A/N: This story was some kind of a prompt given to me by Vika (highonbooks). It was also written with her help in several aspects of the world-building, plot and motivation. The Original Character presented here was created by Thams (eyesofeagle, on tumblr) and he was used by both of us in a HP role play of ours... Feliks, therefore, grew as a character with the help of all of the RP crew (Thams, Vika, Cella/otomriddle/voldybadass and I). So, this story is dedicated to Vika, who pushed me to write it, and to Thams, who 3 years ago created the best OC we could have to work with.

As I'm brazilian and our forensic science departments are way too different from the UK's (aka no one takes our forensic science department seriously), I tried my best to write something that is correct based on researches I did. This is a work of fiction, written with the intent of having fun and making those who read it have fun too, so I'm sorry if something is too different from reality in regards to the forensic and pathology field in the UK during the 1940s.

I hope you guys enjoy it. I, as someone who loves to play with the HP universe, had a lot of fun writing this story.

Any character or concept you may recognize from the canon HP stories belong to JK Rowling.

01

July the 14th, 1943

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The police's report was as confusing as it could be.

A couple and their adult son had been found dead inside their house on that morning and no one in East Yorkshire had thought they were experienced enough to perform the autopsy on the bodies. To Dr Feliks Ravenwood, it was a silly excuse not to do their work, but he also knew, from the report, that the case had already raised too much speculation and rumours around the neighbouring cities and villages. Given the context, summoning a professional from the capital was a good move to show people that the police were trying hard to get that odd situation sorted out in the best way possible.

And now, after receiving a telegram earlier that day telling him to get on the first train he could find, Feliks had finally arrived at Beverly (as that was where the bodies had been taken) only to find its coroner's office full of policemen trying to deal with the journalists (most of them from small county tabloids that couldn't stand publishing stuff related to the war anymore) who wanted to know more about the Riddle case.

"Dr Ravenwood?" a middle-aged man with a thick moustache approached him as soon as Feliks squeezed through the journalists. "Glad to see you. I'm Dr David Collins, I've asked the Chief Inspector to ask you for help." Collins pushed the man across the office's hall until they crossed a door and entered an empty corridor. "Have they told you anything about what happened?"

"Just the basic: three people found dead inside their house in a small village in East Yorkshire with no apparent manner of death," said Feliks, looking around before following the other man into a small office.

"I imagine Chief Linwood didn't give you any more details because he wanted you to come as soon as possible." David laughed, before handing him a file brimmed with typed pages and a few photographs. "Earlier today, around 6:30 AM, a maid named Margareth Norton arrived at the house of the Riddle family, in Little Hangleton, to find three dead bodies in the drawing room. The bodies belonged to Thomas Christopher Riddle, 63 years old, Mary Elizabeth Riddle, 60, and Thomas Felix Riddle, 38. The three of them were healthy and until now, from what our team has analysed, there was no evidence of violence towards them. The house was intact, there was nothing out of place inside the drawing room, the doors of the house had not been forced open and the state of the bodies was perfect. It's as if the three of them dropped dead all of sudden, for no reason at all."

Feliks looked through the photos inside the file. Three of them showed the Riddle family: a woman with dark hair speckled with white and a delicate face, a stern man with greying hair and a younger man with a handsome, yet tired face. The other photographs had been taken earlier that day and showed a richly decorated drawing room with three bodies lying on its floor. One of the bodies, that of the woman, was lying on its back in the space between the sofa and the grand piano; the one that belonged to the older man was right in front of an armchair, by the fireplace, lying on its front; and the last one, the younger of the Riddles, was on its back, a few feet away from the door, with its face slightly tilted to the opposite side of the room, as if the corpse had been trying to avoid looking to the other bodies. The rest of the room had no sight, at least from the photos, of a fight or anything like that.

"What else do we know about them?"

"Well, they were rich people. The family owns several houses and apartments throughout England, they lived out of renting their properties. There were no other relatives," Collins explained and then sighed. "You see, the people in Little Hangleton said they were odd people… Well, actually they said they were rude and that not many people liked them in the village. But 'odd' was a description many people gave of them."

"Odd in what way exactly?" asked Feliks, arching an eyebrow as he looked up from the papers.

"As you'll see in the reports, the villagers tell of a rather weird story regarding the son, Tom Riddle. They say the man once ran away with a local girl and vanished for almost a year," said David, scratching the back of his head. "When he came back, people say he had gone mad: he kept talking about being bewitched by the said girl, he became afraid of leaving the house and, by the end of 1926, he had attempted suicide. He was institutionalized for a few weeks before Mr and Mrs Riddle managed to take him home again." The man shrugged. "Apparently his grandfather, a certain Gregory Riddle from Great Hangleton, went down the same way. People in the village say it's in the family."

