly everything together. So, you understand, you showing up here with your name, and your-“

“My getting put in here.” Harry liked Peter, but this was clearly an annoying case of a puppyish eagerness to please without any thought about what that actually meant.

“No! I mean, yes, that doesn’t help, but.” Remus paused for a long moment, and when he continued his tone was sort of strangled. “But you look like James. It’s uncanny. It’s – I’m sorry – it’s horrible. Except for your eyes, and that’s… please understand.”

“I’d like to. I had no idea.” I had no idea was very useful always, as useful phrases went. In this case it was mostly true. Harry budged up a bit against the headboard and waved an invitation towards the foot of the bed.

Remus took it, sitting heavily. “There’s not much more to tell. It had been one thing after another. First James’s parents died, of dragon pox. Another friend’s parents died, too, in a car crash. And then Sirius lost his dad and little brother. They weren’t close, but he… he doesn’t ever stop, once he starts loving someone. Not ever. Not even when he should. He wants to sometimes, I think, but he can’t do it. So he went to stay with his mum for a while, off and on, thought she’d hurt herself or something. And one time while he was gone James went out and never came back.”

“And he’d died…?”

“He was killed. The Aurors caught the murderer eventually. After… James had a girlfriend, but she didn’t live with us and they found her body about a week after James disappeared. In a shallow grave, all mangled, with her face pretty well torn off. I was getting over being ill, and Peter was traveling for work, and her family was Muggle, so Sirius got called to identify her. He’s never really recovered. Anyway, it came out that she’d been seen with this other fellow named Severus Snape. The Aurors thought he’d gotten jealous and killed them in a rage, but-“

“He was a Death Eater,” ground out a voice from the doorway. Sirius leaned on the jamb, looking murderous himself. “He hated James from school, and he wanted Lily, and he killed them both to suck up to his blood-purist terrorist boss. That’s what happened. Telling tales, Moony? Gotten to the good part yet?”

“Trying to help Harry avoid going wrong, Padfoot. Since you and Wormtail are being intensely you and Wormtail just now.” There was some genuine snap in Remus’s tone, and the two older men stared at each other for several seconds before Remus seemed to wilt. “Anyway. We found out when… when Lily’s body was examined… that she was pregnant when she was killed. So you just….” Remus trailed off, then stood up and almost rushed out, muttering something about the back garden.

Sirius shifted enough in the doorway to let him out, then turned an abruptly-cool gaze on Harry. “To be clear, Peter is a gullible twit with stupid ideas, and I’m not. Remus is ill and he gets confused, but I don’t. They’re my friends, and this is my house. Whatever you’re actually here for, you won’t get.”

The abrupt changes in Sirius’s mood were frankly alarming, how he could go from harsh and obvious rage to pure ice in a blink was unsettling to say the least. “I’m not here for anything but two days not spent hiking,” Harry replied quietly.

“Hah. I don’t believe that for a second. Have it your way, though.” Sirius waved slightly and wheeled away from the door. His voice floated back on his way down the hall. “Just be warned! I’m the last person you want to mess with.”

Harry stayed quietly in his room for another hour or two, until he was sure that he couldn’t hear anything or anyone moving around near him, and then dressed as quickly as he could and all but flung himself down the stairs and out the front door. He needed to think, and he needed to not do it where his brain conjured images of Sirius Black with a knife, just waiting for Harry to climb into a bathtub. Clytemnestra.

There was a church not far away – not a particularly old one and not, thanks to what seemed to be a fairly middle-of-the-road Victorian restoration, a particularly nice one, but it had a peaceful little graveyard. Harry was oddly fond of graveyards – they were quiet, they often had flowers, no one bothered anyone much, and sometimes the epitaphs on the gravestones were quite funny.

To settle himself, Harry walked slowly around and looked at the gravestones. No funny epitaphs, sadly, but quite a lot of the same name cropped up over and over. Lots of Princes, interestingly – possible relations to Mr. Prince of the Tour? Perhaps Harry could ask, if he needed a neutral or neutral-ish topic. (Or an annoying topic, at the right time. He felt that annoying Mr. Prince was sometimes a matter of timing rather than topic.) There were also a great many McKinnons, and many of them seemed to have died around the same time as each other.

There was an old man moving about, Vanishing dead flowers and Scourgifying the stones – the graveyard keeper and perhaps gravedigger, maybe? Harry wandered purposelessly over to him. “Good morning. Quite a lot of Princes and McKinnons here, I see.”

The old man seemed unsurprised to have someone open a conversation with a remark on the number of corpses. “Oh aye, there are. The Prince family’s an old one in these parts, and the McKinnons’re a sad tale. Almost the lot were killed in the late war, you see, and they all got buried here.”

“That’s so sad!” Another useful sort of phrase, especially when it was true. “Why would anyone want to kill a whole family?”

“Who knows? He was a mad one, that Lord What’s-his-name. Could be a McKinnon gave him lip and he ordered the lot of them dead in revenge.” There was no real interest in the old man’s tone, and any horror or grief about it had been worn smooth by time. He lived and worked among the dead, they didn’t worry him. “Anyhow, at least one got away. Marlene, that clever girl. A local girl, you know. Ran off so well no one’s ever found her. Bet she’s living a fine old life in New York or Paris or somewhere. Eh? Maybe there’s a whole pack of McKinnons who missed the Killing Curse now.”

“That’s a nice thought.” Harry wasn’t interested in McKinnons, though he did hope that this Marlene girl was living a good life, wherever she was. It seemed like she’d escaped a very messy mess at least. “Is it all right if I go in and sit for a while?”

“It’s a church, boy. If the door’s unlocked, you’re free to go on in.”

Harry smiled vaguely and did so, taking an uncomfortable seat in an ugly pew and tilting his head so it looked like he was absorbed in some stained-glass imagery.

So. Miss Trelawney’s story of her student Lily, her unborn baby, and her undesirable boyfriend or boyfriends had married up with the three friends in Old Manor House, assuming you could believe both her and Remus. Harry found that he did believe them; he didn’t think Miss Trelawney’s tears were put on, and he didn’t think that Remus had exactly intended to say everything he’d said. He’d gotten a real sense that once the scarred man had started talking, he’d just continued because it was a release of pressure. Like popping a blister or something. (What an unpleasant simile. Harry tried to forget it.)

So what did he know now? There had been two murders: James Potter and Lily No-Last-Name who had been James’s girlfriend according to Remus but not Miss Trelawney. Three murders if you counted Lily’s baby who equally might have been James’s or some other man’s. The killer had been caught and convicted, Severus Snape – he was probably still in Azkaban, but no one had said so.

He knew, or was fairly sure, that the injustice Mr. Riddle wanted him to resolve was murder. Harry firmly believed that Ron was right about that; it was the only crime that Riddle would think of when he thought of Harry. This particular multiple murder had now come up twice in mostly unrelated situations, and it seemed close to impossible that anything else could put itself in his path so obviously. Especially since the second time at least had been in a situation Riddle himself had engineered.

So, a double-murder plus an unborn baby, who might well have been the main target if you gave Miss Trelawney’s prophecy talk any credence, if he or she had been due around the right time. Not likely, from Remus’s timeline – whenever Lily had died, it had been early days enough that only post-mortem examination had shown she was pregnant. But Harry couldn’t say for sure, he didn’t know any dates and asking for them would have been awkward. He couldn’t imagine asking when exactly was that when someone was weeping on him or trying to explain why their housemate kind of hated him on sight. No thank you!

Killings of whatever number that had been solved, the killer caught and convicted and sent to Azkaban. But if this was in fact the injustice that Mr. Riddle wanted resolved, that meant this Severus Snape, whoever he was, was innocent. Or at least, he hadn’t killed James Potter, or Lily No-Last-Name, or her unborn child. Someone else had, and Mr. Riddle wanted Harry to find out who. Or at least, to prove Severus Snape’s innocence in the matter, but as it was generally impossible to prove a negative only finding the right killer would do the trick.

Which led to an interesting question, if one not especially relevant to Harry’s task. Why should old Mr. Riddle care about an imprisoned Death Eater while on his own deathbed? To this extent, to go to this trouble in planning and letters and paid holidays and vague threats to his solicitors. If Snape had been in Azkaban all this time, twenty-something years it had to be, he was unlikely to be alive, and even if he was he wouldn’t be sane. The dementors that guarded the worst prisoners – murderers among them – made sure of that. Freedom wouldn’t make any difference to him, his reputation would be likewise meaningless. So what was the difference, really?

It made a difference to Harry, and he thought Mr. Riddle had known it would. Had relied on the fact that Harry would care. The truth mattered to Harry, even when it didn’t do any real good. But what difference did it make to Tom Riddle? It wasn’t something that Harry had to solve, but he thought he’d probably worry at it anyway.

He needed to know more. He needed dates, times, details. When he rejoined the Tour day after tomorrow, he’d pin down Miss Trelawney and get her to talk more about this Lily girl. And she’d said she was on a quest, what was it? Yes, he’d definitely squeeze more out of Miss Trelawney. In the meantime, at Old Manor House, he’d just pay attention. Perhaps Remus would say more, perhaps friendly chatter would pry something out of Peter, perhaps he could poke Sirius into blowing up in an enlightening way. (That last one seemed more likely to blow up in his face, so Harry assigned it as his lowest-preference option.)

He nodded firmly, then said into the silence of the church, “I hear you. I see where I’m going now. I’ll do my best.”

Notes:

Yes, I know, two chapters in as many days. I am very, very bad at spacing this stuff out!

Chapter 9: Tumbling Down

Harry spent maybe an hour or two longer in the church, not thinking any more after his declaration – or re-declaration – of intent, just enjoying the peace and the quiet. Old Manor House, when he returned to it, was unlikely to be peaceful, and the Tour unlikely to be really quiet. But eventually the uncomfortable pew did its job in creating a sore arse, and Harry hauled himself upright and went back to Old Manor House.

When he arrived, two shapes were near the gate, one seemingly heading in and the other heading out. As he got closer, the shapes resolved themselves into Peter and Sirius. Peter, predictably, bounced a little when he saw Harry. “Oh, there you are! We’d wondered – hadn’t we, Sirius? I thought you’d just gone out for a walk, and I’ve been so worried you might have overtired yourself! If I’d known you were going out, I’d have gone with you and shown you whatever you wanted to see. Not that there’s very much, of course-“

“If he wanted your company, I’m sure he’d’ve gone and found you, Wormy,” Sirius said, tone lazy but eyes fixed sharply on Harry. A warning of some kind.

Harry planned to ignore it. “I just wandered around. The churchyard, the church. Quite well kept really-“

“Ugly as sin,” Sirius interrupted. “The stained glass especially, all that red and blue. I’m afraid Uncle Al had a lot to do with that. He was a dear old thing in his way, but he had no taste at all.”

“Very vulgar, I agree!” Peter all but chirped, then ignored Sirius rolling his eyes and waved while the taller man walked away down the road. “And there he goes, off to wherever he is when he’s not at home. Very private, our Sirius. Full of secrets, I’d think if I didn’t know him so well as I do.” He turned a gentle, friendly look on Harry. “I heard there was a bit of a dust-up, I’m sorry. I do understand you wanting to get away a bit.”

“I’m fine, don’t worry. A walk and some quiet was just what I wanted.” Harry shoved his glasses up on his nose; that always helped him look both innocent and awkward. “I hope Remus is all right? He got pretty upset, and I don’t think Sirius helped much.”

“I worry about both of them. I do.” Peter sighed and fell in beside Harry, heading towards the house. “I keep busy, you know, charity work and things, so I’m always out and about and with people. I like people. But I don’t know what Sirius gets up to half the time, and Remus would lock himself in the cellar always if we let him. It’s not at all healthy.”

“So many things are difficult.” Useful phrase number three, a nice commiseration that didn’t actually say anything much. “After I was hurt, I didn’t want to leave home much either. I still don’t, but I’ve got friends and family who pop me out of my shell when they think it’s getting on top of me. You can’t do that for them?”

“I’ve tried. Believe me, I’ve tried.” Peter seemed eager to talk when presented with a willing and sympathetic ear. “You know, some years ago I asked Sirius to sell this place and move. You know? Take Remus and go live somewhere else, I said, without the memories everywhere. He got as mad as I’ve ever seen him, I don’t mind telling you. Said he’d never run away like that! Called me such names just for suggesting it! And I don’t understand, not at all. How is it running away? He’s not happy here, Moony’s not happy here, I’m… well, I’m fine anywhere, that’s just who I am, but I can’t be happy when the people I love aren’t.”

“No, I’d be surprised if you could.” Harry made a note of the nicknames that the three friends had. It seemed that just among themselves they were Padfoot and Moony and Wormtail but in company they used their actual names. In that light, it seemed odd that Harry had heard the nicknames at all, even just when they were addressing each other – he was, after all, very much in company, even if Peter did seem to want to slot him into that empty James Potter space. Even Sirius, who probably would be pleased if Harry fell off a cliff, had used the pet names in front of Harry.

He'd used them like weapons, though. Finding out what that meant definitely went on the list of details Harry wanted to have, but it was likely that the only one who could tell him was Sirius himself, and that would take a lot of doing in not a lot of time.

Well, hopefully it wasn’t important. It seemed like the sort of thing that might not be.

Peter had been burbling on about nothing in particular, and Harry managed to hold up his end with a few oh reallys and oh dears at appropriate intervals, at least long enough to actually get into the house. Peter aimed himself at the kitchen – clearly the main domestic of the three friends - and Harry let him go without regret. With Peter occupied and Sirius out of the house, he could find Remus and… push on that conversational blister some more. (Ew. But accurate. But ew.)

The scarred man was in the back garden, diligently weeding the only tidy patch in the entire place – a small corner of what had probably been quite an extensive kitchen garden. The entire back garden area seemed even more overgrown than the front, largely due to what appeared to be the tumbled-down wreck of some outbuilding a ways off, just a pile of rubble completely covered over by a flowering creeper, with nothing at all to say what it had once been.

The scene seemed oppressive, somehow, though there was nothing to it really. Long-standing wreckage made moderately pretty by time, an overgrown and tangled kitchen garden, a thin sad man staking out one corner of order amidst the encroaching chaos. Remus himself was by far the most strange thing there, Harry was sure, and there was surely nothing sinister about him. Except, perhaps, the unhealed scars on his face – curse wounds maybe, or maybe not – and that nickname Moony used like a whip….

Harry shook himself slightly and moved closer. “Can I help? I feel a little bad about staying here without offering anything. Especially when I seem to have caused such trouble.”

“Oh, Harry.” Remus looked up, and just for an instant a flash of warmth displaced the sad-sick-scared that usually animated him. Did no one offer to help him with anything? Harry thought that very likely – Peter was ingratiating, and Sirius was definite, and neither seemed like it would be all that helpful to Remus sometimes. “No, I’ve got it. This is about as much as I can do. You could do more, but I’d only have to let it go again. These are mostly just potion ingredients, and Peter’s the only one who even has a cauldron anymore.” He looked down at his hands. “I should let everything go, really.”

“There is a lot here,” Harry agreed, hoping he hadn’t just stepped in something much bigger than he’d intended. “I didn’t realise the property was so big.”

“You should’ve seen it years ago, when I first visited with Sirius, before his uncle died. There were grapevines, some little Muscats that shouldn’t have been able to grow here. Too cold by half about half the time. Climbing red things on vines that smelled like cherries. And the greenhouses.” He gestured at the flower-covered wreckage. “One normal glass, and the other some enchanted brick thing. Meant for night-blooming plants, Uncle Alphard said. They’re both gone now, covered with that mess.”

“It’s rather pretty in its way. I think that creeper is called polygonum something.” Creepers like that tended to be absolute menaces if you wanted to grow anything else around them, Harry knew, and this one seemed to have been let to grow however it wanted, but the effect was quite genuinely pretty. And effortlessly covered an eyesore, which had likely been much more to the point. “It looks like just a heap of pretty white flowers.”

“I hate it.” The words were simple, but vehement. “You have no idea. I hate it. But there’s nothing I can do except try to ignore it.”

Harry lowered himself slowly and carefully to sit on the ground. Normally he tried not to, because it was such a trial standing up again, but he wanted to be able to watch Remus’s face even when he was looking down. “You could leave,” he offered. “Go somewhere new.” Somewhere without whatever made him scared of his own shadow or wore him down to the point where he was his own shadow.

“I can’t.” Remus closed his eyes and shook his head. His face said scared as it always did to Harry, but the sad was also deep and evident now. Bleak grief, despair maybe. “I wish I could. I do. But I can’t.” He breathed in and out a few times, deep and slow, and when he spoke again his expression mostly cleared and the moment was over. “I have these moods, that’s all. You’re just unlucky enough to always catch me at bad times. Normally I’m quite steady, cheerful even.”

“I’m sure. Luck’s not something I’m really known for.” Harry watched Remus at his weeding for a while longer, and noticed that the man really did seem to hate the flower-covered wreckage. He always maneuvered so his back was to it, so he couldn’t see it at all, even when that was inconvenient or required that he stand in his just-weeded beds and risk crushing his plants underfoot.

Remus Lupin, Harry decided as he maneuvered himself back up to his feet and went back inside, had a lot of feelings he preferred to ignore just like he did the tumbled-down greenhouses.

Sirius hadn’t returned from wherever he’d gone by dinner time, so the evening meal was rather less stilted and awkward than previous meals had been. Peter as usual chattered away and exerted himself to please, and without Sirius’s interruptions and hostility Remus almost seemed to wake up. He provided commentary to back up Peter’s chatter, offered a story or two of his own, even laughed a little. Peter was clearly delighted, and Harry was bemused.

