Chapter 5: Custody
By three in the morning it was done, and Draco was on the floor again.
There had been no time for sittings. The silver had reached the hinge of the old man's jaw by the time they ran in, his breath whistling thin past it, and Healer Carvalho had said, "His heart won't take another hour," and looked at Draco. Draco had taken Hapgood's hand without a word and simply not let go. Hermione had watched the silver run down out of the old man's throat and chest and arm and pour up into Draco's hand, past the wrist, past where it had gone for Dennis, up the forearm to the elbow. It was still there. It had greyed to the colour of a winter sky and showed no sign of fading.
He sat against the wall with his eyes shut. Harry crouched beside him with one hand on his shoulder, and neither of them said anything about it, and Draco didn't shrug the hand off. Hermione, holding a cup of water nobody wanted, couldn't stop looking at it.
Hapgood woke at dawn. His voice was a rasp, like the grille on a cold morning.
"Spectacles," he said. "Went back down for my spectacles. Can't see through them, but I like to know where they are." His clouded eyes moved towards her. "Somebody'd put that salt cellar where my spectacles go. Somebody who knew where they go."
"Elias." Hermione drew her chair close. "On Thursday you said the Custody Office sent you their boxes in ninety-eight. Who sent them?"
"Ledgers. Slips. Tags by the thousand." The rasp caught, and she held the water to his mouth. "Burn these, Elias, he said, and don't read them. So I didn't read them. Wasn't going to start at my age."
"Who said?"
"Mr Robards. Brought them down himself on a trolley, summer of ninety-eight." A cracked little chuckle. "Didn't burn them, though."
"Why not?"
"I'm Lost Property, miss. Forty years. I've never burned a thing in my life." His hand found hers on the blanket and patted it. "They're in your vault. Brought my crates down with me when I took the job. Back wall, behind where the tapestry hung. Marked Umbrellas."
Hermione sat very still.
It came the way answers came to her in exams, all at once and in the wrong order, until she put it straight. The fourth face the door knew, the one that never came down; never as himself. A plan he had signed on a Friday and nobody thought he'd read. A thief who turned straight to their corner. The Auror entrance, and a list of eleven names drawn up to have nobody on it. A release slip worded the way they'd been worded in a room in 1998, and the man who'd sent that room's records down to be burned. Two years of her warrants on his desk and his eyes on her quill. A long brown hair, picked off Harry's shoulder with two fingers.
And the smile. Small, private, as if at a joke told in another room. She had seen it on Wednesday night, on her own mouth.
She looked up. Harry was standing in the doorway, and he had heard all of it.
"No," he said.
"Harry—"
"He signed my papers." It came out flat. "Ninety-eight. Kingsley wanted me in without my NEWTs and half the office said no, and Robards signed it. He sat with me in Mungo's two nights running when I got hit in Bristol. He—" Harry stopped. His hand went up, slowly, to his own shoulder, and stayed there. "He picked something off me. On Thursday. In front of you."
She didn't answer.
"It's always on me," Harry said. "Your hair. Ginny said so. It's always on my coat." His face did something she had seen it do only twice before, both times in the war. "He took it off me."
"Potter," said Draco from the floor, eyes still shut. "If it's any comfort, I'd have taken things off you as well. You moult like a hearthrug."
Harry made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh, and sat down hard on the end of Hapgood's bed, and put his head in his hands.
"We can't arrest the Head Auror," Hermione said, "on an old man's word about some umbrellas."
It was eight in the morning in the corridor outside Hapgood's room. Draco was in a wheeled chair someone had brought him, which he had refused to sit in and was now sitting in. The vote was in seven days.
"He'll say he was ordered to send the boxes down. He'll say Elias is confused, and Elias is eighty-one and half blind and has just had silver in his throat, and the inquiry will believe him. So we don't arrest him. We make him come and get them."
"He knows Hapgood's alive," said Draco.
"He doesn't know Hapgood's talking. And he doesn't know what's in those crates, or he'd have burned them on one of his visits wearing my face." She turned to Harry. "You go up to his office this morning and tell him the truth: that Elias is awake and rambling about some crates of old Custody papers at the back of the vault. Then you lie about when. You say the inquiry means to open them on Monday."
"You want me to lie to him."
"I want you to tell him one thing that isn't true. Only him. Nobody else in the building. That was what went wrong last time. I told too many people, and one of them was him."
Harry looked at her for a long moment. Harry, who had never in his life lied to a teacher with a straight face.
"All right," he said.
While he was gone she sat with Draco in the corridor. His grey hand lay along the arm of the chair, and she put hers over it without thinking. It was so cold she nearly took it back.
"Don't," he said. "You'll catch it."
"You can't catch it."
"You'd be amazed what I can give people." He didn't move his hand. "He'll do it, you know. Potter. He'd walk into the sea for you if you asked politely."
"I know."
"I used to think that was the stupidest thing about him." Draco looked down the corridor where Harry had gone. "I'm revising."
