Ministry of Magic
Refreshments Standards Committee

Item 7. The Chair notes, with regret, that the biscuit situation has become untenable.

Minutes, 14 March 2005. Chair: P. I. Weasley

By Saturday morning, Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place had acquired the atmosphere of a rather strange boarding house.

Goyle, it turned out, had meant it about not leaving. He had gone home to Hackney at two in the morning to do the day's baking, and come back at seven with a tray of croissants, and met Molly Weasley on the front step on her way out, with an empty basket over her arm.

She looked at his croissants. He looked at her basket. Something passed between them: the wary, respectful recognition of two people who had only ever known one way to tell anybody they loved them, and it involved an oven.

"You'll want to warm those through, dear," said Molly. "Five minutes. Not a second more."

"Yes, Mrs Weasley," said Goyle.

He set the croissants down in the middle of the kitchen table, beside the smoked salmon, scrambled eggs and still-warm soda bread Molly had just dropped off. Then, without a word, he retreated to his bench in the corner, where he now sat with a mug of tea, watching everyone eat with quiet, enormous satisfaction.

The rest of the household had arrived in stages. Luna had slept on the sofa in the drawing room with Bolorma's crate beside her, and had come down to breakfast in Ginny's knitted dressing gown and a crown of what appeared to be dried Mongolian wildflowers. George had brought half the stockroom of Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes in a single bottomless rucksack, and was working through it at the dresser with a clipboard, ticking off each item with a quartermaster's gravity. Blaise had turned up just after eight, still in last night's dinner jacket, and was taking his coffee with a splash of something from a hip flask. And Pansy was reading the Prophet's society pages with a pencil, every so often underlining something with a small, vicious stroke.

Theo Nott had not slept at all, as far as Harry could tell, and somehow looked better for it than anyone who had. He'd spent the night at the far end of the kitchen table with his spectacles on and Hermione's books built up around him like the walls of a small, scholarly fortress. Every so often he made a small, pleased noise, murmured "Oh, you beauty," to a footnote, and wrote something down with a great swooping flourish of the quill. His waistcoat and shirt were unbuttoned to precisely the third button, which put rather more well-kept runesmith on display than anybody had asked to see before breakfast. Harry had already turned Ginny's head away twice. Both times, she had turned it straight back.

And Draco Malfoy, who had said very clearly and on several occasions that he would rather be eaten than stay the night at Grimmauld Place, had arrived at half past eight for breakfast and been served kippers on the Black family silver.

"This is intolerable," Harry said to Ginny, watching Kreacher refill Draco's cup from a silver teapot shaped like a coiled serpent. "He's moved in."

"He hasn't moved in," said Ginny. "He just comes round for every meal and has all his post redirected here."

"He's had his post redirected?"

"Kreacher did it. Yesterday." She bit into a croissant. "Kreacher also asked me whether Young Master would prefer the blue bedroom or the green bedroom, and when I said Young Master lived in Holland Park, Kreacher made a noise like a wounded accordion and had to go and lie down."

Across the table, Draco lifted his cup to Harry in a small, smug salute.

Harry's gaze slid past him to Parvati, who had turned her teacup upside down in its saucer, out of old habit, and was frowning into it. She glanced once down the table at Draco, then back at the leaves. Then, before anybody could ask, she tipped them into the slop bowl.

Harry was still frowning at the slop bowl when there was a knock at the front door.

Out in the hall, the lamps didn't so much as flicker. For a stranger, they flared, and the troll's-leg umbrella stand rattled as though Walburga's disapproval had outlived her portrait. Whoever this was, the house already knew them.

Nobody moved. The only person who ever answered the door at Grimmauld Place was Kreacher, and Kreacher had just noticed that Young Master's toast was getting cold and was dealing with the crisis. After a moment Harry sighed, got up, went down the hall and opened it.

Percy Weasley stood on the top step. Three cardboard boxes hung in the air behind him in a neat line, like ducklings. He wore a tweed overcoat, carefully polished shoes and horn-rimmed spectacles, and the expression of a man who has been right about something for a very long time and has only just found someone who might listen.