Which was real, he wondered – the sad and scared man in one clear patch of order talking wistfully about giving everything up, or this almost charming man with the warm quiet humor? He had the horrible feeling that both were real, and the second man, who he found he liked quite a bit, was being consumed and destroyed by the first. He was being eaten, in some metaphorical but still real sense of the word, by fear and sadness and whatever else. What would happen when there was nothing left?

He'd only known the man for two days, but Harry worried about Remus Lupin.

The pleasant mood carried through after dinner, too, as Peter chivvied Remus and Harry both into the sitting room, dug out a deck of cards, and badgered them into playing with him. Oddly, they settled on Go Fish – Harry wasn’t sure how it came about that he’d ended up playing a Muggle childrens’ card game with two wizards nearly twice his age, but it was genuinely fun.

Or at least it was fun until Sirius breezed back in just before midnight. When that happened, it was like all warmth was blasted right out of the room, and Remus shrunk back in on himself too, all streams of light and life in him sucked out as if by a vampire. Peter reacted immediately, all but grabbing at Remus and shaking him as if that would bring him back around. It didn’t. Harry watched Sirius covertly; always before the man had been entirely aware of Harry, performing for him in some way or other. Now, Harry was background noise if that.

He'd expected to see anger, it was the man’s go-to emotional expression as far as Harry could tell. And he did, but after. What he saw in those first unguarded moments was hurt. Not, Harry thought, at seeing Remus smiling and laughing, but seeing him stop. Seeing him stop, perhaps knowing that he himself was why? And that was what made Sirius angry. Harry could almost hear the man’s thoughts, he fancied. Why should he smile for someone else? Why not me?

Harry opted for the better part of valour, therefore, and slipped out of the room as quickly and stealthily as he could. That anger was the kind that would find a target, and Harry was the only person in the room that Sirius Black didn’t love.

Upstairs in his room – the Potter bedroom – Harry reflected that once again he was entirely in agreement with and understanding of Peter. He worried about Sirius and Remus. He worried very much about them both.

Chapter 10: Tragedy

Harry normally woke up fairly early, but the next morning a sharp rap on his door woke him up even earlier than usual. A quick Tempus told him that it wasn’t much past seven in the morning, and he’d just jammed his glasses on his face when the door swung open to admit Sirius. Even though Harry hadn’t acknowledged the knock at all. “Get up,” the man said, not quite snapping. “You’ve got a visitor downstairs. A rude, early-morning visitor.”

“Do you sleep?” Harry groused, stretching and surreptitiously rubbing his bad knee. It tended to be stiffer than usual when he woke up, and a quick sort of massage had become a habit.

“Not much.” Sirius flung open curtains, found Harry’s suitcase and tossed it on the bed. “The others do, though, and I won’t have Remus trying to play host to another stranger in our house.” Peter, clearly, was judged able to fend for himself. Sirius collected Harry’s cane from its resting place, his wand from the bedside stand, and dropped both carelessly next to him. “There’s been some kind of accident on the Tour, apparently. This Tony person’s been sent round to collect you.”

“An accident?” Mostly to prevent Sirius from rummaging in the rest of his things, Harry started shifting his clothes back into his suitcase from the chest of drawers where he’d unpacked them not even two days before. “On the coach? Did it crack up, or did someone fall off-?”

“Not the coach, just one of the others on the Tour. Some woman was climbing on the paths they visited yesterday – Bonaventure, I think, there’s an old lighthouse thing high up that seems like the right kind of tourist rubbish – and a rock fell on her. Or something. I didn’t listen, I’m sure you’ll hear all about it.”

“Did he mention which woman? There’s several.” Harry hoped it hadn’t been Mrs. Longbottom. Neville would be heartbroken if his grandmother got hurt, however imperious and controlling she was.

“Tremaine, I think? Some T name.”

“Miss Trelawney,” Harry breathed. The person he’d wanted to talk to most of all, and a rock fell on her? What a terrible coincidence… if it was a coincidence.

“That’s the one. Get dressed, come on!” Sirius snapped his fingers irritably. The prospect of getting rid of Harry a full day ahead of schedule obviously thrilled him, and any delay was aggravating.

Harry glared at him. “I’m happy to, but somehow I don’t actually want to change with you standing right here.”

Oddly, that made the man laugh. A real, actual laugh, with no meanness hidden or otherwise. “No? To each their own, I suppose. Just get downstairs as quick as you can manage.” He waved a little and sailed back out the door, closing it firmly behind him.

Harry glared at him again and then at the closed door, just on principle. Just because he was beautiful he thought anyone would want to be naked in front of him? Well, Harry Potter didn’t. He was tempted to take his time dressing and finishing his packing-up just to punish that attitude, but… Miss Trelawney was hurt, and Anthony was waiting downstairs for him. This was decidedly not the time for petty revenge that might not even be noticed as such. Harry dressed and packed up as quickly as he could, then left the room with suitcase and overnight bag in one hand and his cane in the other.

To his near-astonishment, Sirius was waiting just barely down the hall, and took his luggage without comment. If he’d thought about it at all, Harry would have considered that Sirius was exactly the sort of person who’d let him struggle with everything himself and maybe laugh about it a little, even if the struggle meant a few extra minutes with Harry in the house. But no – Sirius took the bags and even stayed fairly nearby on the staircase. As if he was ready, Harry thought with some confusion, to stick out a hand in case of a fall.

He didn’t fall. He’d gotten quite good at stairs, even if he didn’t like them.

Sure enough, Anthony was waiting in the Old Manor House’s sitting room, perched nervously on a chair. He’d been joined by Peter, still in pyjamas and dressing gown, at some point while Sirius was upstairs managing Harry. “What a terrible thing!” he exclaimed as soon as Harry walked in. “It’s just awful, that poor poor woman. Please, you have to let us know if there’s anything we can do. Or if you need to stay-“

“It’s best he goes back to his Tour group,” Sirius interrupted firmly, passing Harry’s bags to Anthony. “There’s bound to be some upset in the schedule or something, and we can’t expect them to always be running here with updates, can we?”

“No,” Harry agreed. It was a bit odd to be wholly on Sirius’s side of anything, but he had no desire to be where things weren’t happening, and he himself was probably the only thing that had happened at Old Manor House in years. “And anyway, I might be able to help in some way. You never know.”

“Good man!” Sirius’s good humour was for getting rid of Harry, not any approval of his desire to help, but the why didn’t matter. (Anthony seemed inclined to be a little impressed, and Harry made a note to, if it came up, explain exactly how little a pretty face represented the whole.)

Peter wrung his hands a little and seemed almost ready to cry, so Harry actually hugged him good-bye. Sirius got a stiffly-offered handshake – which he accepted after too long a moment to be really polite – and a please tell Remus good-bye for me which Harry wasn’t at all sure would be passed along.

And then he and Anthony were out in the street, walking towards the Golden Boar. “So what happened?” Harry asked. “I don’t think Sirius was really listening when you explained.”

“It’s Miss Trelawney. You know, that old schoolmistress lady. You talked with her a bit, I think.” Anthony was a little inclined to walk fast, so he had to constantly circle around back to Harry. Harry tried not to be put in mind of a predatory fish. “We were all at the rocks to see a lighthouse thing, and there’s two paths. One quite steep, practically a climb, and the other supposed to be quite safe even if it’s not exactly not steep, you know?”

Harry nodded.

“Anyway, we all sort of scattered and followed our own paths – I don’t think Mrs. Crabbe is very good at this tour-guide thing, I don’t mind saying. We’re all always scattered all around and you’d think she’d keep us more bunched together if she was any good… of course, if we were bunched up maybe more of us would’ve gotten hit by rocks. Which is what happened. A great huge rock and some littler ones just rolled off from above – it was very windy yesterday – and crack! One hit Miss Trelawney bang on the head while she was on the safe path.”

“Really?” Wind had rolled a rock off from where it had been sitting for who knew how long? Harry thought that very unlikely. “That’s awful. Is she very badly hurt?”

“Very, yeah. She just crumpled, and there was blood everywhere….” Anthony’s face screwed up at the memory. “So we’re definitely stopping here for at least tonight, and we’ll see how she’s going on tomorrow, Mrs. Crabbe says.”

“Wait, surely Miss Trelawney’s been taken to a hospital! She’s not in the Boar, is she?” Harry of all people knew how important it was, especially with head injuries, that medical attention came quickly. If anyone had delayed much when he was the one all bloody on the ground….

“There isn’t one locally, and she’s too hurt to be moved, Mr. Prince says. Oh!” Anthony snapped his fingers. “I didn’t mention! Apparently Mr. Prince is a great potions expert, maybe a fully qualified healer too. One of his cases – he had two, remember? – was absolutely stuffed full of already-brewed things and ingredients and shrunk-down cauldrons and such. Neville’s nan said she saw him just run straight at Trelawney the instant the rocks fell. Neville thinks the only reason she’s alive is somebody who knew what they were doing got to her that fast.”

“My goodness.” It was a dim, inadequate thing to say, but somehow it also seemed like the only thing. Anthony was surprised by Mr. Prince, but Harry found he really wasn’t. That the older man was unsociable and angry and used to being seen a particular way – that was obvious. That he didn’t care what people thought of him or at least pretended not to care was likewise obvious. But during the one real interaction Harry had had with Mr. Prince – the only one, as far as he knew, that anyone on the Tour had had with him – he had been entirely civil. Gentle, even, if you looked past his presentation.

No, it didn’t surprise Harry at all, on the whole, to hear that Mr. Prince’s reaction to a fellow creature being injured near him was to get to work fixing them as quickly as possible.

“Right? Fancy him being a Healer with all his glaring. After you told us how he’d talked about poison honey, I’d’ve thought he’d be the last one to do anything about helping anybody.” The architect waved his hands as if gesturing at the absurdity of the world. “Anyway, he’s shut up in Trelawney’s room with her since she can’t be Floo’d or Apparated or flown somewhere better. Mrs. Crabbe checks on them sometimes, and she’s trying to owl her bosses to see what they’ve got to say too.”

The rest of the way to the hotel, Anthony continued to walk too fast and then circle back to Harry, but he didn’t continue talking. Once they reached the Golden Boar, he handed Harry’s suitcase and overnight bag over to someone at the front desk and herded Harry towards the morning room, where the Tour had been taking most of their meals.

Everyone – except Mrs. Crabbe, Mr. Prince, and Miss Trelawney of course – seemed almost huddled inside. Instead of the small social groups that had formed of couples, single ladies, and young people, there was one large group of everyone together, conscious of misery. Conscious of misery, Harry thought, but not actually very miserable. No one here had been particularly attached to Miss Trelawney, so what had happened to her was shocking and frightening but not devastating – except people felt they should be devastated.

They fell on Harry as a distraction, offering tea or coffee or cocoa, urging him to have a seat, eat a bun. Miss Cooke took him by the shoulders and looked him over very intensely, as if she’d been worried that his absence hadn’t been because he was visiting friends but because something terrible had happened to him. She released him and stepped back when Mrs. Longbottom clucked a that’s quite enough, don’t scare the boy at the room in general.

Harry let himself be amused, but didn’t let himself show it. With the possible exceptions of Neville and Anthony who’d found their trio reduced to two in his absence, he was sure no one had actually missed him. He just counted as Something New at the moment. It was only to be expected that, once everyone had settled themselves about acting welcoming that they’d start telling him about the terrible event from eleven different perspectives, most of which were about the same.

Mrs. Figg and Miss Macmillan had seen nothing, but waxed poetic about having heard it, it was an awful wet crunch, Belli thought someone was throwing melons, oh no I didn’t Pip I knew very well what it was. The Walkers had been nowhere near anything but seemed the most terrified of everyone; and why not? They were thousands of miles from home, while everyone else was comparatively local. To them this felt like a near escape. Mr. and Mrs. Fudge were quite occupied with Mrs. Fudge’s purported strange revulsion for the rocks and lighthouse, and how terrible it was that they’d thought nothing of it! Miss Cooke had seemingly been close enough to be hit on the shoulder by small rocks. Mrs. Longbottom had not been hit by rocks, but Harry got a rather more complete picture of Mr. Prince To The Rescue It Would Seem from her than he had from Anthony, even if not much was different. Mrs. Longbottom seemed to be of the opinion that he could only move that fast if he’d known what was coming, but her grandson disagreed more firmly than he usually did.

Grandmother and grandson stared each other down, and the large group split off into separate corners around them. Eventually Neville turned on his heel, but his storm-off was quite short – just far enough to join Anthony and Harry on a sofa. Mrs. Longbottom stared at that with an unreadable expression, then turned away herself and joined the ladies’ group.

“I know a few people who’ve gone for healer training,” Neville said, still mutinous. “That’s all. They get trained to react. And of course Mr. Prince is… well, he’s old, isn’t he? He could’ve got field experience in the war. She’s got no call to say anything.”

Not that old, Harry didn’t put in. His perspective was skewed, maybe. He’d been living most of his life, in recent days, with ‘old people’.

“You should tell Harry what you saw,” Anthony told Neville seriously. “He won’t have heard.”

“I didn’t see anything! And anyway, you saw it too.”

“Now you both have to tell me.” Harry sat up a little and shifted his seat so he could look at them. “You saw something?”

Neville groaned. “It’s nothing, I bet. I thought I saw someone up in the rocks just before they fell.” Beside him, Anthony nodded vigorously, then poked him in the ribs. “Hey! I didn’t really see anything! I saw someone in a red-and-yellow checked jumper. Tallish, I think. Dark hair? I mean, mostly I saw the jumper.”

“I saw it too,” Anthony said, now that he could back someone up instead of putting himself out. “Pretty garish. And you know, I think-“

“No, you don’t. That’s just how these things go, Tony. First you see someone in an ugly jumper having a walk, and the more you tell it to people the more it becomes someone with, I don’t know, curly hair, a beard, and an ugly jumper pushing at the rocks and cackling.” Neville was firm, and the long-unused approval meter Harry had started for Neville Longbottom nearly at first sight was adjusted upwards again. A good man who looked after his grandmother and genuinely cared about what was true enough to stand up for it. His initial flicker of interest had snuffed out at some point, and Anthony seemed to have wedged himself in there anyway, but Harry thought he’d very much like to be Neville’s friend after this was over. Neville was clearly a friend worth having.

“There was someone up there, anyway,” Anthony surrendered. “That’s not too much to say, is it Nev?”

“No, it’s not. But you know, Tony, the more I really think about it the more I think it was just someone taking some exercise, just like us. That jumper!” Neville shook his head. “Who’d wear a thing like that if they wanted to get away with rolling rocks down? I swear you could’ve seen that thing from the sea!”

Harry nodded. “That’s a very good point, I think.” He didn’t say more, though, because while Neville thought no one would wear something bright and noticeable to do something nefarious, Harry rather thought that being bright and noticeable at the time had been exactly the point.

The three young men went silent, all thinking their own thoughts. Harry, who hadn’t technically had breakfast, ate several (mediocre) buns. His mouth was full when Mrs. Crabbe bustled in, still big and broad-faced but no longer smiling. “Well!” she said. “I’ve no news, I’m afraid. Miss Trelawney is still unconscious, and Mr. Prince thinks she’ll stay that way for some time.” Murmurs went round the room, all what a pity and oh no that poor woman, and Mrs. Crabbe continued into the susurration, “At his request, I’ve owled St. Mungo’s and asked them to send a specialist to see to her. No reply yet. I thought perhaps it would be best to have some distraction and not stay all confined here, so I’ve arranged a day trip to a local site. A church next town over, which has some very old stained glass and good brasses, and a picnic lunch. Anyone who wishes to stay behind may do so of course. And as I said earlier, we’ll certainly stop here again tonight, and I should know what we’re to do about the rest of the Tour tomorrow.”

Harry immediately let her know that he’d be staying behind, and made some excuses about needing to see to his things and settle in his room before slipping out. He thought probably most of the group would take Mrs. Crabbe up on her day trip, and had a few private guesses about who might not.

Contrary to what he’d told her, though, he didn’t go up to his room – at least, not for longer than it took him to retrieve his sketchbook and pencil. He had some idea which room was Miss Trelawney’s, and if there was a specialist coming soon he wanted to see her for himself, and also see what Mr. Prince had to say.

Chapter 11: Times, Dates, Details

Harry didn’t dither or pause, just knocked on Miss Trelawney’s door and waited. It was answered, in short order and as expected, by Mr. Prince. Anywhere other than a rather cosy hotel in the countryside, it might have been dramatic, with some colored smoke or steam rolling out past him through the open door and sickroom heat escaping as well. Mr. Prince himself might have been at home in such a drama – hair pulled back, no outer robe or cloak, hastily rolling down his sleeves because of course he’d rolled them up to get them out of the way.

But this wasn’t a drama, even though all those things happened. Mr. Prince just looked rather tired and annoyed, and the absence of his outer robe and cloak just emphasized his thinness. To bony, Harry decided, then remembered that for a near-certainty Mr. Prince hadn’t had any sleep since being… called to duty, as it were.

“Well?” the man snapped, and Harry started. He’d been staring, hadn’t he? Prince didn’t give him a chance to fumble some excuse, just stepped back from the door. “Come in if you’re coming in. Shut the door behind you.”

Harry blinked, but accepted the invitation – if that was what it was – before it could be withdrawn. The room was small, as rooms at the Golden Boar seemed to be, and it had been made smaller by no less than three variously-sized cauldrons bubbling away on lit braziers wherever there was space for them. Harry was an indifferent potioneer at best, and could not identify what potions were in progress with any confidence. Miss Trelawney was on her back in her bed, looking small and shrunken – her hair was gone, her head wrapped closely with bandages, and her eyes were closed and normal-sized, without magnification from her spectacles. “I suppose her glasses broke when she was struck,” he said, drawing close enough to the bed to hopefully be out of Mr. Prince’s way.

