Chapter 4: Released for Examination
Somebody had to take the kettle off, and it was her kettle.
Hermione did it without looking at him. She warmed the pot, because her mother had always warmed the pot, and found two mugs, and put milk in hers and milk and two sugars in his, which she had been telling him since they were thirteen was a crime against tea. Her hands knew all of it. They didn't need her, which was as well, because she wasn't sure where she had gone.
"You don't have to say anything," Harry said.
"I know I don't have to." She put his mug on the table and stood holding hers, too close to the hob. "I'd like to say something that isn't stupid, and I can't find anything. I've been looking since you said it."
"That was about a minute ago."
"It's been a very long minute, Harry."
He sat down at last in his chair by the window and held the mug in both hands the way he used to in the tent when there was nothing in it but hot water. He looked exhausted, and young, and exactly like himself. That was the difficulty. She kept waiting for him to look like someone new, like a man who had just said that in her kitchen, and he went on looking like Harry.
She thought of the orchard.
She hadn't meant to. It came the way it always came, when she needed a Patronus or a reason to get out of bed: the long grass at the Burrow, the broom tipping, his hand round her wrist as they went over, the two of them laughing too hard to stand. Seven years she had been reaching for that memory and it had never once failed her. It had not until this moment occurred to her to ask what it was a memory of.
"I kissed him," she said, as if saying it again would help.
"I know."
"Four hours ago."
"I was there. Nearly." He turned the mug a quarter turn on the table. "I'm not asking you to decide anything tonight. But someone's walking round London with your face on, and Malfoy's in Mungo's, and I'm not leaving you on your own." He was already untying his boots. "I'll have the sofa."
"It's a two-seater."
"I've slept in a tent with Ron."
She lay awake and listened to him not sleeping on the other side of the wall. She thought of Draco's fingers round her wrist at the lift, Lock your door, and of the door she had locked and then opened, and slept at last with both of them still talking in her head.
At seven she found Harry on his back with his glasses on the carpet and his feet in their socks hanging over the arm of the sofa. There was a long brown hair on the shoulder of his jumper. One of hers; there always was, as Ginny had pointed out over the roast. She reached to pick it off and stopped with her fingers an inch from the wool, and stood there in her dressing gown like an idiot, and then went and made toast instead.
They came out of the lift onto Level Two together at a quarter to nine, and the corridor went quiet.
She lifted her chin and walked past Improper Use of Magic as though she hadn't heard the silence. Then she saw her office door standing open.
Tobias Merrow was in the corridor outside it, holding a cup of tea in both hands. He was crying, which wasn't unusual, but he was crying without a newspaper, which was. "They've been in since seven, Miss Granger. I told them to wait for you."
Inside, Proudfoot stood by the filing cabinet sucking a bitten hand, and Dawlish was at her desk with all three drawers out on the blotter. He straightened. Something grey hung over his arm, and he held it up: her spare work robes, the set that lived on the hook behind her door for nights she didn't go home. The left cuff had its ink stain. The hem was stiff to a hand's depth, and when he turned it to the window it showed rust-dark.
"Yours?"
"You know they are."
"On your hook this morning. Still damp." He laid them over her chair as if they might go off. "That's off the bleeding tapestry in your vault. Anyone who ran out down that aisle last night got it on their hem."
"I wasn't wearing grey last night. I was wearing black, under a Cloak."
"So you say." He counted on his fingers, which she suspected he'd practised. "Your face opened that door. The comb turned up in your drawer. I put Specialis Revelio on the register myself this morning. Two new lines, a salt cellar on the fourteenth and the comb on the nineteenth, initialled. You came into the building by the Auror entrance, where nobody would see you. And the only living soul who claims he saw a second Granger walk into that vault is Malfoy, who you were found—" He glanced at Harry and found, just in time, a different word. "Who you were found with."
"I brought her in through our entrance," Harry said. "It was the plan, John. It's on paper. Robards signed it."
"And whose plan was it?"
"That'll do," said someone at the door.
Hermione had met Gawain Robards perhaps a dozen times in three years and never seen him anywhere but behind his desk, signing things. He was a big grey man in his late fifties with a nose that had been broken and set slightly crooked, and he came in favouring his left knee the way men do who have decided not to mention it.
"Hermione. I'm sorry about all this. Harry." As he passed he picked something off Harry's shoulder with two fingers, absently, the way a man straightens a son's tie. "You've slept in that jumper."
Harry went red to the hair. Hermione felt her own face burn, and she would have given a great deal to be back in the vault with the screaming spoons.
"I'm suspending you," said Robards. "Full pay, pending an inquiry. You're not to go into the vault or this office until it's done. You'll keep your wand." He looked at Dawlish as he said it. "I'm not having the author of a bill before the Wizengamot walked out of this building with her hands empty. It looks like a verdict."
"It is a verdict," Hermione said. "The vote's in nine days. If I'm suspended, Ogilvy doesn't have to win the argument. He only has to read out the Prophet."
"I know." He said it heavily. "I'll do what I can." He held out a sheet of parchment and a quill. "Acknowledgement of the notice. It's the form."