"Good morning, Harry," said Percy. "I wasn't invited."

"Percy —"

"I'm not upset. I've simply noted it as a procedural irregularity." Percy stepped into the hall. The boxes floated in after him. "Mother mentioned you were having people round."

​

♫ Listen along

Ron, who had come down to breakfast with his jumper on inside out and his hair at several competing angles, pointed a croissant at his brother.

"You weren't invited," he said, "because you'd have taken minutes."

"Somebody should have taken minutes!" Percy looked round the table with something close to anguish. "All of you discussing a conspiracy at the heart of the Ministry of Magic, and I understand from George that not a single action point was agreed —"

"We agreed to find the missing people," said Harry.

"That is an aim, Harry, not an action point. An action point has an owner and a deadline." Percy drew a breath and visibly composed himself. "Never mind. I've brought evidence."

The boxes settled onto the table in a row, and Percy nudged the middle one a quarter of an inch to the left until all three were exactly square. Each had a neat typed label pasted to its side. EXHIBIT A: HANDWRITING. EXHIBIT B: SIGNATURES. EXHIBIT C: REFRESHMENTS.

"Refreshments?" said George.

Percy ignored him. Harry noticed, without quite knowing why he noticed, that Percy had not put down the thin cardboard folder tucked under his left arm; he'd taken off his coat around it.

Percy Weasley was, these days, Chief Clerk to the Wizengamot. It was a post, Harry understood, that involved writing down every word spoken in every session of the highest court in wizarding Britain, filing every document, witnessing every signature and knowing, at any given moment, where every piece of paper in the building had been, where it was now, and where it was supposed to go next. It suited him so perfectly that the family had long since stopped making jokes about it. He was also, since what he always referred to, in a slightly lowered voice, as the Great Biscuit Overspend of 2005, Chair of the Ministry Refreshments Standards Committee.

"Twelve officials," Percy said. "Senior officials. Two members of the Wizengamot, three heads of department, four senior advisers, the Minister's private secretary, and two members of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement's policy board. Over the past six weeks, every one of them has changed." He opened Exhibit A. "Overnight."

He laid out two sheets of parchment side by side. Both were memos about Floo regulation. Both were signed Octavia Mallory, Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. On the left-hand sheet the handwriting was small, cramped and slanted sharply to the right. On the right-hand sheet it was large, round and very nearly upright.

"Before the ninth of September," said Percy. "After the ninth of September."

"People's handwriting changes," said Ron.

"Not in a single night, Ronald. Not at sixty-three." Percy laid out another pair, and another. "Horace Pembury, Senior Adviser to the Department of International Magical Cooperation. Before the fourth; after the fourth. Lionel Stroud, the Minister's Private Secretary. Before the eleventh of August; after the eleventh of August." He opened Exhibit B. "Signatures. Every one of them has changed. Some only slightly. Some a great deal. Aldric Fawley, of the Wizengamot, has signed every document in this building with his right hand for eighty-six years. Since the eleventh of this month, he has signed with his left."

Blaise, down the table, lifted a finger in acknowledgement, like a man at an auction.

"And then," said Percy, laying the words down like a trump card, "there's the tea."

He opened Exhibit C.

"Aldric Fawley," he read, "has taken his tea black with three sugars every day since the Ministry installed a refreshment trolley in 1921. I have the requisitions. Since the eleventh of September: milk, no sugar."

There was a short silence.

"Call the Aurors," said George gravely.

Somebody snorted. Percy's ears went pink, but he pressed on. "Octavia Mallory has requested Earl Grey, no milk, every day for fourteen years. Since the ninth: builder's tea, two sugars." The snort became a laugh. "Horace Pembury has not eaten a single biscuit since the fourth —"

"Maybe he's on a diet," said Ron.