“They did. Fortunately, the lenses were thick enough not to shatter, so glass cuts weren’t added to her troubles.” Mr. Prince moved around the room, from cauldron to cauldron – adding things, adjusting heat, stirring. Anthony had said ‘some great potions expert’ and Harry thought, watching the man work, that even that might be underestimating the matter a good deal. One potion at a time could be difficult enough, depending on the potion, even in a space specifically arranged for brewing. Mr. Prince was brewing three at once in a small country hotel room as if it was no trouble at all. “I confess I’m surprised Lucy remembered to pass on the message.”

“Lucy?” Harry echoed. “Oh, Mrs. Crabbe.” Lucrezia Crabbe, as she’d introduced herself. Harry hadn’t been aware before that Mr. Prince knew her at all, much less well enough for even a commonplace nickname. “What message?”

“Of course she didn’t.” Mr. Prince sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Miss Trelawney has not been entirely comatose, and once or twice during lucid moments she has… asked for you. Said your name, at least.” He looked at the unconscious woman almost angrily, but when he rearranged her blankets and adjusted her bandage his hands were gentle. “Yours is the only living name she says. I thought it significant. She does not, you understand, find me to be a comforting presence.”

Harry remembered the range of reactions to Mr. Prince on the first day of the Tour before boarding, and his own impressions of the man. “No, I expect she doesn’t.”

Mr. Prince turned a brief glare on Harry, then shrugged, clearly letting something go. “I asked Lucy to keep her mouth shut about Miss Trelawney’s moments of lucidity, and to pass along to you, should you deign to grace us with your presence, that you were being requested. I might have known you’d turn up anyway.”

Might you have? Harry felt absurdly pleased. During their first conversation, he hadn’t been sure he liked being seen through, but either this was different or he’d decided while not thinking about that he did like it. So few people he knew really saw him. “Well, here I am. But she’s sleeping now.”

“So she is. The moments come at random, and they don’t last long.” Mr. Prince took a seat in a chair arranged quite carefully to be out of direct sight of the bed. Harry felt a surge of warmth towards the man. Knowing that his presence distressed the injured woman, he’d taken care that she not see him while he looked after her. It was thoughtful and kind, Harry thought, in exactly the sort of way no one noticed or was ever meant to see. “I recommend you stay close by. Not necessarily in the room, but close.”

Harry looked at the unconscious woman on the bed. “Do you think she’s going to recover?”

“No. If that specialist I asked for gets here soon enough, there’s a very small chance. But on the whole… no.” There was no apology or sugar-coating in Mr. Prince’s tone. Only fools refuse to accept reality.

“What a terrible accident.” Harry had not been close to Miss Trelawney. They’d had one conversation and he’d wanted another. But he didn’t have to be close to feel that something would be lost if she died. She hadn’t been a great Seer, and he didn’t know what kind of Headmistress she’d been to Fallowfield, but she had seemed like a decent woman who tried hard.

Mr. Prince snorted. “I assure you it was no accident.”

“You saw something on the path?”

“No. Just rocks falling, but I’ve seen her wound. It can only be explained if she held perfectly still and allowed that rock to brain her. Also, any concussion like this should be mendable with the right spells and potions, all of which I have tried, along with some useful others. But here she still is, with a head like a baked apple.”

“What? A cursed wound?” Harry stared. “Was she under Imperius to hold still…?”

“I highly doubt it. The Dark is a shapeshifter, nearly any spell can be a strong curse if used with the right intent at the right time. I expect a simple Body-Bind held her in place for the rock, and the combination was enough to... stick properly. Why use an Unforgivable when a simple spell nearly everyone knows would do just as well and incriminate you far less?” Mr. Prince kept his tone cool and academic, but Harry thought he could hear both fascination and distaste buried in it somewhere.

He smiled. “You realise talking like that is how people get the wrong idea about you, right?”

“Are you so sure it’s the wrong idea?”

Harry let his smile brighten. “Oh yeah, pretty sure.”

Mr. Prince glared (on principle, Harry thought, not because he was actually angry) and pointed at the door. “Get out. I’ll send my Patronus for you if she seems likely to wake.”

Harry saluted the older man with his cane, because he thought it would be the kind of annoying that Mr. Prince would secretly enjoy, and exited as ordered. “I’ll look forward to it!”

As he’d just about expected, almost everyone had gone on Mrs. Crabbe’s day trip and were not expected back at the Golden Boar until evening. In fact, Harry could find only one person who had opted to stay behind: Professor Moody. Harry was just evolving plans to ‘accidentally’ fall in with the man and finally get around to figuring him out when a heavy hand landed on his shoulder and a gruff voice said, “Let’s go outside, Potter. It’s a lovely day. You’ve been cooped up.”

Harry almost jerked away and went for his wand before he realised that the hand and voice belonged to Professor Moody, and he didn’t need to make any plans at all. “Oh! Yes, sounds great, that’s a lovely idea-“

Professor Moody grunted and steered Harry by the shoulder to a sort of outdoor terrace area, a pleasantly shady and breezy open space with a good view of the main street of the village. Harry noted this, and also that the table Moody pushed him at wasn’t in direct view of any of the Golden Boar’s windows. It was, in short, a perfect space for having a genuinely private conversation while technically in public. Moody waited for Harry to take a seat before clumping down himself. “Shouldn’t let yourself get caught off-guard like that, Potter. Better to be vigilant, but if you’re going to be surprised, hex first and sort it after.”

“I’m sure I’m grateful for the advice.” Harry thought that probably Professor Moody wasn’t funny at all, but he couldn’t help his inner laugh. “You’d rather be hexed than not, got it.”

“Keep the cheek to yourself.” Moody looked him over, false eye spinning in its false socket. “So you’re Riddle’s secret weapon, are you? You don’t look it, but then you wouldn’t be much good if you looked it.”

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about.” Moody knew too much, especially since Riddle’s first letter to Harry had included this is to be entirely between you and me. He’d assumed, early on, that Moody could be a resource. He only now wondered if the man might be the reason Mr. Riddle had thought Harry might need a guardian angel.

“Not a complete fool, then. Good. Means we can be honest with each other.” A hotel employee brought out two glasses of lemonade, set them in the middle of the table, then glanced at Moody and positively fled back inside. The Professor gestured at the glasses, so Harry took one and only then did Moody take the other. “I’m an Auror, mostly retired. I train the new kids, and I consult on things. Trained your friend Weasley, for one. Not as dumb as he looks.”

“I’ll tell him you said so.”

“Go ahead! I’ve said worse to his face. But I didn’t hear about you from him.” Moody gulped lemonade. “In fact, I got a letter out of the blue a couple of months ago from your master Riddle, and he gave a pretty good description of you, and this tour, and frankly offered a pile of money if I’d go along. Talk to you if I thought it was a good idea. Look after you if you needed it.”

“Were you… a friend of his?” Harry could see it, if he squinted. Maybe. Moody’s absolute lack of tact or grace might mix well with Mr. Riddle’s imperious demands, but equally might not. They would get on like a house on fire in one or the other sense of the phrase – either very well indeed, or a horrific mess with no survivors.

Moody barked a laugh. “Not me! Not for a second! We only ever met at wandpoint. But I thought I might as well see what the old snake was playing at on my own recognizance, so here I am.” His false eye turned all the way around, and Harry got the feeling it was pointed right at a bedroom containing an unconscious woman, several cauldrons, and the situation’s best effort at a healer. Moody sighed. “Here we are, and I’m going to do just what he wanted.”

“Go ahead then.” Harry sipped his lemonade, then held the glass in front of him almost like a shield. Acting a little at sea was easy. He was a little at sea.

Moody’s real eye gleamed with some expression rendered unreadable by the uncooperative nature of the false eye. “You’ll have to decide for yourself whether you believe me or not. I don’t much care either way.” He drained his glass of lemonade, then cleared his throat. “Twenty-four years ago, give or take a bit, one of my Auror trainees disappeared. People disappearing wasn’t uncommon back then, with the war on –disappeared and turned up dead if you were lucky. This one, James Potter by name, was sort of a special case if you take my meaning. More involved than your ordinary trainee.”

Harry nodded. It wasn’t difficult to decode, and it wasn’t difficult to believe either – Voldemort had had his Death Eaters, there was bound to have been a similar sort of cadre among those fighting him even if they’d kept themselves more secret.

“Him being who he was, I investigated personally. Never found him, but I found a girl’s body some weeks later in a shallow grave. She’d been strangled, pretty well shredded, and dumped. I identified her by some papers in her handbag as a girl named Lily Evans, who’d been Potter’s girlfriend. One of Potter’s housemates identified her as well.”

“When was that?” Harry asked, with some relief. No one was weeping on him, and if Moody hated him it didn’t seem to matter, so he could ask the questions.

“First of September, as I recall. She’d been in the ground a few days, maybe a week. Won’t bore you with the rest of it, but we caught the killer. Motive for days – some vicious schoolboy vendetta against Potter, stalking Evans. Priori Incantatem showed his wand loaded with Dark spells, most of’em new ones he’d made up himself. Bad reputation in general, other arrests, no alibi, and he didn’t help himself in court even before his sleeve got yanked up to show that tattoo.”

“Severus Snape,” Harry said, to show he was paying attention.

“Heard of him, have you? Yes. It was a good job, I thought. A few years in Azakaban and he’d spill what he’d done with Potter’s body, I thought.” Moody heaved a sigh and looked (with both eyes) into the middle distance for a while before continuing. “But that’s not what happened. Now, one thing you’ve got to understand and I bet you don’t is that Azkaban isn’t just a hell-pit full of dementors. There’s layers to it. Someone with only a short sentence – for thievery, say – or someone being held awaiting trial isn’t going where the dementors are. So Azkaban’s got a Governor whose job it is to mind the prisoners. Mostly the ones who don’t get dementor treatment, but the ones that do, too. The Governor some years back was a friend of mine, and he wrote me.”

Harry focused as completely as he could, trying to project attentiveness. This was all new information, and what’s more it was information that Mr. Riddle had asked Moody – who’d hated him for some reason – to give Harry. He worried that if he looked even a little wrong, the old Auror would stop talking, close up like a clam.

“He wanted to know about Snape’s case. Said he wasn’t satisfied at all. He wasn’t an Auror, you know? Actually trained a bit as a mind healer first, wanted to try and rehabilitate the little fish. Might’ve succeeded once or twice, I wouldn’t know. Anyway. The details of the investigation and case didn’t sway him. He said he didn’t think the man was a killer, he’d never seen any killer like that, and would I please come.”

Harry had reasoned as much himself, but resisted the urge to mentally hug Moody’s words. It was only confirmation of what he already knew, it wasn’t proof of anything except that he was on the path, he really truly was.

“The war was long over, and any of You-Know-Who’s people who didn’t want to quit had got caught and sent up years before too. Things were calmer, so I had time to do what my friend asked. I went to Azkaban, and I talked to Snape. Talked to him, tested him in as many ways as I could. He was pretty well put together for somebody who’d spent that many years with dementors, and that bothered me, but….” Moody scowled. “I had to give it to the Governor in the end. Hang the evidence, hang the conviction, I didn’t – still don’t! – think that man I met in Azkaban killed anybody. I’ll stand by saying he was a lot of things, just not that.”

“What happened then?” Had he just left Snape there? Harry hoped not. He hoped that Moody, someone who still trained Aurors, hadn’t sent someone who didn’t deserve it back to have his mind and spirit destroyed by inches.

“Nothing I could do. He’d been tried and convicted, and there wasn’t anything new to present. Feelings aren’t evidence, Potter.” Moody wasn’t any happier to say it than Harry was to hear it. “My friend had some ideas, he said. He shifted Snape away from the dementors and into the small-time cells, for one, but….” He smiled a little tightly. “I’ve figured it’s probably best I don’t worry about it, especially since no inspectors or auditors ever asked later why there was a murderer in the small-time cells. No one spends more than a year or two in those, but he would’ve done.”

“Huh.” A few pieces had come together, Harry thought, and a few other things niggled at him. He wasn’t sure what they were, yet, but maybe soon. “Can I ask a question?”

“Stupid one?”

“Yeah, probably.”

“Why not, go ahead. Bet it won’t be the stupidest I’ve heard.”

“You know for certain – personally, I mean - that Snape’s not in Azkaban anymore, don’t you?”

Moody stared at Harry for a few seconds, then laughed. Hard. “Hah! Yes, I do. Won’t say more, doubt I need to. Now I’ll ask you what I didn’t before: what are you up to?”

“I don’t know that you’ll believe me.” Harry considered, then said, “I’ve been… contracted, I guess… to ‘serve the cause of justice’. That’s a quote, by the way, from Mr. Riddle after he died. He said I had a gift and didn’t tell me anything else. He didn’t tell me what justice needed serving, or why, or for who.”

“So here you are.”

“Here I am,” Harry agreed. “And there’s a good half-dozen people at least who need justice, if I’ve got my count right. Maybe more.”

“Huh.” Moody slapped his hand on the table, abrupt and hard. “You want anything else from me, you ask for it. I like justice as much as anybody, no matter where it’s coming from.”

Chapter 12: The Worst-Kept Secrets

Moody got up and stomped up the street after a while. Errands, maybe, or just a walk. Harry wasn’t too interested; the old Auror probably could have been a bad enemy, and maybe he’d thought he was going to be, but… they were on the same side in at least one way, and that was enough. Harry had learned at least two things from him, and felt like there was probably more that he wasn’t getting yet. It all needed to settle in his mind before it could fall into place.

Fortunately, anytime he had a view of a street, he could people-watch. There was always something interesting to see or think about, just for a few seconds before it was gone. Nothing that dragged him along, nothing crucial. Nothing, usually, that people’s lives or deaths hung on. This street was mostly the same as any other street – people shopping, meeting each other, walking from one task to another.

It turned out Mr. Karkaroff hadn’t actually gone on the day trip, and neither had the Walkers. They seemed to instead be wandering the village, going into and out of shops. Harry wondered idly how they were conversing – a Russian trying to speak English, two Americans trying to speak English – but forgot about them the minute they left his line of sight. Here and there were people he’d seen in passing, and he let them pass again. Even Remus Lupin was out running errands, apparently taking a package to the local owl post. Harry thought it was good to see him out and about and privately bet that Peter had badgered him into it; perhaps he’d taken Harry’s advice about popping friends out of shells.

Shortly after that, a silver doe popped into existence next to Harry. It was obviously a Patronus, and there was exactly one that Harry was expecting. (A doe did seem like a very odd expression of Mr. Prince, but in Harry’s experience Patronuses almost never made sense. His own stag didn’t seem to come from anywhere, and Hermione was the least ‘otter’ person he could think of. Ron was believably a yappy bouncy little terrier though.) He was already getting to his feet and had pulled out his wand when the doe said in Mr. Prince’s voice, “She’s stirring. Come now.”

Rather than make his slower-than-most way on foot, Harry Apparated to just outside Miss Trelawney’s door. He didn’t have to knock before the door opened to admit him. Mr. Prince didn’t invite him in, just finished rolling down his sleeves again and moved aside to settle in his hidden chair. The room was unsurprisingly mostly the same as Harry had left it from the slightly-too-warm temperature that always seemed to plague sickrooms to the cauldrons on braziers placed wherever they fit. One of those had been moved slightly, to allow for a plain chair pulled up next to Miss Trelawney’s bed.

Harry took a seat in the chair, rested his cane against the bed, and took one of Miss Trelawney’s hands. It seemed like the thing to do, and when she surfaced (he had no doubt that Mr. Prince’s assessment was correct) she would focus on him immediately.

It was a very boring ten minutes or so before she did. Miss Trelawney’s eyes fluttered open, cast around, and then met his. Harry wasn’t sure how much she actually focused or saw, but she smiled a relieved sort of smile. “Lily.”

“No, Miss Trelawney–“

“Which of them?” she asked in a rush. “You have to tell me! Which of them was it?”

“Which of who?”

“Them. Which one?” She closed her eyes and twisted on the bed for a good minute or two. When she stilled, her eyes opened again and this time Harry was sure she saw him. “You. Harry. You have to find her.”

“Find…?” Find who?

“Promise me. It’s almost time. You promise me. Find her.”

“I promise.” Harry patted the hand he was holding, now gripping his with unexpected strength. I’m making quite a habit of impossible promises to the dead and dying. “If I can, I will.”

“Yes. Good.” Her mouth opened in a broad, loopy smile. “Pink robes….”

For a split-second, Harry felt like his heart had stopped. A crippled mess of a man in overlarge pyjamas and a cloud of pink. Did she see it too? Was that what she’d seen that made her eyes bulge, the first time she saw him? Nemesis. “Yes. That’s me,” he whispered to her as her eyes closed again and her grip on his hand loosened. “I promise.”

She lay still, sleeping again, and Harry took a few seconds to breathe and settle himself.

“That was dramatic,” remarked Mr. Prince’s deep voice from just out of sight. Harry shifted in his bedside chair enough to catch a glimpse of the man. His expression was oddly blank, and it was distressing in a different way than the desperate nonsense Miss Trelawney had offered. “I do not expect her to wake again. You can go.”

Instead, Harry watched him. About the age of the three friends of Old Manor House, he thought. Not a comforting presence to Miss Trelawney, a shock to Miss Cooke (whoever she really was), frightening enough that Mr. Karkaroff refused to stray far from an old Auror whenever he was nearby. Harry remembered his question to Moody, and that Mr. Prince had, twice now, ensured that he was not seen without his arms covered. “I’d rather talk to you.”