Harry came back at eleven and sat down on the bench beside her.
"Done."
"Did he believe you?"
"He asked if I'd eaten." Harry took his glasses off and looked at them. "He told me to go home and sleep."
Dawlish took more persuading. In the end Harry did it, in a stairwell, for twenty minutes, with the door shut. Hermione heard none of it but the end, Dawlish's voice rising: "If you're wrong about this, Potter, I'll have your badge. And hers."
"She hasn't got a badge," said Harry.
"Then I'll have yours twice."
Robards could suspend her. Nobody had thought to tell the door.
It looked at her at half past nine that night, considered her, and opened with its old man's cough, and Hermione walked into her vault for the first time since it had come down on her head.
Nothing had been righted. The inquiry wanted it as it had fallen. The shelves lay where they'd gone over, the wand boxes split along the aisle, the tapestry in a long dark heap that had stopped bleeding and started to smell. Along the back wall where it had hung stood four wooden crates, each stencilled in faded black: UMBRELLAS.
Dawlish and Draco, who had been told by three Healers to stay in bed and had answered each of them in French, went behind the fallen shelf halfway down. Hermione and Harry stood by the crates under the Cloak.
They had done this since they were eleven. The first time they had both fitted under it with room to spare. Now the hem barely reached her ankles, his chin rested on the top of her head, and each time he breathed she felt it go down the length of her back.
"We used to fit," she whispered.
"We used to be twelve."
He had always been warm. She had never once in fourteen years stood still long enough to notice. His hand rested on her arm above the elbow, not holding, just there, the way it had on Diagon Alley when he said you're on the list. Somewhere across the dark Draco was crouched behind a shelf with his grey arm, unable to see her, knowing exactly where she stood. She was aware of both of them, and she was aware of being aware, and she couldn't make it stop.
At a quarter to eleven the grille cleared its throat.
The lamps came up, and for the second time in her life Hermione watched herself walk into the vault.
She saw more this time. The thief wore plain black robes; Dawlish had the grey ones in an evidence bag. On Wednesday she'd thought she must walk slower than she'd believed. She didn't. Her legs were carrying a heavier man's habits, a long careful stride that favoured the left knee. Her own gloved hands carried a lead-lined pouch.
The thief went straight to the back wall, set the pouch down on a crate, and with a flick of the wand the lid of the first one began to lift.
Hermione stepped out from under the Cloak.
"Those are umbrellas," she said.
The other Hermione turned. For a moment they simply looked at each other across six feet of broken flagstones: the same hair coming out of the same clip, the same face, the same height. It was like a mirror that had decided not to copy her.
Then her own mouth smiled at her, small and private, as if at a joke told in another room.
"Good evening, Mr Robards," said Hermione.
"You're suspended, Hermione." It was her voice. That was the worst of it, worse than the face: her own voice saying her name gently, the way he'd said it in her office. "You oughtn't to be down here. Anyone might walk in and find you destroying evidence before your inquiry."
"You sold them," she said. "The wands. The Commission took them and sent them to your store, and you sold them to the families. That's why my bill has to die. Once it passes, every family in Britain can tell the truth about where their Muggle-born wands came from, and nobody can touch them for it. Nobody except the man who sold them."
"Forty galleons apiece," said her own voice, "and they queued." The thief tilted her head. "Everyone in this building did something in ninety-eight. I was the one with a storeroom."
"And Pip? Dennis? Elias?"
"Your bill had faces. Faces are easy." The smile again. "So is hair. You leave it everywhere. You leave it all over him."
The thief's free hand went to an inside pocket, and Hermione knew that movement. She had made it herself in 1997, inside this building, wearing a stranger's face and counting the minutes.
"Accio flask," she said.
It flew out of the thief's robes and across the gap to her, small and pewter and sloshing. She watched the understanding arrive on her own face, which was a very strange thing to see, and she could have sworn the left knee gave a little.
The thief snatched up the pouch, and the christening cup came out of it, gleaming in a gloved hand.
"That's been in the Auror evidence store since Wednesday," Hermione said. "There's one man who can sign things out of there without anyone asking why. Did you use your name, or mine?"
"Yours," said the thief, "naturally," and threw it at her face, underarm and hard.
The Cloak hit the floor. Harry's hand closed round the cup an inch from her cheek, bare-fingered, the way it had once closed round a Snitch, without seeming to think.
She heard him draw breath.
The thief's wand came up. Hermione's Shield Charm met the curse halfway and threw blue light up the walls. Dawlish was roaring behind the fallen shelf and Draco was over it in one movement, and the next curse went wide and split another wand box down the aisle, and Hermione said, quite clearly, "Expelliarmus," because it was the spell Harry trusted more than any other. The thief's wand spun up into the dark.
By the time it came down, the thief's face had begun to change.