"He has taken one ginger nut at half past three every afternoon since 1987! He had them served at his mother's funeral!" Percy's voice had risen. Half the table was laughing now: Neville with his chin on his chest and his shoulders shaking, George openly, Seamus wheezing, Blaise with his face turned politely to the wall. "Delphine Achterberg, Head of Magical Transportation. A custard cream at eleven o'clock every morning for twenty-two years, Ronald. Twenty-two years! She once lodged a formal complaint because the trolley arrived at eleven-oh-seven."

"What happened?" said Dean.

Percy looked offended by the question. "The trolley operator received a written warning."

"Speaking of things in writing," said Ron weakly, wiping his eyes. "Perce. Tell them about the scarf."

Percy's face went from pink to crimson in a single second. "That was entirely under duress —"

"Ron," said Hermione.

She hadn't been laughing. Harry realised he hadn't heard her laugh at all. She had pulled Exhibit A towards her while Percy was talking, and then Exhibit B, and now she had a sheet from each box laid out in front of her, and a page of her own notes, and her face had gone very still in the way that, in Harry's long experience, meant somebody was about to have a very bad day.

The laughter died down, not all at once, but in a slow ripple round the table, the way it does when people slowly notice that one of their number isn't joining in.

"The dates," Hermione said quietly. "Percy, the dates are the day the changes start. What about the day before?"

Percy blinked at her. Then, with the specific joy of a man who has been waiting for somebody to ask exactly the right question, he took a single sheet of parchment from his inside pocket and unfolded it.

"The Ministry leave register," he said. "Every one of the twelve took one day of unscheduled leave. Always the day immediately before the change. None of them gave a reason. None of them had taken unscheduled leave in the previous ten years." He laid it on the table. "Twelve officials. Twelve single days off. And the next morning, every one of them came back to work with different handwriting, a different signature, and a different cup of tea."

The kitchen had gone completely silent.

"There's something else," said Hermione. She was running her finger down her notes. "Every one of these people — every single one — had something to do with the Restitution Act. Mallory drafted the enforcement clauses. Pembury advised on the international travel restrictions. Stroud sat in on every meeting where it was discussed. Achterberg wrote the section on Portkey licensing." She looked up. "Percy. Aldric Fawley. How did he vote?"

"On the first reading, on the twenty-eighth of August," said Percy, "Aldric Fawley voted against the Restitution Act and made a forty-minute speech denouncing it as, and I quote from my own minutes, a vindictive, grasping, small-minded piece of legislation that would shame a goblin." He paused. "On the final reading, on the fifteenth of September, he voted for it. Without a word."

"And the final vote?"

"Twenty-six to twenty-five," said Percy.

Nobody said anything for what felt like a very long time.

"It passed by one vote," said Neville.

"It passed by one vote," agreed Percy. "I took it to my superior. He told me to take some leave. I took it to the Head of Wizengamot Administration. She told me to take some leave. I took it to Gawain Robards, who went quite grey and told me to take some leave. I took it to Mother, who said I looked peaky and should take some leave. I have now been told to take some leave by four separate people in eight days." He adjusted his spectacles. "I have never taken leave in my life. Audrey had to carry me onto the boat for our honeymoon."

Across the table, Draco was looking at the thin folder still tucked under Percy's arm.

"And that one?" he said.

Percy's hand tightened on it. "It's not relevant."

"You've been holding it since you got here."

"It's not relevant," said Percy again, rather too firmly, and for a moment the Weasley likeness was very strong in his face, like Molly refusing a second helping of anybody's nonsense.

Draco looked at him a moment longer, then nodded slowly and let it go. Harry saw his eyes flick back to the folder once more, though, and stay there, the way a cat watches a mousehole.

​

♫ Listen along

Kreacher had found a chalkboard. Nobody knew where from, and nobody felt brave enough to ask.

On the chalkboard, at the top, in Draco's elegant, slightly slanted handwriting, it said: OPERATIONAL ASSIGNMENTS (PROVISIONAL). Underneath were ruled columns. There was a key.

At the far end of the table, Percy made a small, involuntary sound, the kind other men might make in front of a new broomstick in a shop window.