“About?”

“I’d like to ask you a question, but you need to understand some things before I do.” On impulse, Harry stood up and made his way across the small room to stand directly in front of Mr. Prince’s chair. “You don’t have to let me ask or try to understand anything if you don’t want. I won’t be upset. I mean… I’ll be a little sad, probably. I’d like to get to know you better. But if you don’t, I can go.”

The older man looked up at him, black eyes flat and expression blank. (It was unusual for Harry to have anyone look up at him, and he tried not to enjoy the change in perspective.) “Do what you want. I imagine you usually do.”

“Yeah, I’ve been told it’s annoying.” Harry resisted the urge to untie Mr. Prince’s hair so he’d have an excuse to brush it back from his face. This was almost certainly not the time, and definitely certainly (he was halfway sure) it wouldn’t be the right kind of annoying. “I need you to understand that I am not here to threaten you. I like you, actually. And I’m pretty sure, in a mostly direct sort of way, that I’m here for you. So when I ask my question, I’m just asking that question. I don’t mean anything else, and you can tell me to fuck off if you want. I don’t think it will matter.”

Mr. Prince’s hands twitched on the arm of his chair, like he’d wanted to do something and forced himself not to. “Get it over with.”

He’d wanted to go for his wand, probably, Harry thought. “How did you get out of Azkaban, Mr. Snape?”

Mr. Prince – Severus Snape – exhaled slowly. Not quite a sigh, not quite relief, not exactly resignation. Maybe all three, a little bit. Harry couldn’t read it, even though he watched carefully, trying to memorise minute expressions. “Institutional corruption at its finest. A little pity, and then a lot of money.”

“And then you worked for Mr. Riddle.” It made sense. Mr. Riddle had outlived a lot of predictions from official healers. It could have been just because he was strong… but it could have been because he had employed someone with a flair. Which he preferred to do whenever possible. “As Mr. Prince. What does St. S. stand for?”

“A question, you said.”

“Give me an inch, I’ll take a mile. Sorry.”

“You are the least sorry man I’ve ever met.” It felt like a compliment, even if it didn’t exactly sound like one. “It doesn’t stand for anything. It’s my initials.” He paused, then said clearly, “Severus Tobias Snape.”

“Wow, you’re really not subtle at all, are you?” Harry laughed quietly, then continued before real offense could possibly be taken. “Not that you’ve needed to be if you avoid people who actually know your face, which I’m sure you’ve done up to now. What did you tell friends St. S. stood for when they wanted to use your name?”

“It’s never come up.” The blankness had left his face, replaced by a neutral but real expression. Carefully neutral. “You’re up to four questions now.”

“That might be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard, and I’ve listened to an opera.” Harry grinned at him. He should have stayed on task, asked questions about Lily Evans, about what really happened, about how evidence lied, but… surely there would be time for that. Surely he could give himself a little personal time.

“One whole opera.” That neutral face was what it looked like when Severus Snape (Harry refused to use the false name any further except in company) was laughing on the inside, Harry was certain of it.

“It lasted forever. Part of me is still listening to it. Can I use your name?”

“Trapped forever in a concert hall, what a nightmare.” The sarcasm, from a man who’d survived years of actual nightmare, was desert-dry. “That’s five questions.”

“You can ask me questions too, you know.”

 “I’ll consider it. For now, get out.” Severus lifted one hand from his chair arm, placed it in the center of Harry’s chest, and pushed. Very gently. “I have three potions and an injured woman to manage. I don’t care to entertain you further just now.”

“Later, then.” Harry decided to hear just now as an indication that, perhaps, the older man might care to entertain Harry at some future point.

“Fuck off, Mr. Potter.”

“You had your chance to tell me that, Mr. Snape, and you didn’t take it.” Harry finally obeyed the pushing hand and headed for the door. “You’re stuck with me now.”

He’d almost gotten to the door, was reaching for the doorknob, when Severus asked quietly, “You really believe I didn’t? Either of them?”

“I know you didn’t.”

“Do you know who did?”

“Not yet.” Now, Harry opened the door and walked out. “But I will.”

This time, he did go to his room. He didn’t unpack, though – out of laziness, primarily, though it was likely he’d claim if needed that he had too much on his mind. Instead, he settled on his bed to think. He’d gotten, he thought, one thing out of confirming Snape’s identity, especially after speaking with Moody.

He had the answer to one of his questions, he was certain of it. He’d even confirmed it, in a way. That it didn’t have any real bearing on the task he was pursuing was equally true, but it settled something in him.

Mr. Riddle was what had happened to Lord Voldemort. For whatever reason, he had abandoned the name and abandoned his war, and become Tom Riddle – someone who lived a wildly successful life almost entirely offstage. He’d changed his mind, as he’d told Harry straight to his face, once in his life; he’d intended never to do it again, and he hadn’t.

And this was why Riddle, seemingly thoroughly unconnected, had cared about an imprisoned Death Eater. Had gone to, in fact, a great deal of trouble and expense for him over the years. For some reason, though, he hadn’t been able to clear Snape’s name. Perhaps the best he could do was getting the man (illegally) released, more or less freed to live under an assumed name and separate from everything that had been his life before.

Which was quite a long way around, really, to get to something Ron had figured out right away: Riddle wanted something fixed, and thought Harry was the only one who could do it. He thought he was edging closer to that answer, and it felt important.

Harry talked to people, he listened to people, he paid attention when he wanted to. Loads of people did that, exactly as he’d said at first. What did Harry have that no one else did? Persistence? He didn’t let go of things when he knew he was right and didn’t stop when something was wrong. That wasn’t unique – Moody, Harry thought, had some of that – plus actual training and experience, and a clear ability to evaluate matters and change even long-held opinions. Certainly Moody would never have agreed to actually work for Mr. Riddle, had laughed at the very idea and made sure Harry knew he was acting for himself and hated the idea that he was helping the one-time Dark Lord in any way.

A hypothetical Moody-like figure, then, who had his skills but not his strict allegiances – what made Harry better than him? Why should a Harry – a crippled mess of a man in Riddle’s own words, in all truth just a washed-up former Quidditch player with no training as a detective – be more likely to succeed at this task than a Moody?

The answer came in a slow trickle, flooding Harry’s mind so slowly that he didn’t dare move lest it drain away again. He had one thing that no one else did. Maybe two, depending... but one, for sure.

It fit. It fit. And the little stream of knowledge touched other things, and they fit too, even if they led to more questions.

Harry took a few deep breaths, then swung off his bed. He needed to send a letter to Hermione, maybe Luna too just to be sure. And he needed to go to the owl post anyway.

Chapter 13: Step By Step

Harry’s letters were short ones – he did write both Hermione and Luna in the end – containing only one question and just enough small talk to be polite. Hermione at least, since she knew what he was about on this trip, would answer quickly. Luna was always harder to predict.

As soon as both letters were written, folded, and sealed, Harry set off, out of the Golden Boar and down the street to the public owl post. It was a sturdy brick enclosure with a small building and an open courtyard full of perches, with owls constantly coming and going; they picked up mail, they dropped it off, mail transferred beaks from long-range owls to local ones, all quite normal. The small building contained a desk and the owlery mistress, who was quite a young woman (twenty at oldest, Harry judged) in dingy brown robes with loosely-curly blonde hair in a ponytail on top of her head and a smile seemingly made much bigger by bright red lipstick.

Harry offered her his letters and some coins for them. “And I’m afraid I’ve done something really stupid, which I hope you can help with, Miss…?”

“Miss nothing! Call me Jean, everyone does.” She took the letters, looked at them with the professional eye of someone who looked at mail and sorted it all day, then made a note in a ledger behind her desk. “How can I help?”

“I’ve been staying at Old Manor House – they’re old friends of mine, well of my parents really,” Harry was too young to believably be an old friend, but his parents being such would be reasonable; there was no way Jean could know he was lying, “and while I was there I needed to send something off. Remus was so kind, he offered to post it for me so I didn’t have to walk, but I realised just now that I’d got the address wrong!”

“Oh!” Jean’s eyes flickered to Harry’s cane and her expression filled with pity. “Oh, I’m sorry! It’s already been taken off! Wilbur – he’s our biggest owl, so good with packages – was available right away and he took it. I don’t think I can get it back.”

“Really?” Harry let his expression go crestfallen for a moment, or he hoped he did. “Do you… could you tell me where it did go? Maybe I can reach out and ask whoever’s got it to return it, or send it on, or something? I hate to ask, I know it’s a really big imposition and really inconvenient for you….”

“Oh, no. It happens all the time, you’d be surprised how often people will bring something here and send it off – even wave goodbye to the owl! – and then be right back here hours later because they accidentally sent auntie’s birthday present to Blackpool of all places or something.” Jean started to run her fingers along the entries in her ledger. “Earlier today, was it? Mr. Lupin brought it in?”

“Yes to both,” Harry agreed, relieved. He sketched the dimensions of the package he’d seen Remus carrying with his hands as best he could. “About this size. Heavyish – old clothes I wanted to donate. Thank you so much.”

“Hmmm.” After a few seconds, Jean nodded. “Here we are! It’s been a busy day so far, but I’ve found it. It did get sent to a charity, Lockhart’s Loving Hands – d’you want the address?”

“Yes please. I was right, that’s not where I meant to send it at all, but I bet they’d send it on if I asked.”

Jean scribbled on a scrap of parchment, then paused. “Actually, do you want to just write them now? I’ll send your letter marked special, no charge, so you can get your package returned or sent on right away. Wilbur’s a fast flier, but I’ve got faster for letters and short hops like this. You might get it settled as early as tomorrow morning, that way.”

And she would, that way, technically not have told a strange person exactly where someone else sent mail. Not that Harry planned to report this little malfeasance at all even if she had. “You’re so kind, really! I would love that. Do you have parchment and ink I can use?”

“’Course I do, and wax to seal it. People sometimes like to write replies right here in the office, I’ve learned to be prepared.” With a small flourish, Jean produced parchment, an inkpot, a stick of wax, and a candle which she lit with a snap of her fingers. Harry was impressed; even though Jean had probably cast it literally thousands of times and it was a very minor spell, doing it wandless and wordless was a genuine feat. He wanted to wonder why someone who could do that was working public owl post in a small village, but he already had too much to wonder. Perhaps she simply liked the work.

Harry shifted down the counter a little bit, both for privacy to keep the actual contents of his note to himself and for politeness in case someone else came in to hand over mail. No one did, and in a very few minutes Harry had a note explaining his ‘mistake’ and requesting that the package delivered by Wilbur the owl be returned to his room at the Golden Boar. He folded the parchment and sealed it with a healthy drip of wax, then handed it to Jean, who stood ready with one of several stamps from a shelf behind her. “There! I’m so grateful for your help, you have no idea.”

“It’s no trouble!” She smiled brightly, a clearly habitual expression, then whistled sharply, and a tiny ball of taupe feathers rocketed into the room from the outside enclosure. “This is Skoti – don’t ask – and she’ll probably beat Wilbur there. Should make everything nice and easy for everyone if they can just tell Wilbur to push off right away. Trust me! Like I said, this happens all the time.” Jean made a clicky noise at the little owl, who hooted three times very quickly, grabbed Harry’s letter, and flew off out the window.

“You like owls a lot, don’t you?”

“When I was little, all I wanted when I grew up was to have a bunch of owls flying around. And now I do!” Jean laughed merrily. “And I get paid for it which feels like cheating, but I don’t complain.”

“Well. Have a really good day, then, and thank you again.” Harry left the post office with Jean’s of course, anytime, come back whenever! following him out the door. It was nice, really, to see someone so completely happy – especially since he’d been surrounded by people who really weren’t, lately.

To make his trip to the owl post less obvious, if anyone happened to be watching him, Harry visited a couple of other shops. He didn’t buy anything, just browsed and chatted with the shopkeepers. They were pleasant people on the whole; had this village been part of an actual holiday, Harry probably would have found it both charming and restful. As it stood, it was neither.

Once he felt he’d done enough touring to bore his hypothetical (and, most likely, nonexistent) watcher, he went back to the Golden Boar. It was still some hours before dinner and the expected return of the day-trip travelers, so he decided a nap was called for. There was nothing else he could do until something happened – a response to one of his letters, the arrival of the package he’d arranged to steal… something.

Did naps count as lying in wait? Harry didn’t come up with an answer before he fell asleep.

He was awoken by rapid knocking (almost pounding!) on his door that continued right up until he managed to get to it and open it. Anthony stood on the other side, fist raised to keep knocking. “Oh thank Merlin. You could’ve called out!”

“You know I can’t move fast.” Harry clicked his cane on the floor meaningfully. “Besides, I was asleep. What’s happened?”

“Mrs. Crabbe wants us all in the morning room. We got called back a bit early, and… it’s probably something to do with Trelawney.” Anthony looked down the hall in entirely the wrong direction if he meant to be looking meaningfully in the direction of the injured woman. “It’s probably bad.”

Had that specialist called from St. Mungo’s ever actually arrived? Harry didn’t think so. And after a full twenty-four hours, or close to it, suffering from a cursed concussion without such a thing there probably wasn’t much good news to be had. “Why should you be worried about me, though?”

“Just nervy, I guess.” They fell into step to go downstairs and join the group. “Maybe I thought if someone’s going around bumping off people on the Tour, you’d be – sorry – you’d be a pretty easy target? Limping around alone like you do.”

“Thank you for worrying?” It wasn’t exactly complimentary, but it also wasn’t unpredictable. People did tend to see the cane and tortured mobility and think it made him helpless, even when they should know better. And Anthony wasn’t necessarily someone who should know better. “You don’t think Miss Trelawney was an accident?” Harry knew for a fact that she hadn’t been, but how might Anthony?

“Nev and I did see someone up among those boulders. Someone was among those boulders and then one fell. I think it’s pushing ‘coincidence’ a little far if the one didn’t cause the other.” The architect’s tone was more than a little defensive, and Harry got the impression that he and Neville had been bickering about it, if not constantly, then off and on since it had happened.

“I hope there will be an investigation, then. Or that she wakes up and can say what happened.”

The morning room that late afternoon was almost exactly the same as it had been that morning. Everyone was present except Miss Trelawney and Severus (Harry reminded himself to use ‘Mr. Prince’ if he needed to speak about the man), and once again the usual groupings had been abandoned. Neville sat with his grandmother, and Anthony hustled to the empty space on his other side. Miss Cooke caught Harry’s eye and patted an invitation on the empty space next to her.

He took it, as he didn’t have a good reason not to.

Once everyone present was settled, Mrs. Crabbe clapped her hands for attention. Her no-longer-smiling face was now quite pale and strained-looking. Not good news at all, Harry thought before she spoke, “I am sorry to have to tell you all this, but Miss Trelawney has passed away. About an hour ago, I’m told. Her injuries couldn’t be sufficiently healed, and… they were… quite severe.” Of course they must have been, but Harry wasn’t inclined to comment on the obviousness of it. He expected most professional tour-guides could go entire careers without having to inform a group, mid-Tour, of a death among their number. One hoped there was no official script for occasions like this. “Each of us present at the time of her injury will have to give statements tomorrow, to a patroller who will be dispatched from Magical Law Enforcement specifically for this. I’m told that interviewing everyone who was present will take most of the day, so we will certainly not be leaving until the day after at earliest. Even accidents must be investigated, I’m told.”

A patroller, not an Auror? Harry frowned slightly. Miss Trelawney had been deliberately murdered, in part by least situationally-Dark magic. That seemed to him to be clearly Auror work. Unless, perhaps, Severus hadn’t explained his findings to anyone but Harry? What could be the reason for that, if so? Staying under cover, maybe – any Auror, or at least any Auror sufficiently old enough and experienced enough to head an investigation, might well recognise him.

Mrs. Crabbe was still speaking. “-Tour as arranged, with some alterations in schedule, once we are free to do so. I have been advised by the travel bureau that we will happily arrange transportation back to London or directly home for anyone who wishes not to continue. Please simply let me know if you wish to leave us and where you wish to go, and I will make sure it gets done.” She stopped then, wrung her hands as if she thought she should say more but couldn’t think of anything, then rushed from the room.

As soon as she was gone, the morning room exploded into people talking at and over each other, mostly over whether or not they intended to continue with the Tour. Everyone seemed to take it for granted that after their statements they’d be free to go. Mr. and Mrs. Fudge seemed to be telling anyone who came near them that they were absolutely going back to London, Mrs. Fudge’s nerves were just in shreds because an atmosphere of death was so taxing and she was so sensitive. The Walkers, despite being scared by the ‘accident’ (as they’d decided it must have been) intended to continue, as did Mrs. Figg and Miss Macmillan. Mr. Karkaroff was certainly going to leave, and Harry suspected that if he wasn’t watched he’d just run off in the night to the nearest train station, and not give a statement at all. Mrs. Longbottom stated quite firmly that she intended to continue, as she would not be scared off by either strong wind or some hooligan. Next to her, Neville said nothing, but Harry noticed he and Anthony were holding hands, and thought that if Neville chose not to go on with the Tour it wouldn’t be because he’d opted to go home.

Miss Cooke shook her head and shoved some greyed-yellow hair behind her ear. “I hoped she’d pull through. So what d’you think, Mr. Potter, will you go or stay? You haven’t got to give a statement, have you? I mean, you weren’t there.”