It went the way she remembered: the skin seething, the bones shifting under it. Her hair drew in and greyed. Her nose broke and set crooked. The body thickened and grew until the black robes split at the shoulders, and Gawain Robards stood in the middle of her vault, breathing hard, his empty hands half raised.
"Sir?" said Dawlish. He sounded about nine years old.
Then he remembered what he was. Ropes leapt from his wand and bound his Head Auror from the shoulders to the knees, and Robards went down on the flagstones and didn't fight.
"Ask the boy," he said, in his own voice, which she had never heard sound so tired, "how I knew what his family's silver does."
Hermione was already on her knees beside Harry.
He had sat down where he caught it. The cup lay by his leg. His right hand was silver to the wrist, and as she watched, the line climbed his forearm faster than it had climbed Dennis's, faster than anything she'd seen, the colour running under the skin like a tide over sand.
"Look at me." She took his face in both hands. "Harry, look at me. You've got to be bored. Can you do bored?"
"Can't," Harry said. He was smiling at her, which was unbearable. "You're here."
"Granger." Draco was on Harry's other side with his glove already off, and his voice was very calm. "Get up and go and stand by the door."
"What?"
"His heart's going like a train because you're holding his face. Go and stand by the door."
She stared at him. Then she understood, and it went into her like the cold of the vault, and she took her hands away from Harry's face and stood and walked to the grille. It was eleven steps. She counted them so as not to run back.
Draco took Harry's silver hand in his grey one.
"Do try to be bored, Potter," he said. "I realise it's difficult with her in the room."
The silver went home.
She watched it from the door. It drained out of Harry's elbow and wrist and fingers and poured into Draco's hand, up through the grey of Hapgood's silver, past the elbow, to the shoulder. She saw it at his collar, a bright line along his throat. Draco's lips went white. His breath went short, and then shorter, and he didn't let go.
"Malfoy," Harry said. "That's enough. That's enough, you'll—"
"Shut up, Potter. I'm working."
When Harry's fingers were pink again, Draco opened his hand carefully, as though setting something down, and tipped sideways. Harry caught him before his head hit the stone.
She stood in the doorway where she'd been told to stand, with Robards's flask still in her fist, and watched Harry Potter hold Draco Malfoy's head off the flagstones with his one good hand and shout for her to get Carvalho, now, now, and she could not have said which of them she was more frightened for.
At two in the morning the fourth floor of St Mungo's was dim and smelled of lavender, and they had put the two of them in rooms across the corridor from each other, as though somebody had a sense of humour.
Harry was awake. His right hand lay bandaged on the blanket, warm when she touched it, ordinary skin. The first thing he said was, "How's Malfoy?"
"Grey from his fingers to his collarbone. Cold. Carvalho says it'll fade." Hermione sat on the edge of the bed. "She doesn't like how slowly."
"Go and sit with him."
"Harry—"
"I'm all right. Ron's coming in the morning with Kreacher's tart, God help me. He's got nobody." Harry looked at the ceiling. "He took all of it out of me, Hermione. Every bit. I could feel him doing it. He didn't have to take it all at once."
"I know."
"Go on, then."
She stood. At the door she turned back, and he was watching her the way he had always watched her, and she crossed the room again before she'd decided anything and bent and kissed him.
It was brief, and not careful. It tasted of hospital water. His good hand came up to the back of her neck and rested there, very lightly, as if she might go, and after a moment she did. Neither of them said a word. She closed his door behind her and stood in the corridor with her back against it and her heart going like a train.
Dawlish was waiting at the end of the corridor with a ledger under his arm.
"Found it in a crate marked umbrellas," he said, and held it out as if it were something he'd lost in a bet. "Thought you'd want to read it before his solicitor does. Your suspension's lifted. Kingsley came in at midnight in his dressing gown. Vote's still Saturday." He paused. "Granger."
"Yes?"
He seemed to look for something to say and not find it. "Good spell," he said, and went.
She read it under the corridor lamp. Columns in a neat upright hand she knew now from every warrant he had ever countersigned. Wands by the hundred: wood, core, length, the name of the witch or wizard they'd been taken from, the date, the price, the family they'd gone to. She knew the families. She had sat across committee tables from them. The Selwyns were there. She remembered now that their June declaration had come in with an old tag still tied to the wand; Tobias had filed it under S, and she had signed it off without a second look.
Halfway down the third page she stopped.
Willow, phoenix feather, 11 in. Okafor, P. 2 March 1998. Forty galleons. Released to L. Malfoy, Wiltshire.
She had written that wand down herself in June while its owner cried and apologised for crying. It had been in that house the spring Hermione lay on its drawing-room floor. The Malfoys had declared fourteen objects in May, and Draco had carried every one of them in with his own hands, and not one of them was a wand.
Across the corridor a lamp was still burning under his door. Ask the boy, Robards had said. She thought of a dish of murtlap on his workbench, and of telling him that somebody was still giving dinner parties on top of Pip's wand, and of how he had looked at her for a long moment and said Yes. All right, as if she'd passed something.
She knocked.