"When did you make that?" said Harry.

"Last night," said Draco. "I couldn't sleep."

He didn't say why, and Harry didn't ask. He'd come down for a glass of water in the early hours of the morning and found the kitchen fire still burning green, and Theo on his knees in front of it, talking low and fast into the flames. Hermione had looked up from her stack of books, caught Harry's eye and mouthed a single word: Malfoy.

"Item one," said Draco, tapping the chart with a long ivory pointer that Kreacher had also produced from nowhere. "We need proof. Not handwriting, not signatures, not" — a glance at Percy — "custard creams, with the greatest respect, but a real, live changed official in front of us, answering questions. The best candidate is Aldric Fawley. He's the swing vote, and thanks to Zabini's mother we have an unusually intimate knowledge of his habits."

"Thank you," murmured Blaise.

"So. Surveillance on Fawley. Two days, round the clock, to establish his routine before we move." Draco consulted the chart. "Weasley. Parkinson."

"No," said Ron.

"No," said Pansy, at exactly the same moment.

They looked at each other in horror.

"Weasley has done surveillance for the Auror Office," said Draco serenely. "He's patient, he's good in a hedge, and he knows what to look for. Pansy knows the name of every servant, gardener and house-elf in every pure-blood house in England, and most of their secrets. They are, objectively, the two best people for the job." He paused. "The fact that they'll both loathe it is a bonus."

"I'm not sitting in a hedge with him for two days."

"I'm not sitting in a hedge with her for two minutes."

"You'll be in the Hide-in-a-Hedge," said George helpfully. "It's a prototype. Extension Charm on the inside. Loads of room."

Harry had known George for a very long time, and he didn't like the way he said loads.

"Item two," said Draco, over the sound of Ron and Pansy both drawing breath to protest. "The twelve changed officials must have something in common beyond the Act. Somewhere they all went, someone they all met. That requires somebody who is invited to every party in London and has never once been sober at any of them."

"Finally," said Blaise, looking deeply gratified, "a job that suits my skills."

Draco didn't so much as pause. He was already moving down the chart, crisp and unhurried, as if he'd been running briefings in this kitchen for years. Harry glanced across the table and found Hermione watching him with the expression she usually saved for a beautifully cross-referenced index. When she caught Harry looking, she went faintly pink and became extremely interested in her toast.

"Item three. The Remembrance Society." Draco tapped the chart again. "Pansy's files show that every one of the missing received a letter from the Office of Remembrance. Grieve's office sponsors a charity for bereaved families that meets in Carkitt Market. I'd like to know what's in their filing cabinets. Theo, you're the best there is at getting through doors that don't want you."

"I work alone," said Theo, without looking up from his book. He turned a page with a languid flick of one ringed finger, and the fine silver chains at his open collar slid and glinted. "Like a lighthouse keeper. Or a very glamorous widow."

"I'll go with Theo," said Luna.

Theo did look up then. He looked at Luna, sitting at the end of the table in Ginny's knitted dressing gown and her crown of dried flowers, and for once in his life he seemed to have nothing prepared.

"I work alone," he said again, a little less certainly.

"That's all right," said Luna kindly. "So do I. We can work alone together."

Theo opened his mouth, closed it again, then opened it once more. "Well," he said faintly. "I suppose a lighthouse could have a — a second —" He gave up and went back to his book. Harry noticed that he didn't turn the page for quite some time.

"Item four," said Draco —

"You haven't put me down for anything," said Neville.

He didn't raise his voice. He had been teaching Herbology to thirteen-year-olds for years, and he had long since stopped needing to.

Draco turned from the chalkboard. "You have a full timetable, Longbottom, and a castle full of children who'll eat each other if you're not there to stop them."

"I've got free periods, and my evenings, and the weekends," said Neville. "And I want to look into Immy." He set his mug down. "Somebody took her out of the ground from underneath. People don't dig from underneath. But things grow from underneath." He looked round the table. "There's a yew in St Aldhelm's churchyard that's older than the church. Its roots will be all through that grave. If anything's been moving down there, the yew knows. Plants keep better records than the Ministry."