“I shouldn’t have to, but if they want one just for completeness or something, I will.” Harry shrugged. “I might stay here for a few days and then go home. I don’t think I’d enjoy Famous Houses or Gardens much right after someone I know just died. Even though I only knew her for a few days.” And here was where his task was. There was nothing for him further on the Tour, unless he somehow wrapped it up before the coach was able to leave. Which felt very unlikely. “What about you, Miss Bartlett? Do you go on or go back?”

She blinked at him. “It’s Miss Cooke. Dora Cooke. Don’t tell me you hit your head somewhere too! Prince’s probably dead asleep by now and I can’t brew or heal for beans.”

“Right, of course. Sorry. You just remind me a lot of a woman I met back home.” And now she knew he knew, at least. Perhaps it would warn her off whatever she was up to. “I talked about gardens with her.”

“It’s all right. You do look a bit peaky, though. I should get some sandwiches or something from the hotel kitchen and go to bed if I were you.” She grinned at him, and it was Miss Bartlett’s open sunny grin. “Lock your door! There might be a mad head-cracker about.”

Harry laughed. “I don’t think there is, really, but that’s a good idea. I’ll see you tomorrow, Miss Cooke.”

He wasn’t entirely surprised when Moody clomped up alongside him on his way out of the morning room. “You’ll be staying behind, I’m sure.”

“Probably.” Moody might be an ally, but Harry wasn’t particularly inclined to discuss things with him. A lot depended on now on tact and subtlety, which were two things Professor Alastor Moody probably was not at all known for. “I’d have a talk with Mr. Prince, if I were you. A formal sort of talk, because he has some formal sorts of things to say about Miss Trelawney and I suspect he’d find it easier to speak to someone he knows.”

“Figured as much already. Got his statement while guarding the body, waiting for it to be picked up. Post-mortem’ll bear out the Body-Bind thing, or whatever spell it was.” Moody bared his teeth, probably a smile from him. “Got a Priori Incantatem on his wand too just to be sure. All healing, diagnostics, and commonplace stuff in the last week. The last month or more, even. I’ll give that and the statement to the patroller tomorrow.”

Harry opened his mouth to protest the suspicion, then closed it again. That was the smart thing to do – Moody himself was genuinely the best person to safely interview Severus, on a number of different levels, and the Priori Incantatem was useful testimony regarding the healing efforts he’d made. Getting both of those early would be convenient for the patroller, and be taken as an effort to let someone who’d spent a full twenty-four hours or more awake and working get some solid rest. No one would question it, and more importantly no one would question Severus. He nodded. “Thank you.”

“Got a good head on your shoulders, Potter. Keep it there.” Moody thumped him on the back, then turned away to leave.

“Are you going on?”

“Nah. I’ll be heading to London as soon as I can, see what the examiners find on Trelawney’s body.”

“Right.” Harry thought for a moment, then said, “I am expecting one or two letters and a package to be delivered here. If for some reason I can’t claim them, you should.” They wouldn’t help him much. He wouldn’t understand them. But they had to go to someone, if Harry wasn’t available.

“What’s in’em?”

“The letters should have the same answer to an Astronomy question I asked, and the package… it’s a sort of test. I think I know what’s in it, but I’m not sure.” Moody looked at him with both eyes, and Harry ducked his head. “I might have lied to Jean at the owl post, a little bit. A lot, actually. Anyway, it’s a package Remus Lupin sent out earlier today, and I’m hoping I’ve managed to commandeer it.”

“Lupin, eh?”

“Yes.”

“You sure?”

“That he mailed the package? Oh yes, I watched him carry it.”

Moody stared at him, still with both eyes, then nodded. “Right. If you somehow can’t get your mail, I’ll have someone take it for you. I’m not your errand boy, though. Unless you’re dead, no one’s touching it.”

“Well, I hope it won’t come to that.” Harry made a shooing gesture at the old Auror, which caused his fake eye to spin madly. “Go on, then. I’ve been told to go to bed early, and I’m going to. Good night!”

Chapter 14: Statements and Intent

As Miss Cooke had predicted, Harry didn’t have to give a statement. The patroller, a bored wizard somewhere in his thirties (most likely, anyway; once again Harry was annoyed at his inability to place wizard ages properly) just confirmed that he hadn’t been anywhere near Bonaventure Rocks on the date in question and told him to go. Harry did go, but only as far as a chair with a good view of the door to the room where interviews were being conducted, in which he sat with his sketchbook and mostly-pretended to be trying to accurately copy a distinctly mediocre landscape painting hung on the wall opposite.

Harry’s experience of being interviewed by Magical Law Enforcement was, predictably, the quickest and simplest of what might be termed the simple witnesses. (Severus, of course, was a special case in a number of ways, and Harry was relieved to learn that Moody had been as good as his word and the patroller had not gone near him.) Most of Harry’s fellow travelers had a comparatively short and simple interview, lengthened only by their own tendency to go on at length or, in the case of Mr. Karkaroff (who had astonishingly not fled in the night), speak Russian roughly half the time.

There were four who seemed to Harry to stay longer in the interview, and three of them were expected. Neville and Anthony, with their report of a figure in a red-and-yellow checked jumper amongst the rocks above where Miss Trelawney had been struck, had of course been held longer simply because they had more to say. Both spotted Harry and came over to chat with him briefly after being released; both told him (Neville nervously and Anthony excitedly) that they’d had their memories of the figure in the jumper copied out for Pensieve analysis. Similarly, Mrs. Longbottom had seen the ‘accident’ most directly and clearly, so she spent longer being questioned. Harry didn’t hear whether her memories had been harvested, but suspected they had. The unexpected longer interview was Miss Cooke; Harry could not account for it at all. She had said she’d been close enough to be struck in the shoulder by small rocks, but hadn’t offered anything more concrete or interesting than that to her fellow travelers. Everyone else had, or seemed to have, offered all their experience of the event, in order to feel a part of it, a part of the group. But to have a longer interview, there was something more to Miss Cooke, or her story, or both.

Harry wasn’t self-centered enough to think she was confessing having lied about being Mary Bartlett some weeks before, or alternatively that she was actually Mary Bartlett and was lying about being Dora Cooke. He was beginning to be of the opinion that she wasn’t either lady, and inclined to wonder who she was. For sure, whoever she was – even if this did seem a little self-centered - she’d come to Ottery St. Catchpole and stood outside his garden just to get a look at him and talk to him. A full week at least before he’d received the letter from Rookwood and Runcorn, more than that before he’d met them and agreed to Mr. Riddle’s proposition.

There was an extremely short list of people who might have brought Miss Cooke (or Miss Whoever) into play. It was worth bearing in mind, if not worth much concern.

But none of that gave him any idea why she might have more to say to a patroller on the subject of a supposed hiking injury.

In the middle of the afternoon, Harry received a reply to one of his letters. (Interestingly, it was delivered by the rocketlike little owl Skoti. It amused Harry to think she had a crush, so he informed her gently but quite solemnly that he already had an owl, and Hedwig was the jealous type. Skoti nipped his fingertips upon streaking out, which he accepted as the price of stringing a girl along.)

Normally, Hermione wrote very long letters. Harry liked to kid that it was because she was no longer at school and was no longer turning in four-foot essays when eighteen inches had been requested. Hermione said she just liked to be thorough. Whatever her reasons, this letter was decidedly against type as it was only nine words (four of which were the greeting and close), and since it contained a post-script from Ron it also became the first time Ron had ever written a longer letter than his wife.

Dear Harry,

August 26. What’s going on?

Love, Hermione

P.S. I HEARD YOU MET MOODY HE’S INSANE! HE ONCE CALLED ME A FAT-ARSED GINGER NIGHTMARE AND I THINK IT WAS MEANT TO BE A COMPLIMENT! HE LIKED YOU THOUGH. WHAT’S GOING ON? LOVE, RON

Harry read it, short though it was, three times. He smiled each time at Ron’s postscript, at both his friends signing ‘love’, and the clear concern of the mutual ‘what’s going on’. He didn’t intend to answer. They were his best friends, and he loved them, but they would not be helpful here.

He did not smile upon reading the answer he’d expected. He burned the letter to ashes.

The Tour group that assembled for dinner that evening was a somber and quiet party. Mrs. Crabbe further depressed the mood by announcing that there was to be a small and local memorial service for Miss Trelawney in a local church (the very one with the ‘vulgar’ red and blue glass and uncomfortable pews that Harry had visited) the next morning, to provide closure to the community and the Tour group, as Miss Trelawney’s body would eventually be claimed by family, and was to be held as evidence in the investigation of her death in the meantime. The small groups that had formed to date had splintered fully, replaced by groups that Harry could label easily as ‘going on’ and ‘leaving’.

Going on were Mr. and Mrs. Walker, Mrs. Longbottom, Mrs. Figg, Miss Macmillan, Miss Cooke, Anthony, and Neville. Harry thought it was likely that either Anthony and Neville would split off from that group sooner or later or that Mrs. Longbottom would simply acquire a second young man to carry her luggage for her.

The ‘leaving’ group consisted of Professor Moody, Mr. Karkaroff, and Mr. and Mrs. Fudge. Harry was surprised that Moody hadn’t already gone, but promised himself to catch up with the man after dinner and ask him for a favour. Or another favour, if one were to count ‘collect my mail if I die’. Mr. Karkaroff and the Fudges had already expressed their intention to go home rather than on – to London for the Fudges, to who-knew-where for Mr. Karkaroff.

Severus, who had rejoined the group for the evening meal (looking fairly rested, Harry thought, pleased by that if not by the return of all three million buttons) sat alone, as was his habit. Harry, because he wanted to and because he decided to make a group labeled ‘other’, took a seat with him. “Are you going on or leaving?” he asked without preamble. “I plan to stay on here for a few days, I think. It’s been quite a trying sort of time, and this is a nice village and decent hotel.”

“I’ve been asked to stay here. In case, I am told, there are questions or complications regarding Miss Trelawney’s recent medical history.” Harry didn’t sense any unusual tension in the man, so he decided that meant the request was pure formality. Or at least that Severus, likely much more paranoid about law enforcement than Harry, had decided it was a formality. “I’m rather surprised you’re not going on. You seemed quite interested in Famous Gardens when we spoke at Nettlebed. But then, I did hear you’d made some local friends.”

“I don’t know that I’d call them friends. Maybe one or two, but not all three.” Harry shrugged. “A late friend of mine left me this trip in his will, I don’t know if I mentioned it to you – a Mr. Riddle – and he also asked them to host me during the more strenuous parts of the Tour here. It was very kind and considerate of him, because I really could not have managed anything like rock-climbing, but I don’t think we all made the best impression of each other.”

“Ah.” Severus didn’t ask which one or two, and Harry thought it was because he was entirely capable of guessing. He did, after all, know the residents of Old Manor House to at least some degree. “Will you visit them again before you go home?”

“Yes, I expect so. It would only be polite to say good-bye, after they were so kind.” Harry smiled at the older man, trying for teasing. “For the record, I expect a good-bye from you before you go wherever you’re going, once you’re allowed.”

“That depends entirely on how much patience I have left, at that point.”

“You never did say whether or not I can use your name. You can use mine.” Feeling greatly daring, Harry reached out to cover one of Severus’s hands with his own as it rested on the table. “I’d like you to use mine.”

The older man froze, stared at their hands on the table, and after almost a minute like that, very slowly pulled his hand away and out from under Harry’s. “Not in public,” he said. It wasn’t a snap or a hiss, and after a moment, he added, “Harry,” in exactly the same tone someone else might have said please.

“We’ll talk about that later.” Oh yes, they certainly would. Possibly at length, if Harry had anything to say about it. He suppressed what would probably have been a fairly idiotic smile and pulled his hand back as well.

After that, they ate in silence, until Harry abandoned the dinner table entirely to not-exactly-chase Professor Moody on his way out. “Professor, wait a moment! I need to talk to you.”

Moody sighed, trying to look put upon. “What is it, Potter?”

“I have three questions. First, how quickly do Law Enforcement or Aurors view memories obtained during interviews? Second, if you had to take over Miss Trelawney’s investigation, could you? Or get someone else in? Third, was it a compliment when you called Ron a fat-arsed ginger nightmare? Because he thinks it was.”

“If you’re talking about the ones I think, they’ll be viewed sometime tomorrow I’d bet. Could be a suspect. As to taking over, not me. I’m retired from field. I could lean on people and get someone of mine in if I had to-”

“You have to.” Harry said firmly, then took another chance. “Miss Cooke’s already here, put her in charge. Got some parchment on you or something?”

“And why d’you think Miss Cooke-“

“Didn’t you yourself say I’ve got a good head?” Harry asked, suddenly impatient. There were too many stupid lies and secrets, and they took his attention away from the less stupid ones. “She changed her face – Polyjuice or something – and came to get a look at me at home, before I heard from Mr. Riddle’s solicitors but not before you heard from Riddle personally. I’m pretty sure Mr. Riddle didn’t hire her for me, because he tried to hire you,” and the guardian angel Riddle had mentioned was definitely not Moody, “and I don’t know that you ever actually told him where he could stick it. You said you were curious, so you must’ve told her to check out ‘Riddle’s secret weapon’. She’s your partner or something. Parchment, Professor, have you got any?”

Moody just glared at him.

Harry rolled his eyes. “Don’t look at me like that, it’s not my fault you tell me things.” He moved to a little table with a wide-leafed plant on it, plucked two of the leaves, and turned one into paper and the other into a Muggle ballpoint pen. He scribbled a note, folded it up, then offered it to Moody. “If you can do what I ask, give that to her. It’s important.”

The old Auror took the note and unfolded it to read. After a few seconds, he folded it back up again. “You’re sure?”

“About that at least, yes. Completely.”

“I’ll do what I can.” Moody slipped the folded note, carefully enough, into one of his pockets. “And no. It wasn’t a compliment.”

“I thought not.”

Chapter 15: In Memoriam

Once again, Harry woke up early. He didn’t have to pack up to leave, as a few words to Mrs. Crabbe – who had really been so accommodating, even if Harry was fairly sure that what she wanted most of all was to ensure that her travel bureau didn’t get a bad reputation due to the death of one of its tourists – had been enough to ensure that his room would stay his until he decided to leave. He did, however, plan to attend the little memorial for Miss Trelawney, and as such needed to do what he could to be presentable for such a thing. His usual casual and worn-comfortable Muggle wear would not do, so he had to take some time to actually Transfigure some of his clothes. (Accio Something Appropriate was not a really effective spell.)

The rest of the Tour seemed to have had much the same idea as Harry, though he thought that quite possibly most of them had actually packed something appropriate to a more formal occasion, if not anything specifically meant for a funeral. No one wore black, particularly – except Severus, and Harry would have been genuinely surprised if there was anything not black or white in the man’s wardrobe – but various grays and purples abounded, coats or scarves mostly. Half-mourning colors, in this case not meant to signal old grief but rather impersonal grief of the ‘I didn’t pack anything black’ variety. (The Weasleys were a large family, with some branches more inclined to formality than others, so Harry had not only learned about half-mourning from them, he’d learned the commonest ways it was used to mean something other than it was meant to. Also, he’d learned that really, he had almost no interest in fashion at all.)

Those who were going on or leaving had their luggage loaded into the coach; the Fudges and Mr. Karkaroff were going to be dropped off at the closest train station while those who were continuing with the Tour did so. Harry assumed he and Severus were meant to make their own way back to the Golden Boar, but it turned out that the man didn’t plan to attend the memorial at all. Harry supposed he could understand that; he’d had to watch Miss Trelawney die while nothing he did seemed to help at all, perhaps a memorial felt like rubbing it in. So really, it was just Harry who was left to his own devices.

The memorial was entirely impersonal. A speaker of no particular note, delivering platitudes of no particular meaning. Of some interest was the fact that there actually were non-Tour attendees. Remus and Sirius were present, Sirius projecting a clear enough I don’t want to be here that Harry wondered whether he was there because Remus had asked him or because he’d invited himself along to keep an eye on his housemate. Jean from the owl post was there, wearing entirely correct black including black lipstick (which wasn’t exactly entirely correct) instead of the loud red Harry had seen her in before. A black owl sat on the back of a pew next to her. Harry wondered if, perhaps, Jean had attended Fallowfield, and if Miss Trelawney had been headmistress during that time. A number of faces he didn’t recognise were probably former students, come to that.

One person stood out quite a bit – a tall, slender elderly lady in black with a very impressive hat. She looked serious and stern – like Mrs. Longbottom, she was Someone not only in her own mind but in reality. Unlike Mrs. Longbottom, her aura of authority was not imperious but merely firmly decided. She was certainly no former student, if only because she was most likely older than the late Miss Trelawney. A friend, perhaps, or a relation? Not close, if so – Harry thought someone who’d been truly close to Miss Trelawney would wait for the real funeral, whenever it occurred, and not attend a little memorial held out of duty, meant to provide ‘closure’ to uncomfortable strangers.

As unobtrusively as he could, he moved to sit close to her. Not next to her, that would have been notable, but the pew directly behind her had enough space that he could play up his bad knee by stretching his left leg out on it. There were few enough gaps that were large enough to allow such a thing that it was believable he should be there by coincidence, and that was really all he wanted.

Once the speaker had finally finished speaking and people started to file out, Harry not-at-all-on-accident fell in with the elderly lady. She turned a disapproving sort of look on him, but that was the only indication he had that she had both noticed his maneuvering and realised the reason for it. He was left to speak first.

Harry rarely had difficulty speaking. “What a lovely speech, I thought. Of course, not someone who really knew Miss Trelawney, but very comforting in an unsettling time.”

“And I suppose you think you knew her?” She had a Scottish accent, though it sounded like it had been tamed somewhat either by time or effort. Harry imagined that when she’d been young she might have been almost incomprehensible, but that was the sort of thing he would never know.