She signed it on the corner of her own desk. Hermione Jean Granger, the date, the hook on the G. He watched the quill as she wrote, the way he'd watched it on every search warrant she had carried up to his desk for two years, as though it might do something rash.
"And you're off the case, Harry. Everyone on this floor knows how you feel about her." Robards said it quite kindly. "I'd be a fool to leave you on it, and so would you."
Harry didn't deny it. She watched him consider denying it, in front of all of them, and decide against, and that undid her more than the robes had.
"I see I've missed the hanging," said a voice from the corridor.
Draco's left arm was in a black sling and his coat hung from his shoulders, and he was the colour of old candles. His eyes went to her first, down and up again, quickly, as if checking she'd come back with everything she'd gone out with. Then they went to Harry's crumpled jumper and stayed there a moment too long.
"Potter," he said. "You look rested."
"Mr Malfoy," said Robards. "Your contract's void, I'm afraid. A suspended officer signed it."
"I'll bear up. I was mostly paid in sandwiches."
Then Elias Hapgood came round the corner on his stick, in carpet slippers, his clouded eyes fixed somewhere above all their heads, and said in a voice that carried to the broom cupboard, "Miss Granger has never initialled a thing in her life and the door has never made a mistake in its life, and I'd like that written down." He found the door frame with his hand. "And I went over that Malfoy shelf this morning with my fingers, since the young man's not allowed. The salt cellar's wrong. The beast on the lid has four legs. I can feel them. And that wording. Released for examination. That's not Miss Granger's. That's old Custody Office wording. I've not seen it on a slip since ninety-eight, when they sent me down all their boxes."
"A great many things got sent down to be burned in ninety-eight, Elias," said Robards. "Most of us were glad to see the back of them." He smiled at the old man, a small private smile, as if at a joke someone had told him in another room.
Hermione took her coat and her cardigan and left the robes where they lay. At the door both men moved at once.
"Don't," she said. "Either of you."
The smile went down in the lift with her, for no reason she could name, and stayed.
Someone knocked on the workshop door at ten that night, three times, flat-handed, and Draco knew who it was before he was halfway down the stairs. Nobody else he knew would knock like an Auror and then step back off the step to show he wasn't going to force it.
Potter stood in the alley with his hands in his pockets. He hadn't brought noodles.
"You knocked," said Draco.
"I'm told it's polite."
"By whom? Nobody who's met you." He stood aside.
He had spent the day being useless with one arm. The new skin pulled when he made a fist, and under it the Mark lay broken clean in two. He had looked at that in the mirror at St Mungo's for longer than he would ever admit, and then spent the afternoon deciding whether he minded, and found he didn't, and minded that instead.
Potter climbed the near-ladder of a staircase and looked round. Granger's pencil was still on the bench where she'd left it on Tuesday, the end chewed. Draco watched Potter see the pencil.
"A Potter," said the wall, with feeling.
"She talks?"
"Incessantly." Draco leant on the bench and waited. Potter took his glasses off, looked at them and put them back on, which at school had always meant bad news. "I told her. Last night."
"I gathered." He had gathered it at nine that morning, from the state of Potter's jumper and the fact that Granger couldn't look at either of them. "Congratulations. Or is it commiserations? I never know with you people."
"I didn't come up here to fight."
"Pity. It's been a very dull day."
Potter sat on the stool at the far end of the bench. Her stool. Draco felt it the way you feel a stair that isn't there.
"What do you want with her?" said Potter.
There were a dozen answers, and every one was either cruel or true, and Draco had the uncomfortable feeling Potter would know which. He took the cruel one because it was shorter. "Is this where you tell me she deserves better? Don't trouble. I've a list. It's alphabetical."
"That's not what I was going to say."
"What, then?"
"I was going to say if you hurt her, I'll—" Potter stopped. "No. That's what I'd have said at fifteen."
"You'd have said it with your fists at fifteen."
"So would you," said Potter. "You'd have lost."
Draco heard himself say, low and exact, the way things came out when he'd been saying them to his ceiling for a week: "Fourteen years, Potter."
Potter went still.
"You had fourteen years. You had a tent. I expect you had her asleep on your sofa more nights than you can count, and you stood under a lamp-post in the rain for forty minutes rather than knock on my door. I've had ten days and a dish of murtlap. Don't climb my stairs and ask me what I want."
Down in the alley a cat knocked something over.
"I know what I had," Potter said quietly. "I was so frightened of losing her I never noticed I wasn't keeping her either." He looked at the pencil. "Do you know what she uses? For her Patronus?"
Draco didn't.
"The orchard at the Burrow, the summer after the war. I was teaching her to fly, and we came off the broom together." There was no triumph in it at all, which was worse. "She told me, the first Christmas after. Said it was the happiest she'd been since she was eleven."
Draco thought of the otter on Diagon Alley, blue-white through the rain, opening its mouth on her voice. Draco Malfoy. Eeylops. Now. He thought of how he'd run.
"And she sent it to me," he said.
"Yeah," said Potter, after a while. "She did."
He should have left it there. But the part of him that had been raised in a cold house to go for the soft place said, "Perhaps she's tired of being safe."
Potter's hand came down flat on the bench, and every piece of copper on it rang.