Percy looked faintly wounded on the Ministry's behalf.

"Let me go and take a look at it," said Neville.

"I'll go with you," said Ginny in the voice Harry had heard her use on referees. "She sat next to me in Charms for five years."

Draco looked at them for a long moment. Then he flicked his wand towards the chalkboard, and in the narrow gap between Item three and Item four, in small, neat letters, he wrote: St Aldhelm's — Longbottom and G. Potter.

"Thanks," said Neville.

"Don't thank me. Bring back something useful." Draco turned back to the chart, but Harry noticed that he had underlined it twice.

"Item four," said Draco again, and then he stopped.

"Research," said Hermione into the pause. "Because it isn't Polyjuice, and it isn't Imperius."

"How do you know?" said Ron.

"The Imperius Curse makes you do what you're told. It doesn't change your handwriting, or which hand you sign with, or how you take your tea. It's all in Ashworth's Compulsion and the Will, chapter nine." She looked down the table. "Percy. The final reading of the Act. How long did that session last?"

"Nine hours and twelve minutes," said Percy at once. "Aldric Fawley did not leave his seat once. I minute every departure from the chamber." He paused. "Including the lavatory."

"Unless," said Blaise, glancing down at his own hip flask, "he brought his own."

"No beverages of any kind are permitted in the Wizengamot chamber," said Percy. "Standing Order Fourteen." He adjusted his spectacles. "I drafted it."

"So nobody's been nipping out for a sip of Polyjuice every hour," said Hermione. "And it can't be a glamour or a Transfiguration, because the security desk checks for those every morning, and all twelve of them have walked straight past it for weeks." She tapped her notes. "So it's something nobody thought to check for. Which means it's old. Older than the Ministry, possibly. I need books. Old ones. Dark ones. Theo and I were up all night, and the only thing either of us found was a line of runes in the margin of a book on Welsh folklore, about frost forming on the inside of the glass the night before something comes to the door —"

"Ogham," said Theo, without looking up. He sounded faintly pained. "And it doesn't say frost on the glass. It says the cold that comes before the knock. Which is a much better line, and I'd thank you not to flatten it."

There was a short silence. It was, Harry suspected, the first time in her adult life that anybody had corrected Hermione Granger about a book. It was certainly the first time anybody had done it twice.

"Some Ogham," said Hermione, through her teeth, "about the cold that comes before the knock." She looked across the table at Harry. "This house had a library, didn't it? The Black family library. Sirius told me about it once. He said his mother had it sealed after Regulus died and nobody could get in."

"There's no library," said Harry. "I've been in every room in this house."

From behind Draco's chair, Kreacher gave a small, reverent cough.

"The library of the Most Ancient and Noble House," Kreacher said, "opens only for the blood."

There was a pause while everybody in the kitchen worked this out, and then, one by one, turned to look at Draco.

"Oh, no," said Hermione.

"Oh, yes," said Draco.

"You're the two cleverest people in this kitchen," said Harry, before either of them could say anything else. "Work it out."

They both looked briefly and unmistakably pleased. Then they both noticed the other one looking pleased, and looked away, annoyed.

"It'll take days," said Hermione. "Not evenings. Whole days."

"Then we take leave," said Draco.

"Both of you?" said Harry. "At the same time? Percy's just spent an hour showing us what it looks like when people start taking leave."

"Twelve single days," murmured Percy. "Unscheduled."

"Ours will be scheduled. Granger can schedule anything." Draco waved the ivory pointer. "And think about it, Potter. Who in that entire building would ever, in a thousand years, imagine that Hermione Granger and I were taking a week off together?"

There was a pause while everybody round the table considered this.

"That's," said Ron slowly, "actually true."

"Nobody would," Ginny agreed, with enormous relish. "Nobody at all."

"Granger has holiday owing," Draco went on, ignoring her. "Four years of it, I should think."