"And is the police suspecting he might have done something and taken his parents with him?" asked Feliks, pushing his glasses up his nose.

"Yes and no… Apparently the lad had gotten better over the past few years. He was still a bit scared of several things, but it's been seventeen years since it happened and there's no recent medical reports of him having suicide ideation or attempts," he explained. "The main suspect is their gardener, a young man called Frank Khaled Bryce, Lieutenant of the 5th Infantry Division, honorably discharged after being wounded. The Riddles employed him after he came back from the war with an injured leg and a bad temper. The cook and the maid said he was the only other person who had the keys to the house."

"And why would the gardener kill them? Is he, I don't knowdinnae ken, mentioned on the Riddle's will or something?"

"He is but he would make more money working for them rather than inheriting what Mr Riddle would leave him."

"Then why?"

"Maybe he went mad? They say he's a strange lad, Frank Bryce. That he's reclusive and rude, afraid of loud noises and easily irritated by the kids when they try to poke fun at him. He's basically an old man in the body of a 26-year-old."

"Weren't Wasn't Tom Riddle the reclusive rude man that was scared of everything?" asked Ravenwood, raising arching a brown eyebrow.

"Well, he was too… Maybe it was a pattern followed by the men in that house?" said Collins, letting out a nervous laugh.

Feliks laughed, shaking his head while he closed the file, taking care for none of the papers and photos in it to slip out. When he looked at Collins again, the man watched him closely and expectantly.

"Could I… Start the necropsies tomorrow?" asked Ravenwood. "It's a bit late and the day was a little exhausting with the travel."

"Oh, of course." David took a step back and let his shoulders slump a little, looking a little disappointed now. "I believe there's an inn a few blocks from here. Tell them you're here working with me, I bet they'll make a better price for a room."

Feliks almost felt bad for how disappointed the man had looked. Everyone was expecting an answer for the deaths of the Riddle family, but what could he do? After he received the telegram, Ravenwood had to finish identifying a dead body found in an abandoned house that had been bombed two years earlier, and then there was the hours inside the train until he arrived at Beverley… He was tired, even though he was curious about the Riddles. But he knew there was no chance he would do a good job if he opened them up right now, while his body begged for a good meal and a bed.

The inn – The Hermit Inn – was not the most luxurious one, but it was one of the cheapest, according to its owner, who served Feliks his dinner all the while talking about how his grandparents had built that house and how it had been the family business ever since. It was not bad, but the bed creaked every time he turned in it and the chat of drunken men could be heard by his window until around one in the morning. But all of this didn't really bother Ravenwood: his mind had been too focused on the Riddles while he read the reports and analysed the photographs and,photographs. Oonce he put all of it it down, his head was too clouded to register anything but the slight smell of mould that emanated from the pillow.

In the beginning of the morning, Tom Riddle was a stiff body on the top of the morgue's slab. His blue eyes were cloudy and looking more sunken into his skull than when he was alive. His dark brown hair was damp, its curls looking undone and messy, with a thin layer of what looked like ice on its strands and on his eyebrows and eyelashes. His pale skin looked greyer more grey and the sparse freckles on his nose seemed to stand out on the dull colour, while his lips looked bluish. The man was tall and lean and now his chest, ridden of all the air that had once filled his lungs, seemed to sink in, making it look like as if it was completely empty. From the photos, Tom Riddle seemed to be a handsome man in his late thirties, but now he was just a stiff body whose death made itself more and more present with each minute that passed.

By the end of the morning, Tom Riddle was still a dead body with rigor mortis making its muscle lock into place, but now with its chest and abdomen emptied of its contents after being opened by Dr Ravenwood and, later, closed once again with a suture that now formed a Y shape on his body. His skull had also been pried open, his brain looked at and weighted before putting the skullcap on its place once again and having the scalp stitched close.

After the whole process (opening, empting, closing, washing), all Feliks Ravenwood could think about was how every single organ of the man was in perfect shape. His heart was the right size with its arteries clear of any fat plaque, his brain had no atrophy and no bleeding, his liver was soft with no vestige of nodules, his stomach had no bleeding or ulcers, his lungs were of the right pinkish colour without any bubbles left by emphysema or abnormal masses, and his aorta and pulmonary vein were clean, without any trace of a blood clot that could have clogged it. There was no sign of a gunshot or stab wound or even bruises on his neck suggesting that he might have been strangled. The only abnormal marks on his bodies were a small scar on his right knee and the self-inflicted scars on his wrists, the remains of the story Collins had told Feliks the previous day. It seemed as if he had simply dropped dead, which and that wouldn't be too weirdstrange if he was the only one to die in that night.