“Oh, no. I mean, I did, very slightly. We had quite an interesting conversation a few days before her terrible accident. She was a very interesting lady, I very much wanted to speak with her again.” Harry sighed. “But I didn’t get a chance. Did you know her?”

“I did. Sybill was a dear friend of many years, though,” the woman ducked her face behind her hatbrim briefly, embarrassed, “I must admit we got on much better at a distance. I had no tolerance for her Second Sight and Third Eye nonsense, and I believe she thought me rather narrow-minded for it.”

“She did talk about being a Seer, but as she said it while describing a prophecy that didn’t, you know, mean anything I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it.” He shoved his glasses up on his nose, awkward but acceptably scholarly. “She said she was on a quest, even – so I’m afraid I thought she was just a dramatic person.” And then she died, he did not say, but the woman heard. “I’m Harry, by the way. Harry Potter.”

“Minerva McGonagall. Mrs. McGonagall.” She was very much not interested in being on first name terms with a strange young man who talked to her out of nowhere, even if he’d managed to interest her enough to continue the conversation. “A quest, she said? For what?”

“She didn’t say! She talked about her prophecy immediately after though, so I thought they were linked.”

“In point of fact, she was coming to visit me. I live in the village you were meant to be visiting in two days’ time. She wrote me some time ago to say that she planned to be on this Tour and would I mind if she stayed with me rather than at whatever hostel she’d have boarded at otherwise. I said yes, of course. It’s been years since we’ve seen each other, I felt I could manage a few days of her company.” Mrs. McGonagall seemed very slightly misty, which was completely understandable. “I don’t know that I’m very comfortable thinking her visit to me was a quest.”

“I’m sure she genuinely intended to have a nice visit,” Harry said reassuringly, not that Mrs. McGonagall probably needed much reassurance. “I think she wanted to ask you something, and calling it a quest made it sound less ridiculous to her.” He thought, now, that Miss Trelawney had probably been rather sensitive about being called or thought ridiculous – likely because it had in fact happened a great deal.

“Oh do you?” That disapproving expression was back, either because Mrs. McGonagall had noticed that Harry – despite saying that he thought Miss Trelawney had been a dramatic person – had in fact paid close attention to and thought about the ‘dramatics’, or because she thought he was nosy.

Well, it was both. “Yes. I think she wanted to ask you about a girl named Lily who was going to have a baby. I don’t know what she wanted to ask you about her, though.”

“Ahhh. Yes, Lily Evans. I do remember her.” Mrs. McGonagall shook her head. “And she’d been a great favourite of Sybill’s at Fallowfield, I now recall.”

“If you can imagine what Miss Trelawney would have asked you about her, Mrs. McGonagall, can you tell me what you’d have told her? I’d love to know.” He offered the older lady a little smile. “I think it might be nice to complete her quest for her, if I can.”

“Oh, I doubt you’ll be able to do that, but I’ve no real objection.” They left the church together, walking slowly much more for Harry’s comfort than Mrs. McGonagall’s – she struck him as a brisk walker in general and he appreciated the consideration in her slower pace. The rest of the Tour, both those continuing and those leaving, were boarding the coach. Harry returned waves from Anthony and Neville, but didn’t abandon his conversation. He also didn’t miss Remus and Sirius standing off to one side with a good view of him not leaving with the others.

Once they were past the main knots and groups of people, Mrs. McGonagall continued, “One thing that Sybill knew quite well that you would have no way of knowing, Mr. Potter, is that before I retired I worked for the Ministry. In the Records office, technically, though my actual work was more ceremonial. I conducted marriages, witnessed wills, recorded the establishment of godparents and such, cast the occasional formal Fidelius when it was required but those who required it lacked the skill for the charm. That sort of thing.”

“That sounds like interesting work!” It did, in a way. Probably tedious a great deal of the time, but Mrs. McGonagall had probably seen a great many people and relationships come and go over the years. No doubt she had been quite well-respected, and had earned it.

“It was satisfying enough, and kept me busy. Not terribly long before the poor girl turned up dead – six weeks, maybe seven – she came to my office with two young men and asked to be married. Naturally, I first had to inform her that I would not be able to marry her to two young men. No matter how desperate she was to be married before her baby was born, she would have to make a decision first.”

“She wanted two husbands? Seems a little greedy to me.”

“As it turned out, no. One of the young men was the father of her baby and her intended husband, and the other was, she said, a very dear friend who was there to stand up with them and witness.” Mrs. McGonagall waved one hand. “In my defense, it was perfectly clear to me that both of the young men loved her dearly, how was I to know? A pregnant girl turning up in my office with two boys and saying ‘marry us’? Young people, Mr. Potter, are frequently ridiculous.”

“We are, yes.” Harry didn’t wilt under a third disapproving stare, just smiled at her again. “So they got married? How sweet! Her and… James, yes? The father of her baby?”

“James Potter, yes.” Very slight emphasis on his last name informed Harry that she’d noticed his last name. “And no. I advised them that I would require two witnesses, and was told that that would not be a problem. We arranged that they should all come back with their additional witness, we fixed a date for two weeks later when I had an opening in my schedule… and then they never arrived.”

“No?”

“Not a peep did I hear from any of them, and I don’t mind saying it annoyed me at the time. I’d no idea.” She sighed. “If I’d thought for a second that anything had happened to that girl apart from rudeness I’d have marched to the DMLE myself.”

Which one was it? Miss Trelawney had asked in her final lucid moments. Which one? “Did Miss Trelawney know which friend went to your office with Miss Evans and Mr. Potter?”

“Of course she did, I told her. Of course I told Auror Moody that young brute Snape had accompanied those two poor things to my office, weeks before they died, and I thought nothing of it.” She was really angry about it still, Harry thought – even after this long. “I’ve never been so wrong before or since. Certainly I noticed there was no love lost between him and Potter, and I should have paid more attention, but-“

“You thought he really loved Lily,” Harry interrupted quietly. “It didn’t make sense that he would hurt her, based on what you saw, which made the whole thing much more terrible.” He was glad Severus had opted not to attend the memorial (had he guessed? It seemed likely to Harry that he’d guessed there would be at least one person present who’d know his face) and tried not to let on that he was quite certain that Mrs. McGonagall had in fact been never been wrong.

“Precisely, yes. I cannot imagine what Sybill wanted to ask me about that she didn’t already know, though.” She sighed, grieving for the long-dead and the recently-dead both. “Perhaps she was simply being dramatic, as you thought.”

“It’s possible. It’s rather sad if so.” So, which one was it didn’t mean ‘which one came to McGonagall’s office’. They’d needed a second witness, though… if Severus had been there for Lily, then the second witness would have almost had to be one of the other residents of Old Manor House. Lily would bring one witness, and James would bring the other.

Yes. That felt right. Which one was it? “If I find out for sure, Mrs. McGonagall, would you like me to tell you? I fancy I may think about it a bit more and see if I can come up with anything.”

“I doubt you will, the woman’s dead and not a ghost to my knowledge, but please yourself. Perhaps she has a portrait at Fallowfield, if you care to visit there. You might be able to talk your way in.”

Harry laughed. “I don’t think I’ll go that far, but I’ll keep it in mind, thank you.”

“Hmm. Well, I do hope you got what you wanted in my very old, well-known news. I shall Apparate home now. It was a pleasure meeting you.” She didn’t wait for Harry to respond before popping out of existence, which he took to mean that it had not in fact been a pleasure to meet him, she was just polite enough to say so anyway.

Chapter 16: Final Steps

Harry continued to walk slowly in the direction of the Golden Boar after Mrs. McGonagall left, letting things sort and filter in his mind. He had, he thought, a fairly clear picture now, and only wanted some final confirmation.

About a block away from the hotel, quick footsteps sounded behind him and a hand tapped him on the shoulder. He’d heard the footsteps just before the hand touched him, so it didn’t startle him as badly as when Moody had done it, but Harry jerked a little to the side anyway.

“I’m sorry,” said Remus Lupin, looking genuinely sheepish as he stepped alongside Harry rather than behind. “I should have called out. Are you not going on with the rest of your group?”

“No, I thought I wouldn’t enjoy Famous Houses or Famous Gardens so much after a lady as pleasant as Miss Trelawney died. I was planning to have a sort of resting holiday at the Golden Boar for a few days before going home.” Harry had offered that explanation so many times now that it felt very worn and smooth, barely like a lie at all.

“Oh? You should come and stay with us again, then. I’m sure Old Manor House would be much quieter than a hotel. We’d have fewer people coming and going at least.” Something strange was animating Remus now – not the sad-sick-scared that usually filled him, not the here-and-gone warmth and humor of that one evening. It almost seemed like… anticipation? Eagerness, in a way? Regardless of what it actually was, his basic consideration and manners had not changed, as he opened and held the door of the Boar for Harry entirely automatically.

“I don’t think Sirius would like that much,” Harry replied. “I don’t think he liked me much, honestly.”

“Sirius will have a fair amount to say, but it shouldn’t – won’t! – be to you. Or to Peter. Not this time.”

Had Sirius been upset with Peter last time? Almost certainly, though Harry had only caught the reactions around it and hadn’t been party to any yelling about it or anything. The young witch at the front desk - a teenager with a summer job, almost certainly – waved vigorously upon seeing Harry, then bounded around to present him with a package. “Here you are, sir, your package. Dropped off by that Wilbur just half an hour ago. We would’ve sent it up, but as you’re here you can have it now.”

Harry forced himself to smile and thank her, and absolutely did not scream your timing is dreadful! at her departing back, because he wasn’t sure that there was much of anything more awkward than walking with a man and being handed a package of his you’d arranged to steal.

Remus recognised it, because of course he did. He didn’t get angry or upset, though. He stared at it for a few seconds, then his eyes flicked up to meet Harry’s. Dead calm, on top of that strange anticipation, and his tone was completely level and quiet when he spoke. “You really must come stay with us. I absolutely insist. I’m sure it will be the best thing for everyone. Shall I collect your case?”

This, Harry realised, was definitely the sort of situation that Mr. Riddle had meant, when his letter talked about a need for guardian angels. He thought he’d managed to arrange one of his own, but he might as well arrange for the other – if he was lucky, neither would be required, but as he’d said once already… he wasn’t exactly known for his good luck. He smiled brightly and handed Remus his room key, but held on to the package. “That’s really so kind of you, Old Manor House was really very comfortable. I accept. I just need to say a quick good-bye and I’ll catch up with you?”

“I’ll wait by your room for you, we can walk together.”

“Sounds lovely!” Harry stealthily pocketed an ashtray from a side table, then pushed himself to a little extra speed so he could get out of sight fast enough to pull out his wand and start casting spells on his somewhat-grubby prize, and be done before stopping in front of a door.

Harry was perceptive, and he’d learned nosiness at the feet of Molly Weasley, the probable highest mistress of the art of minding other people's business. He knew which rooms everyone in the Tour had occupied, so he knew exactly where to find Severus Snape if the man was in his room, and where else would he be? Sure enough, after Harry knocked a rapid and probably annoying series on the door, the man answered.

Lacking outer robe and cloak again, Harry approved; of course it would have been odd to stay fully bundled up in his private space. But this time, he didn’t let himself get distracted. Not too distracted, anyway. “I’ve only got a few minutes, so you don’t have to put up with me playing. If I called, would you come?”

“Excuse me?” Severus was taken aback and, for a clear second, tempted to shut the door in Harry’s face. But he didn’t. In fact he stared intensely at Harry, tilting his head slightly as if considering something new.

“If I called for you, would you come?” Harry tried to pack as much this is important into his tone and body language as he could.

Severus nodded slowly. “Yes. I would.”

“Good. Thank you.” Harry handed over his ashtray. “I’ll send my Patronus, and that should get you to me wherever I am. I mean, I know where I’ll be. But you won’t. And you should be ready.”

“For what?”

Impulsively, Harry set down the package and leaned in to hug the older man. “I was told that I might need a guardian angel,” he murmured. “I pick you. I think you’ve got some experience in the job.”

“But a significantly bad track record,” Severus murmured back. He didn’t return the hug, but also didn’t push Harry away, and Harry considered that a net positive.

Unfortunately he didn’t have a lot of time, so he released Severus quickly enough, anyway. “I’ll take my chances. Thank you.”

He didn’t wait for a response, because he didn’t have time to possibly be asked to explain himself, but picked the package back up and started walking (limping slightly more than usual as his knee complained about being pushed) back to his own room. He reached it, entirely coincidentally (actually coincidentally, not clever timing for once), just as Remus was closing the door behind him, Harry’s suitcase and overnight bag in hand. “You’re tidier than I expected you’d be,” the man remarked mildly.

“I know, people do tend to see the hair and think ‘oh no!’ But I spent years in care and at Hogwarts and the Burrow – that’s where my family lives – and I learned the value of keeping my things in order so I can actually find them when I want them.” Harry’s chatter didn’t do much to defuse his tension, but it was at least familiar ground.

“In care? Your family-“

“I’m adopted.” Not formally, not legally, but the Weasleys would be insulted en masse if he claimed they were anything less than family. “Did I not mention? Well, probably not, I don’t really think about it much.” Harry wasn’t willing to go into much depth on the subject of his actual past, so he shifted instead to telling stories about the Weasleys. Fred and George’s pranks, Ginny’s various acts of not-always-proportionate vengeance upon them, Arthur’s fascination with and total lack of understanding of all things Muggle.

It passed the time and, he thought, distracted Remus from whatever was actually going on inside his scarred head, long enough for them to reach Old Manor House. “I’ll put your things in your room,” Remus said, still mild. “The same one as before, since you know where it is. Please make yourself comfortable in the meantime. Sirius and Peter are both out, but they should be back soon.”

“Thank you.” Harry watched Remus go up the stairs with suitcase and overnight bag, more than a little nonplussed at how conveniently things were going his way. He’d planned to try and finagle a visit to Old Manor House, and he had been invited. He’d wanted a chance to look around, and he’d been left alone and all but told to do exactly that.

So that’s how it is. He probably should have expected as much.

He didn’t bother to wait until the man was out of sight before turning and heading for the kitchen, and the door to the cellar located there. There was no point being sneaky.

The cellar was in fact cellars – three rooms connected by a hallway, all fitted stone. One, when Harry opened the door and poked his head in, seemed to be genuinely in use as a pantry. Wine racks on the walls, mostly empty of bottles, testified to what it had been (the wine cellar), back when Old Manor House hadn’t been so Old. The second one he looked in appeared to be a potions laboratory and stockroom. He actually poked around in this one. It was well-organised, he thought, and didn’t have much in the way of rare or expensive ingredients. Only a few things, in fact, marked it as a grown wizard’s space and not a student’s workroom – a good quality cast-iron cauldron rather than basic pewter, a cluster of ingredients like boomslang skin that were beyond what students ever needed. A few bunches of herbs and flowers dangled from the ceiling to dry – products of Remus’s little corner garden, no doubt.

Harry had saved the third room for last because of its door. Heavy ironwood very nearly throbbing with magic, with dark steel reinforcing bands and solid lock. A dark steel key hung on one of a pair of hooks on the wall about a foot from the door, and a wedge of ironwood hung from the other. Harry ignored the wedge and used the key to unlock and open the door, then walked into the room beyond.

It was fitted stonework, just like the others, but unlike the others it was completely bare of furnishings or supplies. Unlike the others, there were deep gouges here and there in the walls and floor, even one or two on the ceiling. Harry moved closer to one, a deeply-scored line in one of the walls, when Remus spoke from the doorway, “Ah, here you are, Harry. I wondered where you’d gone.”

Harry straightened up and turned to look at the scarred man. Remus was leaning in the doorway, blocking it. “Peter said once that you’d lock yourself in the cellar always if you were allowed. I don’t think he was talking about the pantry, was he?”

Remus actually chuckled. “No, he wasn’t. This is my room. The other two are his.”

“Sirius doesn’t come down here?”

“He does. Twice a month, when he has to. The rest of the time the cellars are ours.” Remus leaned forward to catch the handle of the heavy door and pull it nearly closed, and raised his voice a little to carry through the barrier. “You see? There’s no handle on the inside. If you’re locked in, you have to wait for someone to let you out. There’s no other way.”

“I see.” Harry watched, trying not to tense up. Sirius locked him in, and Sirius let him out. Every month. Twice a month, a couple of times a year. Like clockwork, every full moon.

He was reminded, suddenly, of the hedge maze at Nettlebed Manor, where he’d thought fancifully of how cruel it would be if someone could stop the hedge maze letting people out again.

After a few seconds, Remus opened the door all the way and stood back from the doorway. “You should probably come out. Just so you know, the wedge here,” he gestured at the wooden wedge on its hook, “is to keep the door open. It likes to close on its own sometimes.”

“Good to know, thanks.” Harry exited the room, not quite at top speed, and sure enough the door swung closed and latched itself the moment Remus took his hand off of it.

He followed Remus back up into the kitchen. “I think coffee this afternoon, rather than tea. Unless you don’t drink coffee?”

“I like to say I’m not picky, but I do have to add enough milk and sugar that I can’t tell it’s coffee. Do you want help?” Harry had to do something to settle nerves that wanted to twang all over the place, and kitchen tasks seemed like a decent option.

“Why not?” They worked together fairly efficiently and mostly quietly, putting together not just coffee things – and since Harry knew he had not been kidding about taking a lot of milk and sugar, he made sure there was a lot of both – but various sandwiches and a few pastries that were probably a day or so old. Peter may have been the most domestically-inclined of the three friends, Harry thought, but Remus was no stranger or slouch.