"Five," said Hermione, to her notes, which she appeared to find suddenly and deeply absorbing.

"And I am going to be ill. Potter will tell Robards so on Monday morning, and Potter will be extremely convincing."

"Ill with what?" said Harry.

"Use your imagination," said Draco. "I'm told you have one."

"And the rest of us?" said Seamus.

"Carry on as normal," said Harry. "Go to work. Keep your coins on you. Don't do anything that looks like you're doing something." He turned to Percy. "Especially you, Percy. I need you inside. I need you to not take leave."

Percy drew himself up. "Harry," he said, with enormous dignity, "I have never taken leave in my life."

"And Goyle —"

"Bread," said Goyle, from his bench in the corner. "Somebody's got to feed you."

Nobody argued with that.

Down the table, Dean had been sketching on a napkin while Draco talked, the way he always did in meetings. Harry caught sight of it over his shoulder. He'd drawn Percy and his boxes, Luna in her crown, Ron mid-croissant, Kreacher scowling at the toast. The far end of the napkin, where the Slytherins were sitting, he had left blank.

Harry didn't say anything. He looked away, back up at the chalkboard, which was easier, and found himself going down the chart instead, frowning. A hedge for Ron and Pansy. Parties for Blaise. A chapel for Theo and Luna, a library for Hermione and Draco, a churchyard for Neville and Ginny, bread for Goyle. He went down it again, more slowly, and still couldn't find himself.

"Wait, what about me?" said Harry.

Draco didn't even look at the chart. "You," he said, "are the most watched man in Britain. So you go to work. You sit at your desk in full view of the entire Auror Office, filing reports on counterfeit Sickles and looking sulky about it, and every single person who's keeping an eye on us keeps an eye on you. Then you come home and hold the fort. Every coin in this kitchen reports to yours."

"So I'm the decoy."

"You're the decoy and the switchboard."

Harry looked round the table at all of them. Then, since nobody else had, he reached for the teapot.

"Fine," he said. "I'll be mum."

There was a short, delighted silence. Then Ginny openly cackled. Blaise, very quietly, took a small black notebook out of his breast pocket and opened it to a fresh page.

"If that ever reaches Proudfoot," said Draco, looking pointedly at Blaise's notebook, "I'm emigrating."

​

♫ Listen along

The Hide-in-a-Hedgeʷ was, Ron had to admit, a very good hedge.

From the outside it was about six feet high and eight feet long, a dense, dark, glossy tangle of holly and hawthorn planted along the edge of Hampstead Heath, where the grass sloped down to the back wall of Aldric Fawley's garden. Nobody walking past would have looked twice at it. Several dogs had already, over the course of the afternoon, taken a much closer interest, and Ron had been obliged to reinforce the lower portion with a Repelling Charm.

On the inside, thanks to George's Extension Charm, it was exactly big enough for two people.

Two people, that is, who were extremely fond of each other.

"Your elbow," said Pansy, "is in my ribs."

"Your ribs are in my elbow."

"That isn't how elbows work, Weasley."

"It's how this elbow works. It was here first."

They had been in the hedge for five hours. It was dark now, and cold, and there was very little to do but watch the back of Aldric Fawley's tall, red-brick house through a gap in the branches and try not to touch each other. They were not succeeding. The Hide-in-a-Hedgeʷ, Ron had discovered, contained one small folding stool, one old cushion, one pair of Extendable Earsʷ and a quantity of holly, and the only way two people could fit inside it without one of them sitting in the other's lap was for both of them to sit on the ground with their backs against the same branch and their shoulders firmly, unavoidably pressed together.

He had checked. Twice.

He was also now acquainted with a small gold earring that kept catching the edge of his jumper, several strands of Pansy's black hair which had become embedded in the holly, and the fact that she wore some sort of perfume that smelt faintly of violets and something darker underneath.

None of this was information Ron had ever wanted.

He resented having it. George was going to die.