"Trade!" shrieked the wall.
"She has never," Potter said, very evenly, "been safe. Not one day since she was eleven. She's been in every fight I was ever in, and half of them were my fault, and in July she got her lip split on a house search for her own bill. If you think I'm safe, Malfoy, you don't know either of us." He took his hand back. "And that's not what I came about."
Draco had to clear his throat. "What did you come about?"
"Nobody came past us in the Atrium wearing her face. I was watching the lifts the whole time." Potter's jaw set. "I'd know her face in a crowd of a thousand."
"Spare me."
"So they came in the way she did. By our entrance, and up and down from Two."
Draco sat down. "So it's one of yours."
"Or it's her. That's what Dawlish says. It's what the inquiry'll say, the day before the vote."
"Do you believe it?"
"No."
"Then for once in our lives, Potter, we agree on something. Shall I have it framed?"
"I'm off the case. You're off it. She's suspended." Potter stood. "I want you on it anyway. You can tell real silver from fake, and I can get into places you can't."
"And Granger?"
"She's not to know we talked."
"She'll know in four seconds," said Draco. "She'll look at us and know."
Potter nearly smiled. At the top of the stairs he stopped with a hand on the rail.
"If she picks you—"
"Potter."
"—I'll still be at Sunday lunch. I'll still bring her tea in the mornings. I'm not going anywhere, whatever she does. You'll have to get used to me."
"Is that a threat?"
"No," said Potter. "It's just how it is." And he went down, and the door shut behind him without a bang.
Draco stood in the workroom a long while afterwards. He would very much have liked to despise Potter. It would have been restful. He picked up the stirring rod to finish the night's draught one-handed, and when he looked down he saw that he was going sunwise, and had been for days, and hadn't noticed.
By Friday evening Hermione had cleaned the oven, alphabetised the spices, read the Prophet four times (GRANGER SUSPENDED, and beneath it, OGILVY: "THE BILL DIES WITH HER CAREER") and started on the skirting boards with a toothbrush, which was how she knew it was time to stop.
Harry arrived at six with a bag of shopping. Draco arrived at ten past with a roll of parchment under his good arm. They met on her landing and said "Potter" and "Malfoy" in the voices of men who had agreed on something and were trying not to look it.
It took her about four seconds.
"You've talked," she said.
"We have not," said Draco.
"Bit," said Harry.
Draco shut his eyes. "I did tell you."
So they sat at her kitchen table, the three of them, where two nights ago Harry had said a thing she was still carrying round like a cup filled too full. She sat between them because there was nowhere else. Harry filled the kettle. "How d'you take it, Malfoy?"
"Black."
"Course you do."
The table was too small. Her knee touched Draco's under it, and she moved it, and found Harry's, and after that she kept both feet on the rung of her chair.
Harry had brought the copy of the trap plan that had gone up to the Auror Office, which he should not have done. Draco weighed its corners with the sugar bowl and his own right hand, still faintly grey from Pip's last sitting, and Hermione read down it and stopped.
Observers: H. Granger and D. Malfoy, under concealment. Rear of vault, behind wand shelf, north-east corner.
"She didn't search," Hermione said. "She came in, took the comb and turned straight to our corner before she cast anything. She knew where we'd be standing, because somebody had written it down." She put her finger on the line. "I built that whole trap on telling my own office on Monday and nowhere else. This went upstairs the Friday before."
"Robards signed it," said Harry.
"And read it?" said Draco.
"He signs forty things a day and reads none of them. Savage got him to sign for a dragon once. And the eleven names on the list all came past the desk in the Atrium. Aurors don't sign in. We never have."
"So the list can't have the thief on it."
"No." He didn't look happy. "Dawlish was on Two all Wednesday night, catching up on paperwork, he says, which he's never done in his life. And he was in the building right through ninety-seven."
"So was half your office," said Draco.
"I know that."
"Hapgood said the wording came out of the Custody Office in ninety-eight," Hermione said. She could hear herself going faster. "Whoever wrote those lines in my register learned to fill in a release slip in a room that was handing out Muggle-borns' wands. Harry, who ran it?"
"Nobody knows. The records went in the summer of ninety-eight." He looked at the plan and not at either of them. "I'll go into the archive tomorrow and see what's left."
He got up for the kettle, and on the way, without a word, took the jar of murtlap essence off her windowsill and put it down by Draco's grey hand. Draco looked at the jar and then at him, as though Harry had produced a live ferret.
"For God's sake," said Harry. "Just use it."
At twenty past nine something silver came through the kitchen wall.
A heron stood on her draining board and spoke in Healer Carvalho's tired voice. "Mr Malfoy. Elias Hapgood's been found on the floor of the old Lost Property store on Level Ten, with a silver salt cellar by his hand. It's at his throat. He's eighty-one and very frightened. You'll want to run."
Draco was already on his feet. He pulled his glove off with his teeth and spat it on the table.
"He wasn't a witness," Hermione said. She didn't remember standing up. "He never testified, he's—"
"He talked," said Harry. He had stopped with one arm in his coat. "This morning. In your office. In front of all of us."
Draco didn't wait for the rest. He ran.