They were arranging trays when Sirius burst in. Harry managed not to flinch, but Remus looked like he didn’t even have to try. He barely even blinked when Sirius pointed at Harry and snarled, “What is he doing here? Again.”

“I invited him.” Placid. Calm. It was such a change from the bundle of nerves Remus had been nearly all the other times Harry had seen him that it made him the scarier of the two – Sirius’s rage burned hot and, as always when it did, violence seemed very imminent, but Remus’s new and seemingly untouchable dead calm in the face of it was worse.

Sirius felt it too, and like Harry had seen in him before, it was like he just blew out his anger like a candle. This time, though, he switched to what sounded like pleading rather than the cold threat he’d turned on Harry. “Moony. No. You can’t.”

“I did. You saw it. He stayed behind.”

“That doesn’t mean-“ Sirius stopped himself, then marched up to Remus and slid a hand around the back of his neck, forcing his head to turn so their eyes met. “I. Said. No. I meant it.”

“You don’t get a say anymore.” Remus mimicked the gesture, sliding his own hand around the back of Sirius’s neck, but then leaning forward to rest their foreheads together. “I’m tired, Padfoot. Let go.”

Sirius said, “No,” but he let go of Remus’s neck.

Remus ignored him, stepped back, and picked up the coffee tray. “Help Harry carry things into the sitting room, would you? It’s awkward for him.” And then he exited the kitchen.

As soon as he was gone, Sirius turned a full-force glare on Harry. “Why. Why did you have to-?” He clenched and unclenched his hands a few times, and Harry thought that maybe if he hadn’t prudently pulled himself well out of reach he’d have gotten punched. Sirius seemed to work through the urge, if it had really been there, and exhaled slowly before picking up the tray of food. He hadn’t worked through being angry, though, because he said absolutely icily over his shoulder, “I will never forgive you.”

Harry waited a minute after he’d gone, just breathing, clutching the package close like a shield or a pillow. Once he felt he was acceptably calm, he pulled out his wand and cast his Patronus. The gleaming silver stag watched him expectantly, then disappeared to deliver his message come in one hour.

One hour would bring them to early evening, a time when people could be reasonably expected to be at home. One hour should be enough time to calm down Old Manor House, just in time to stir them back up again. One hour was good.

Harry squared his shoulders and left the kitchen for the sitting room.

Peter had either returned with Sirius or just after, because he was seated in his apparently-customary place and had taken his apparently-customary role as preparer of everyone’s tea. Or coffee, in today’s case. Upon seeing Harry, he bounced to his feet and rushed over to collect a hug, burbling overjoyed sentence fragments like what a surprise and so glad you came back and so very happy. Harry patted him on the back until he let go and started fussing with coffee again, putting together a cup for Harry – lots of sugar and milk, as requested. He’d expected one warm greeting in the house, and he’d gotten it, but the rest of the afternoon – in fact, the last few days balled up into weeks, dating from a death notice in the Quibbler – prevented him from really enjoying it.

One hour.

Just like the first evening he’d spent at Old Manor House, Peter took on the lion’s share of the conversation, chatting with Harry about nothing much at all. Harry did his best to keep up, talking enough that his coffee ended up being for holding, not for drinking. Unlike the first evening, Sirius and Remus weren’t silent because they were playing chess. They seemed to have reversed roles somewhat – Remus was sitting and placidly sipping coffee, and Sirius was glancing between him and Harry, trying to look calm but failing increasingly badly.

Fifty minutes into the hour, a firm knock sounded on the front door.

Peter stopped chattering mid-sentence to look in that direction, perplexed. “Now who would that be? I’m not expecting anyone. Did either of you-“

“I expect it’s Hit Wizards,” Harry said. “And an Auror. And if you don’t let them in, I will.”

Sirius flinched, Remus sipped coffee, and Peter looked completely flummoxed. But he stood up slowly, for once not bouncing at all, and walked to answer the front door.

Sure enough, he was followed back into the sitting room by five people. Four were in heavy midnight-blue robes, wore identical determined expressions, and had their wands firmly in hand. The last was a rather pretty young woman (a number of years older than Harry but still young – Bill Weasley’s age, maybe) with bubblegum-pink hair and a more professional and less warmly-friendly version of Miss Cooke’s (and Miss Bartlett’s) wide smile. “Thanks for not making us kick in the door.”

Remus set his coffee cup on a side table. “I’m ready.”

She gave him an odd look. “Good to know?” It didn’t put her off-balance for long, because she flicked a hand at Sirius, and all four Hit Wizards aimed their wands at him. “Sirius Black, you’re under arrest for the murder of Miss Sybill Trelawney, using Dark magic.”

Chapter 17: And Righteousness Like An Ever-Flowing Stream

Pandemonium reigned in the sitting room of Old Manor House. Sirius and Remus were both on their feet yelling at Auror Miss Bartlett-Cooke (whose name Harry still didn’t know), Sirius explosively denying killing anybody let alone some woman I never met and Remus backing him up and demanding what real proof there could possibly be. Peter did his best to flatten himself against the back of his chair, trying to shrink away from the entire situation. He looked close to tears.

Harry set his package down on the table and rested his untouched coffee cup on top of it, then took advantage of the chaos to quickly Apparate up to what he still thought of as the Potter Bedroom and retrieve a particular item from his suitcase. It had been a bit egotistical to pack it, he thought, and more than a bit silly. But it had seemed right at the time, and so it seemed again.

The scene hadn’t changed much when he returned to the sitting room and his chair – a bit closer to being a real fight, maybe. Miss Cooke had her wand out as well, Remus had stepped forward to put himself between the law enforcement squad and Sirius as best he could. Peter’s close to tears had become actual tears, and he was wringing his hands a little.

Harry took a breath, then put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. It was sharp, it was shrill, and most of all it was loud. He’d learned and perfected the skill in his last years at Hogwarts, when he’d been Quidditch captain and had to wrangle six other teenagers who tended to massive dramatics. (The Gryffindor Quidditch team of his sixth and seventh years had sometimes been less of a team and more of a sort of an improvisational soap opera.) Just as it had done when he was in school, the sound shocked people into silence, and all eyes – along with about half the wands - turned to him.

Naturally, Severus chose that moment to pop into the sitting room as well via the makeshift Portkey Harry had made. Harry had thought he had a fine sense of drama, but apparently drama simply came naturally to the man, there was no way he could possibly have known that this would be a moment of silence. There was no way Harry could think of for him to have known that his appearance right that second would be a pebble dropped in a still pond. Or perhaps there had been, because he surveyed the room with no evident surprise, then moved to stand beside and slightly behind Harry’s chair. “I’m a little early. I apologise, Harry.”

Harry’s it’s all right was swallowed up by three people yelling at once at both of them.

“YOU! What are you doing here?” Sirius.

“How are you here?” Remus.

“Potter, what are you wearing?” Auror Miss Bartlett-Cooke.

Harry whistled again and they shut up. “Good. Thank you. I’ve got a few things to say, Miss Cooke-“

“It’s Tonks. Auror Tonks.” She lowered her wand when she looked at him, and despite the sharpness of her words Harry thought perhaps she’d almost winked at him. Moody had not only gotten her into the investigation, he’d delivered Harry’s note.

Good. That would make things easier. “Is it? Thank you, I’d wondered. Not about the Auror thing, I’d guessed that. And I’m wearing a pink bathrobe Molly gave me.”

“Doesn’t help. You’re not going to stop me arresting-“

“Let me talk for a bit, and then you can arrest anyone you want.” Harry passed his coffee cup to Peter, who took it dumbly, then ripped into his package. “Just so everyone knows, you’re here to arrest Sirius because when Neville Longbottom and Anthony Goldstein’s memories were reviewed in a Ministry Pensieve, you were able to clearly identify the man they saw in a bright red and yellow jumper among the rocks above the walking-path at Bonaventure Rocks seconds or minutes before one such rock fell and ultimately killed Miss Sybill Trelawney. They weren’t able to identify the person they saw – it was too fast and they didn’t know Sirius’s face - but Pensieves show the memory of things as they actually happen, not as you see them or understand them. They’re pretty good for evidence when the memories are clean. One of the things you’re also here to do is search the house for that jumper.”

He opened the box and pulled out the jumper in question. “But you don’t have to search. It’s right here. Remus Lupin tried to mail it off to charity yesterday morning, but I intercepted it once I realized what it had to be. There aren’t a lot of things that’ll get him out of the house, you know.”

Sirius whipped around to stare at Remus. “It’s not mine, you did not-“

“Of course I did. Why would you think I wouldn’t?”

“So he tried to protect his housemate.” Tonks shrugged. “That counts against Black, not for.”

“Oh, I know. This is just a bit of theatre.” Harry set the jumper on his lap and folded his hands on top of it. “I needed to make sure everyone was paying attention. Auror Tonks, you definitely will be making an arrest tonight, but for four murders, not one. Four people have died, two of which got an innocent man,” he pointed at Severus, “sentenced to Azkaban for life.”

The entire room was silent and focused on Harry, even though the Hit Wizards still had their wands trained – one on Remus, two still on Sirius, and one (the oldest of the lot, Harry guessed) on Severus.

“About a year ago, I went on holiday in the Caribbean. It was a very nice gift from my family, and I was very grateful, but a number of things happened there that made it not especially restful. I won’t bore you with the details, they’re not really relevant. At one point, though, I went to someone for help while I was wearing this robe. I told him that I was Nemesis, justice and vengeance, and he laughed at me. For a bit, and then he stopped. He died three weeks ago or so, and in his will he asked for Nemesis. He asked me to investigate an injustice. ‘Destroy it utterly’ was the phrase he used. And I’m going to.” Mr. Riddle would get his money’s worth, though the money didn’t actually mean anything to either of them.

Sirius and Remus had both semi-collapsed into their sofa. Peter gripped Harry’s coffee cup as if not sure what to do with it. Everyone else watched Harry with expressions ranging from Tonks’s unreadable maybe-exasperation to the studied neutrality that Harry had once translated as ‘Severus Snape laughing on the inside.’

“But he didn’t tell me what injustice, or to who, or when it happened. He told me nothing – I believe he wanted to be sure I’d make up my own mind about things - but sent me on this Tour of Famous Houses and Gardens of the Wizarding World. On the second day, I heard from Miss Trelawney about a prophecy, a girl named Lily who’d died, and that she’d been killed by a boy she was involved with. After that, Riddle sent me here – he’d written before he died and asked that I be invited to stay – and I heard about James Potter who’d lived in this house, and how he’d died along with his girlfriend Lily. They were killed by a Death Eater who hated them. It seemed to me to be the same story from different perspectives, so I thought I’d found my injustice.”

“He did kill them,” Sirius spat abruptly.

“You actually know he didn’t, so don’t try.” Harry took a deep breath, then let it out. There was too much to say. He couldn’t afford to get distracted by Sirius Black. “Anyway. I heard the story again two more times – once from Auror Moody who told me about a murder case he’d come to be unhappy with, and once more from Mrs. McGonagall who used to work at the Ministry. Bits of the same story, from different people. I realised after the third time that it wasn’t the same story at all. Inconsistent, I think is the word that gets used.

“Auror Moody said that James disappeared about a month before Lily’s body was found. Remus said it was a week. Miss Trelawney talked about a girl asking her to be godmother and Mrs. McGonagall thought that Lily was desperate to marry quickly before her baby came, but Remus and Moody both only found out Lily was pregnant after her body was examined. And that’s the key. The body that was so badly cut up it had no face, and was pregnant but very early days, could not have been Lily Evans. Mrs. McGonagall is the only storyteller who actually saw Lily alive at the time, she’s the only one who could be right – and she saw a heavily pregnant woman about to give birth.”

“I saw Lily around the house regularly!” Remus protested. “Almost every day!”

“You didn’t, though. You just think you did. But sure, I can talk about that next. Auror Tonks, what was the cause of death of the body identified as Lily Evans?”

She fidgeted. “I don’t know. It was long before my time, and I don’t exactly read closed-case files.”

“She was strangled.” Severus’s voice was dark and smooth, with rage buried deep underneath. Poison honey. “There was quite a bit of testimony at my trial to that effect. Strangled, and cut by magic post-mortem.”

Remus went white. “That’s not… that’s not possible.”

“On the contrary, Lupin, it was the highlight of the case. She’d been cut by an unidentified Dark curse, and that same unidentified Dark Curse was found on my wand by Priori Incantatem.” The rage was less buried now, even if Severus hadn’t brought out his wand or even moved. Still very much in control of himself. “Sectumsempra, which I believe you will recognize.”

“I’ve never heard of that one!” Despite his determination to stay on task, Harry was distracted and twisted to look up at Severus. “I thought it would be Diffindo with intent.”

“I invented it. Sectumsempra cuts flesh specifically and precisely when used properly, and with the counter-curse – also my invention – it heals completely and cleanly with no scarring. I used it for surgery.” The last word was almost a whip-crack.

Harry tucked away the warm little feeling of being trusted, to look at and treasure later; I invented it would have been as good as more nails in a coffin – who could use a secret, personal spell other than the person who’d invented it? – but clearly Severus trusted that Harry, when handed nails and a hammer, would use them properly. There had been a war on. Surgery might well have been a daily event, which was why his wand had been full of it. Yes.

“But… no, but I….” Remus fumbled, grabbed for Sirius’s hand. Sirius let him, staring at both Harry and Severus in what Harry thought was probably horror.

Good.

Harry continued, “The only reason to take off someone’s face is so no one can see it. That woman was killed August 25^th or so, and I think by that time Lily had been dead for weeks. Her killer changed her hair, dressed her in Lily’s clothes, put Lily’s engagement ring on her finger, and dropped Lily’s wand and handbag nearby. Anyone, anyone, who saw that body would have known it to be Lily. But why were the rest of the cuts there? Just to draw attention away from the damage to her face? No.”

“No, that’s - I’m a werewolf,” Remus moaned, clinging to Sirius’s hand. “I’m a werewolf, I did that, I killed them, I got out, Lily let me out, she didn’t know, she-“

“Didn’t happen. But you were very much meant to think it did. Which is why the cuts. The killer didn’t expect anyone to be able to see ‘strangled’ with all the mauling, but it didn’t actually affect him much. Once I realised that body wasn’t Lily, my suspects narrowed to people who knew her well, people who might have access to her things. The people in this house.”

“Who’s that in her grave, then?” Tonks asked.

“I’d guess Marlene McKinnon. A local girl who disappeared and hasn’t been seen or heard from since. People think she got away when the rest of her family was killed, but I think she went on a date with a nice boy who strangled her and used her like a body double.” Harry paused, then added, “I don’t know that, of course. But I’d be surprised if I’m wrong.”

“I was there!” Remus snapped. “I think I’d know-!”

“I’m making a hash of this, I’m sorry. Last time we caught the bloke in the act, it was a lot easier. Let me try to go in order.” Now Harry did stand up. He thought he would do better if he was moving a bit. “Twenty-five years ago or so, Sybill Trelawney made a prophecy. It’s not actually important, except that she said a baby born ‘as the seventh month dies’ was fated to defeat Voldemort. There were a bunch of other things, but she couldn’t remember everything precisely and in any event it doesn’t matter. Voldemort never got defeated, because he quit and disappeared. I don’t know why.” Harry looked down. “I don’t think he ever told, and he definitely won’t now. When he quit, he told his followers to quit too. Some didn’t, though. He’d definitely heard about the prophecy, though, and so had they-”

“From me,” Severus put in. “I overheard it, not entirely by accident, and I told him. Word got around.” He closed his eyes. “I didn’t realize at the time that Lily… I begged him to leave her alone. And then I ran and told Lily what I’d done. She was my best friend, my only friend. I wanted to save her, I told her to run. I didn’t hear the order to stand down until-”

“It was too late,” Harry finished. “I thought it was something like that. Anyway, when you went to Lily, she didn’t want to run. She wanted to fight.” Pure imagination, but he thought he was right about that, or at least that no one in the room would argue with him about it. “But she also wanted her baby to be safe. She’d been planning to marry her boyfriend James anyway, so she decided ‘do it now, and we’ll move in together somewhere we can defend’. She got both of you in a room and explained everything… and I think there was probably a little hatchet-burying…?”

Severus nodded slowly. “I despised James Potter, and he me, but we… could be civil. For Lily.”

There had been no acrimony when Severus had asked Harry about a possible relation at Nettlebed Manor. Harry had even thought the other Potter had been a friend, and been unable to get further than ‘maybe not’. Whatever hatred or viciousness had been between them, Severus at least had gotten over it at some point. Harry had thought, once he figured things out, that Lily had been how that started. It was nice to be right. “Yeah. She took both of you to Mrs. McGonagall for a quick wedding – her and James, with you as witness. But Mrs. McGonagall needed two witnesses. James said he’d bring one, and an appointment was made.”

“James and Lily went home – James’s home, here – and they told the only person they could about the wedding, and their plan to take off and protect the maybe-savior-of-everyone after, and asked him to please come and stand with James as the second witness.” Harry walked slowly over a short distance to stand in front of a chair. “You, Peter. Sirius was away looking after his mum at the time, and I reckon two weeks from then, the earliest wedding date possible, was the July full moon. Remus would have had to be in his cellar at that time. They could only ask you.”

Peter looked up at Harry, no longer in tears, almost frozen.

“I think you panicked. I think on impulse you went down to the cellars. You got a bottle of something – not wine, because Lily couldn’t have alcohol - you opened it, you stopped by your potions lab – you’re the only one in the house who even owns a cauldron, Remus told me – and you poured a little something into the bottle. Dreamless Sleep, I think. You knocked them out with a celebration toast.”

“Why would I do such a thing?” Peter wailed. “I loved James! I loved Lily! I would have been happy for them!”