Pansy had brought a hamper. Of course she had. It came from a Muggle shop in Piccadilly and had a wicker lid and leather straps, and inside it were very small eggs, a pot of something brown and smooth, and a bottle of wine with a label in French. Ron had brought cheese and pickle sandwiches in a paper bag. His mother had stopped making him corned beef in 1999, after a frank conversation.

"What are those?" he said, eyeing the eggs.

"Quails' eggs."

"They're tiny."

"They're quails' eggs, Weasley. The quails are also tiny."

He took one without asking. She let him. After a while, without a word, she took one of his sandwiches, and ate it with an expression of deep suspicion that slowly, as she chewed, turned into something that was very nearly, if you squinted, respect.

The back of the house was dark except for one lit window on the first floor. Behind it, now and then, a tall, stooped figure moved: Aldric Fawley, a hundred and six years old, pacing slowly back and forth. He didn't read. He didn't eat. He didn't do anything, as far as Ron could make out, except walk from one side of the room to the other, very slowly, over and over again, like something in a cage.

At the far end of the garden, as far from the house as it could possibly get, a small brown-and-white crup was curled up in the flowerbed. It had been there all afternoon. It had not gone inside once.

"Crups know," said Pansy quietly, following his gaze. "My grandmother kept them. They always know."

Ron broke a corner off his sandwich, reached very carefully through the bottom of the hedge, and whistled softly. After a long moment the crup lifted its head, crept across the grass on its belly, sniffed his fingers and took the sandwich. Then it licked his hand and settled down against the outside of the hedge, as close to him as it could get.

Pansy was looking at him.

"What?"

"Nothing," said Pansy, and looked away.

It was round about ten o'clock that Ron made his mistake.

He had been thinking — he couldn't have said why — about Witch Weekly, and it came out before he could stop it.

"You know what I'd do," he said, "if I ever found out who that Mandragora woman was?"

Beside him, Pansy went completely still.

"What?" she said.

"I'd —" Ron searched for something sufficiently terrible. "I'd write another letter."

"Terrifying," said Pansy.

"With better diagrams."

Pansy made a small, choked noise and turned her face away into the holly. Her shoulders were shaking. Ron looked at her suspiciously.

"Are you laughing at me?"

"I would never," said Pansy into the hedge. "Did you really write multiple letters?"

"She said my love life was a public health concern!"

"And was that inaccurate?"

Ron opened his mouth. He thought about the witch from the Portree Pride, and the one from the Muggle bank who'd found out about magic by accident and had to be Obliviated, and the one who had turned out to be two witches under a single Disillusionment Charm.

"That's not the point," he said.

​

At precisely seven minutes past three, the back door of the house opened.

Ron was awake, which was a small miracle, and Pansy was asleep against his shoulder, which was a larger one, and he was trying to work out whether moving would wake her and whether he wanted it to. Then the door opened, and he forgot about all of it.

Aldric Fawley walked out onto the lawn.

He was barefoot, in a long white nightshirt, and he walked very slowly and very steadily, like a sleepwalker, to the exact centre of the grass. There he stopped, turned to face west, and stood completely still.

Ron nudged Pansy hard. She woke with a jolt, opened her mouth, saw where he was looking and shut it again.

Fawley didn't move. He stood with his arms at his sides and his face turned to the west, perfectly motionless, the way a compass needle is motionless once it has found north. And around his bare feet, spreading out slowly across the lawn in a silver ring, the grass began to turn white.

It spread and spread. The crup, pressed against the outside of the hedge, began to whine very softly, and then stopped, as though it had thought better of making any noise at all.

And then, far away — so faint that at first Ron thought he had imagined it, so faint that it might have been nothing more than the sound of his own blood — came the sound of dogs. A long, falling, belling cry, coming from somewhere across the Heath, somewhere across London, somewhere across the whole of the dark country beyond, and underneath it a single low note that might have been a horn.

Something had got hold of Ron's arm. It took him a second to realise it was Pansy's hand, gripping hard enough to hurt. It took him another second to realise that his own hand was gripping hers back.

Seven minutes. Ron counted every second of them.

Then the baying faded, and Aldric Fawley turned round, walked back across the frozen lawn and into the house, and closed the door behind him. The frost on the grass began, very slowly, to melt.

Neither of them moved for some time.

"If you ever tell anybody," said Pansy finally, in a low, unsteady voice, "that I grabbed you —"

"You grabbed me? I grabbed you —"

They both looked down. Their hands were still clasped together on Ron's knee. They let go at exactly the same moment, as though they'd both been stung.

"Nobody grabbed anybody," said Pansy.

"Nobody grabbed anybody," Ron agreed.

​

The second day was easier, in the way that things are easier once you've been frightened together in the dark.

They watched the house. They took notes. They ate the rest of the quails' eggs and the rest of the sandwiches and a packet of Chocolate Frogs that Ron had forgotten was in his pocket, and Pansy won the Morgana card and wouldn't give it up. Fawley paced his window. The crup lay against the hedge and would not leave, and Ron fed it bits of everything, and Pansy watched him do it without comment.

At about noon an owl found them, which shouldn't have been possible, because nobody was supposed to know where they were. It was a sleek, black, expensive-looking owl, and it went straight to Pansy with the air of a creature that had done this before, and left as quickly as it had arrived.

Pansy read the letter. Her face didn't change, exactly. It went smooth instead, the way still water goes smooth, and Ron found that he didn't like that at all.

"What?" he said.

"Flora Travers," said Pansy. "Twenty-three. She lives in Edinburgh. Lived." She folded the letter very neatly in half, and then in half again. "Five nights ago. Her flatmate woke up at just past three because it was so cold, and there was frost on the inside of every window, and Flora's bed was empty and her wand was on the bedside table." She put the letter away. "Nobody's reported it. Her father's in Azkaban and her mother's in France. Her flatmate's a Muggle. My source only found out because she writes to Flora's flatmate's sister."

"Your source?"

"I have sources," said Pansy. "I'm very well connected, Weasley. Unlike some people."

Five nights ago. Just past three. Ron thought of the coins going off in the dark, and of something at the end of a long corridor in the Department of Mysteries saying a name that nobody had quite heard.

"That's four," he said.

"That's four." Pansy was looking straight ahead at the house. "Cassia's been gone seven weeks now. Seven weeks, and nobody but me has been looking for her, and she's —" She stopped. Then she reached into the pocket of her coat and took out a folded piece of pink notepaper, very creased, as though it had been read and refolded many times, and handed it to him without looking.

It was a poem. It was called For My Cousin Pansy On Her Twenty-Eighth Birthday, and it was genuinely, magnificently terrible. It rhymed cousin with dozen. It rhymed Pansy with fancy and, a stanza later, with chancy, and then, apparently in desperation, with pansy. It had a verse about a hat.

Ron read it all the way through. He laughed out loud twice. Then he read it again, and didn't laugh at all, because by the second time he had noticed that under all the terrible rhymes it was about someone who had grown up being told her family was disgraced and her cousin was a coward, and who had decided, on her own, that she didn't believe it.

He folded it up carefully along the old creases and handed it back.

"We'll find her," he said.

Pansy took it and put it away. "You don't know that."

"No," Ron admitted. "But Harry's looking now. And Hermione. And me." He shrugged against her shoulder. "I used to be the one nobody looked at, you know. Next to Harry. Next to Hermione. I know what it's like."

Pansy turned her head to look at him properly, for what felt like the first time in two days. Her eyes went briefly over his face, taking in, he supposed, the freckles and the nose his brothers had spent twenty-eight years informing him was too long.

He resisted the urge to wipe his mouth.

"You were never the one nobody looked at, Weasley," she said. "You were the one everybody laughed at. It's different."

"Is it?"

"Yes." She looked back at the house. "People only laugh at things they can see."

Ron didn't know what to say to that. So he didn't say anything, and after a while he took the last sandwich out of the paper bag and broke it in half, and gave her the bigger bit.