“And you were. But you… when I first visited here, I thought about who all three of you reminded me of. Remus seemed like Ophelia, oppressed and close to breaking. Sirius was Clytemnestra, he’d break everything around him and enjoy doing it. But you… I couldn’t even come up with a single character for you, only a type. The funny friend, the comic relief. The character who’s liked, even loved, but never thought of or respected. Never the lead role. I noticed right away that even now your best friends don’t really respect you – they love you, they’ve needed you… but they don’t think much of you.”

Sirius made a choked noise from the sofa.

“You wanted respect, though. You wanted to be needed, to be important. Voldemort made you feel that, didn’t he? He knew people. He knew how to get what he wanted from them, and it was by offering them what they wanted. You panicked, you couldn’t risk these two getting away, you couldn’t risk this baby who might grow up to destroy your Lord, but I think you couldn’t bring yourself to personally hurt anyone you loved.”

“That’s right! I’d never hurt them! And I didn’t.”

“You kept them drugged while you tried to figure out what to do. Even though orders had filtered through that everyone was to stand down, the war was over, the prophecy would be ignored, you couldn’t just let them wake up. There was no way to explain. It must have been absolutely terrifying when Lily’s unconscious body went into labor. I’m betting that was July 31^st, that’s nicely poetic. You didn’t know what to do. I think that’s when she died, she bled to death. But then there was a baby – a living baby – that you had to deal with. You wrapped it in a blanket and took it quite a ways away, to a Muggle hospital. And you left it there.”

“What happened to the baby?” Sirius demanded. “If you’re so smart?”

“I’ll get to it if you want. Later.” It was a distraction, and Harry didn’t want to look away from Peter, who seemed almost hypnotized now. “I think Lily dying gave you an idea of what to do. You used Polyjuice – I noticed you had boomslang skin in your lab, and Polyjuice is one of the few potions things I know off by heart. It’s not important why.” At one point in school, it had seemed like a good idea to use Polyjuice to disguise themselves, and Hermione had stolen boomslang skin from Professor Slughorn’s personal ingredient stores. “You had all the hair you could ever want, so you played James around the house and even Lily once or twice. For Remus’s benefit. But you didn’t go to work as James, you’d never have been able to pass as an Auror. That’s why Moody knew James had disappeared weeks before Remus did. Nobody lied to Moody with a potion.

“The next full moon was August 26^th. The rhythms of this house always centered on the full moon, because of taking care of Remus, so I think you were all always very aware of when the next one was coming up. On August 24^th or 25^th, you killed the fake Lily. I’ll just call her Marlene. I think you must have been on a date with her, because she didn’t see it coming… and she was pregnant, but she may not have known that yet. You strangled her, and cut her up with a spell you’d… seen once…?” Harry turned his head slightly towards Severus without taking his eyes off Peter.

“Yes. I used it on Potter – James – once in school. In a fight, as a test. And then I tested the counter-curse.”

Harry nodded. “So you cut her up with Sectum-thing, and you… took her blood. Probably made a lot more of it somehow, and put it under stasis to keep it fresh. On the night of the 26^th, you let Remus out of his cellar and let him run – not sure why he didn’t attack you-“

“He’s a rat.” Sirius was sitting up straight, grey eyes burning. He was holding Remus’s hand with both of his, now, and Harry imagined that that was the only reason he hadn’t already cursed Peter to within an inch of his life. Or all the way to death. Put anything in the world up against Remus in Sirius’s estimation, and Remus would always win. “An Animagus. We all were, I’m a dog. James was a stag. We found out when we were kids that Remus doesn’t attack animals when he’s changed.”

“Huh. I’ll remember that.” Not that Harry knew when it might come up again that transformed werewolves didn’t attack animals, of course. It had simply been a question he couldn’t answer. “You let Remus out, let him run off. You followed him until moonset, when he turned back into himself and passed out, and then you put the blood on him-“

“It was in my mouth.” Remus rocked forward, breathing heavily, almost hyperventilating. “It was on my hands. It was everywhere.”

“And then you went home.” Harry kept his tone level. “This is when you killed James. I still don’t think you could bring himself to hurt him. You like potions, you’d got into the habit of using them. An overdose of Dreamless Sleep or maybe Draught of Living Death. Just something to make sure he could never, ever wake up. And then you put blood on him, and some kind of makeup or illusion to make it look like he’d been mauled to death. And then you called Sirius.”

Peter had gone very still, staring at Harry with a look he’d only have been able to describe as loathing. Lip curled, vicious hate. The bouncy, friendly warmth had been stripped off, Harry thought – showing who he really was. He’d miss the friendly little man he’d met, he really would, but that man had not been entirely real.

Harry kept going. “You knew Sirius would never defend you, not for cold-blooded murder. Not for killing out of convenience or fear. But you knew he thought you were weak, he’d believe there was nothing you could do. And you knew he’d kill and die and more for Remus.” The passionate determination of a Clytemnestra, turned to obsessive protection instead of killing. “You cried, I don’t doubt. You spun the story that Remus mentioned earlier – that Lily had accidentally let him out, that James bought her time to run, that Remus killed him and went after her. You’d moved James to the greenhouse to hide him. He saw the body, the gashes you’d made, the blood. And then Remus got home, and he was covered in blood. You – well, Sirius probably – pulled down the greenhouses, both of them. The glass one with James, and the brick one where you’d put Lily so no one could see her. And then you planted that polygonum, Peter. As a grave marker.”

Remus almost barked a sob, the sound was too loud, too strangled. It was twenty-five years of grief and guilt trying to escape at once, and it didn’t stop for a while. “I didn’t. I didn’t. Oh, god, I really didn’t.”

Sirius, next to him, yanked him close and touched their foreheads together again like he had in the kitchen. “I’m sorry. Moony. I’m sorry, what I’ve done-“

“And pretty much the rest actually happened the way people think. Until the Tour got here. You weren’t worried about me, but you saw Miss Trelawney. You knew about her prophecy, you knew she’d liked Lily. You worried about her. You saw Professor Moody there. What if she talked to him? She had to go.”

“Black killed Trelawney,” Tonks interrupted. “The memories were untainted, and it was clear twice over in Pensieve.”

“Polyjuice again. Sirius has thick hair, and unlike Remus he leaves the house fairly often. How hard is it to get hair off a hairbrush?” Harry shrugged. “He wore something very obvious to make sure he was seen, as Sirius. I’m… I think he thought if Sirius was gone Remus would get better.”

“I wouldn’t have.” They hadn’t separated. Harry was pretty sure they’d gotten closer.

“Well, that’s not on me to figure out. There’s probably plenty of Polyjuice in the cellar or in his room. I think his room is more likely, as I didn’t see any while I was looking around.”

“It’s a fine story, Potter, but do you have any evidence?” The Hit Wizards had already acted, pointing their wands at Peter, whose eyes flicked around the room. Counting the odds and finding them very definitely not in his favor. Somehow he managed to make draining Harry’s coffee sinister, but that was the most he could do.

“He was right about James.” Sirius sounded much calmer than Harry had ever heard him, cuddled closely with Remus. There was likely to be some kind of reaction later, as quite a bit of information had been dropped on him, and Harry was thankful that he’d almost certainly miss it. “He’s in the greenhouse under those flowers. If he’s right about Lily she’ll be somewhere else in the mound.”

The Hit Wizards manhandled Peter up. One of them took his wand, and they all hustled him towards the front door.

Harry watched them go. “He killed four people and ruined at least three more lives.” Remus, slowly killing himself from guilt and fear, unable to grieve or move on. Sirius, acting as his jailer, preventing him from self-destructing no matter how much he wanted to, growing more vicious over time. Severus, who’d suffered years of dementors, Harry didn’t even know how many. “There’s going to be evidence if you look. You can collect my memories if you need them. I’m going home, though, so you’ll have to go there. You know where it is.”

Tonks sighed. “Yes, I do, and I probably will. I’m… well, I’m going to be very careful with this one, I believe.” She pointed at Sirius. “For the record, Mr. Black, you’re not under arrest anymore. At the moment. There could be some interference charges, but I will do my best to stop anything like that. And Mr. Lupin, as you have not actually attacked anyone, and you’ve got no record of lapses in twenty-five years, you’re safe as well.” She pointed at Severus. “You… are still a fugitive. Sorry. But not for much longer, I expect. So long as no one reports on you, I’ll be referring to a Mr. St. S. Prince exclusively.”

“I expect nothing else.” Severus didn’t look at the two men on the couch, pointedly or otherwise.

“I’ll be in touch. Or Moody will. One of us!” She grinned briefly at Harry and half-waved-half-saluted, then walked out after the Hit Wizards.

Sirius kissed Remus on the forehead, then separated himself and stood up. He looked Harry over, then turned firmly to face Severus. After a few seconds, he stuck out a hand. “It’s… yeah. Not enough. And I’m not apologising. But I guess you’re not the worst person who’s ever lived.”

Severus stared at him and his hand for a long enough time to be uncomfortable, then shrugged infinitesimally and shook the offered hand. “I would not have believed an apology in any case.”

“If you ever get one from me, hex him as an impostor.” Sirius nodded, then looked back at Harry. “It’s later. Tell me about the baby.”

Severus raised an eyebrow, and then pointed at Harry. Harry waved. “Hi, it’s me." James's face, and someone else's eyes. Lily's probably. "I wish I’d had time to ask Peter why on earth he actually named me properly. I could as easily have been a John Smith and none of this might have happened.”

“It does seem a little obvious now,” Remus murmured, rejoining Sirius and taking his hand. Neither seemed entirely willing to go far from the other. “I’m a little surprised Peter didn’t… try something. He killed Trelawney just for what she might do, and you were definitely snooping. When you came back here today-”

“Oh, he did.” Harry picked up the coffee cup Peter had drained and set down. His own, which he hadn’t even sipped. “I’d wash this very carefully if I were you. Or break it to bits and throw it away, since I’m me. I don’t expect Peter will ever see the inside of a courtroom or Azkaban. I doubt he'll even be interrogated.”

Two sets of eyes stared at him in blank shock, and the third set (flat black) gleamed with… something. (Amusement? Appreciation? It was impossible to tell.) Harry rolled his eyes. “I’m not fool enough to come in here, knowing what I knew, and still drink anything he gave me. I’m going to collect my things and go home.”

Chapter 18: Epilogue

Harry didn’t bother trying to manage his bags with his free hand this time, just levitated his case and overnight bag so they bobbed gently in the air behind him. Goodbyes to Remus and Sirius were brief and awkward – it seemed like there were things that both of the remaining denizens of Old Manor House wanted to say that they were not in fact currently up to saying.

Harry invited them both to write, claiming that Hedwig would be overjoyed to have more letters to carry. (She probably would. Harry didn’t maintain a lot of correspondence, so there wasn’t a lot for her to do normally.) Letters were probably the best way to feel out what a relationship with them, if any could be put together, might look like – he was a grown man who’d lived his life at peace with the idea that he’d never know who his parents were, and at this point the knowledge was academic rather than emotional, they were two damaged men whose lives had been turned inside-out in the last hour. It would be best, Harry thought, if they all three let themselves move slowly and gave each other time to only use the words they really wanted.

Sirius did make sure Harry was aware that the Potter Bedroom was his from then on, whenever he wanted it. Harry thanked him politely, and equally politely did not say that it would be quite a long time before he accepted that invitation, if ever. It would take a long time to clear out the atmosphere of the house, if nothing else, but he was also fairly sure that Remus and Sirius would need time to sort through their own things as well - without an interfering busybody (which Harry was entirely willing to admit he was) getting into the middle.

Remus had lost a load of guilt - he likely would need to work out who he was without it. Sirius had gained a load of guilt – he’d spent a quarter-century increasingly cruelly forcing a man he loved to stay alive and suffer. Both had been viciously betrayed and manipulated, for decades, by someone they had loved and trusted implicitly.

They deserved to heal, and Harry was sure they would. And if he needed to help, he would. From well outside. He was not James Potter and had no intention of risking being slotted into that place any more than he already had been.

Once goodbyes were done and addresses were exchanged, Harry left Old Manor House behind him. Severus followed him like a shadow. It was a little surprising that the man hadn’t left earlier, but Harry was just as glad he hadn’t. Just as glad that he had the opportunity to walk with the older man again, before he departed for Ottery St. Catchpole and Severus departed for wherever he intended to go.

It was entirely possible they’d never see each other again. Harry wasn’t especially eager to hurry that along, but he did have to fully complete the task he’d been given, and there was only one person who could really say if he had. “When Mr. Riddle asked me to investigate an injustice, he really did tell me to ‘destroy it utterly’. Would you say that I succeeded?”

Severus snorted. “No. That would be impossible without time travel and willingness to cut Pettigrew’s throat before he takes his chance.” They walked a few more paces, and he added, “You may have come as close as possible, though, yes. I don’t doubt that sooner or later I will be officially exonerated. That matters less to me than you might think, but it seems that’s what Tom wanted, for whatever reason.”

“You have seemed fairly calm,” Harry agreed. “I assume Mr. Riddle instructed you to come on this Tour, your final task as his employee, and didn’t bother to tell you what you were supposed to do.”

“More or less, yes. I didn’t expect anything but some weeks of irritation, followed by freedom. It has, on the whole, been much less irritation than I expected, and a much greater prospect of freedom.” He did seem more relaxed, Harry thought – the last time they’d walked together, Severus had been stiff and tense and using the wrong name. Now, he was none of those things and it showed.

“What will you do now?”

“I have no idea. I’d imagined I would retreat somewhere and conduct research or write, once I’d finished with this. Perhaps I still will.” It was almost certain that no matter how definite any findings of fact were or how loud the formal exoneration was when it occurred, there were always going to be people who would be convinced that Severus Snape had killed Lily Evans and James Potter. That was simply how people were.

Harry thought that, faced with that sort of unwanted fame, he too would want to retreat. He had, after all, retreated even when he wasn’t famous. Retreated, and learned to be happy in the quiet. “Well, if you care to visit Ottery St. Catchpole, I can promise you that virtually nothing ever happens there. And I’ve a guest room you could use if you preferred to avoid the nearest motel, though I can’t promise not to annoy you on a very regular basis.”

“Hmm.” They fell silent for a while at that point, so Harry could practise patience and Severus could consider what he wanted to make of Harry inviting him home. Eventually, he gestured at Harry’s left knee. “I feel certain that something could be done about that, with enough effort and creativity. If you’re willing to put up with it.”

“Oh.” Harry grinned up at him. That was a yes. “Please be assured I’m willing to put up with a good deal from you. At the very least, I’ll be able to put Ron and Hermione off surprising me with any more healers.”

“It may take quite some time and end with me concluding there’s nothing to be done.”

“Take as much time as you like.” Harry looped his non-cane arm through Severus’s – ultimately to side-along him to the cottage, of course, but not just yet. They could keep walking for a little while. “Be thorough. We’re not on a schedule.”

*****

Two weeks later, Harry sat in the same chair in the offices of Masters Rookwood and Runcorn, Solicitors, that he’d occupied the last time he’d visited their offices. Last time, neither solicitor had been particularly impressed with Harry, but this time they both gaped at him.

Harry wasn’t sure what they meant by it, really – it wasn’t like he’d done anything much. He had a face that had shaken a few stories loose, and he’d paid attention. Mr. Riddle had wanted his face more than his mind, despite Harry’s flair, he was almost sure. He waited politely enough for longer than he exactly expected to, then cleared his throat. “So, I believe I’ve accomplished the task Mr. Riddle set for me, and in much less than a year.”

Mr. Rookwood shook his head slightly. “Yes. Yes, you have. Quite, ah… quite… unexpected. By us at any rate.”

Mr. Runcorn, for the first time, piped up. “Mr. Riddle left instructions that, should you complete your task ahead of time, the funds held for you were to be released. Promptly, he said.”

I’ll bet he did. “Oh, that’s excellent. I suppose I should leave my vault information with your secretary then, so the transfer can be arranged-“

“We could assist you with investment, if you wished.” Rookwood seemed to have taken his partner’s interruption as an opportunity to collect himself, and was entirely back to business.

“No,” Harry mused. “No, I don’t think that’s at all necessary. No, just a deposit into my active vault at Gringotts will do nicely.”

“Properly managed, this money can last-“

“Mr. Rookwood, thank you so much for being so attentive. You’re very kind, really.” Harry remembered what Riddle had said. Scum of the highest order and usually good at knowing what’s good for him – even if he’d wanted to invest, he wouldn’t involve either of these solicitors. “But Mr. Riddle didn’t intend this money to be anything as practical as income. It’s a reward, I’ll use it as such. Active vault, please.”

“What are you going to do, then?”

Harry grinned at him. “Do? I’m not sure yet. I intend to have fun, though. I think Mr. Riddle would have liked that.” Maybe he’d have cause, at some point, to bring out that pink bathrobe again. He was really quite attached to it now. Maybe he’d honestly take one of those Famous Houses and Gardens Tours, see what it was like when he wasn’t fixated on murder. Maybe he’d go back to St. Honoré and see how things were going on there. Maybe… anything. Anything at all.

But for now, he had his garden, he had his two daily newspapers, he shared both with a striking houseguest who seemed increasingly comfortable with Harry and had yet to make any noises at all about leaving, and he had a somewhat-larger family who was not entirely sure what to make of it. Who even needed money to enjoy any of that?

**Fin**

Notes:

Thank you very much for reading!

I very much enjoyed writing it, and I may write a prequel (A Caribbean Mystery) or some kind of sequel. I thought 'The Body in the Library' but the twist there is almost the same as the twist here. We shall see!

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of Christie Rewrites