But that was not the case. Thomas and Mary Riddle had been found dead too and the signs on their bodies exhibited indicated that the three of them had, most likely, died around the same time. And, what was even more surprising, the bodies of the elderly couple followed the same pattern as their son's: nothing indicated the cause of death. The only thing worth being noted was Mr Riddle's mitral valve of the heart having its leaflets thickened with signs of fusion here and there, something that might indicate heart failure in the future but that right now it didn't make any difference as his heart seemed about the right size and shape.

By the end of the autopsies, Dr Ravenwood had nothing to say aside from what the police had already known: there was no apparent cause of death and the manner of death was still undetermined. He doubted any test he asked to be ran on blood or the stomach's contents would come with anything new. It was frustrating, having three healthy people dead in front of him and not being able to understand how they ended up like that. He felt even worse when he stopped to think that he had opened, examined and closed the three of them, coming out without any answer and leaving a terrible job for the mortician who would look after the bodies once they were released to the funerary home.

"I'm sorry," said Feliks, as he took a last look at the three corpses laying on top of the slabs in the morgue. One of the assistants was busy pushing Mrs Riddle into her drawer. If he was honest with himself, the doctor would admit he didn't know if he was apologising to Collins, who had hoped for an answer through his work, or to the Riddles, whose deaths were still a mystery.

"Don't worry," said David Collins as he buried his hands into his pockets. "Are you sure you can't rule it as a natural death, though?"

"Three healthy people don't just drop dead together in one night, you know that," he said, sighing. "But there's not enough evidence to rule it as an accident or a murder either." The man looked at the corpses once again, furrowing his brows and approaching Tom Riddle's body.

"What's wrong?" asked David.

"It's just…" Feliks reached the corpse's right hand, rubbing his fingers against it and trying to clean a faint bluish stain on his cold skin. The stain spread on the man's skin as his fingers brushed it, looking almost like wet paint, before finally fading. "Riddle was a painter, right?"

"From what we gathered, he did paint and draw occasionally."

"His hand was dirty with paint," he said, trying to remember if he had seen it before. Feliks stared at the body, noticing that the thin layer of ice covering Tom Riddle's eyelashes, eyebrows and hair was still there. "You should check the drawers temperature later, Dr Collins. You'll end up mimicking rigor mortis with its temperature."

"What?" the man asked, cocking his head.

"The corpses had a bit of ice on them. It must have been the low temperature of the drawers to keep them cool."

"Where?" he asked, approaching the slabs and looking the corpse from head to toe with a frown on his face, before shaking his head. "Oh… I'll look into it later," said the other man, before letting out a deep sigh and turning around to leave the morgue. "Let's go, I'll pay you a dinner before you go back to your inn to write your report."

Feliks Ravenwood was supposed to go back to London on the following day. He had looked into the train schedules for one that left would leave at the afternoon, but when the clock struck midday, he was still in bed, listening to the sounds of the inn and staring at his own right hand.

He had noticed the blue stain on his fingertips while he was drinking with Collins, the previous night. At first, Feliks had thought it was a stain from the carbon paper he had been using earlier to fill his paperwork, but after washing his hands for a few good minutes and still seeing the bluish mark on his fingers, he started to worry as he remembered he had seen something similar on Tom Riddle's corpse.

He had tried to sleep and failed during most of the night as he tried to ignore the blue stain on his fingers. But the more he tried to ignore it, the more he remembered not just that, but also the tiny specks of ice he had seen on the corpses. Neither Collins nor the morgue assistant had noticed these details and it was not the first time something like that had happened.

The doctor still remembered when he was around six years old and still lived in Inverness. There was a family who lived near the village, he couldn't remember their surname, but he could easily remember how sometimes there was a trail of orange dust that followed their daughter's, Arabella, hands when she was playing with the other children. Feliks had asked her what was that pretty dust she played with, but she said there was no such thing. When he tried to ask the other children if they could see it too, all of them denied it.

Years later, while at an old bookshop near Dufftown, Ravenwood could swear he saw what looked like webs of silver binding the bookseller's hands to some of his books. He was eleven years old then and his uncle had said he had such a vivid imagination, something common for a child that age.

He kept seeing things where there should be nothing. It was never something big, he never saw a dead person or a weird creature: it was always these details, colours or shadows that painted the world in a different way for his eyes. When Feliks learned about synaesthesia, he told himself that was the most logical explanation and now, most of the times, he managed to simply ignore the colourful tricks his mind played on his vision.

But, for some reason, not today. He could just stare at the blue stain on his fingers and remember how it had been on Riddle's corpse before. Or think about the thin layer of ice on the man's eyelashes that should have melted after a few minutes while he had been left outside the drawer on a hot summer day.

He needed to take one last look at the bodies and the train to London would have to wait.

A/N: I had always been curious to how the necropsies of the Riddles would look like to the medical examiner who worked with their corpses.

1) cause of death: it's what caused the death... a disease, a wound, etc.

2) manner of death: it describes the nature of the death, if it was an accident, a homicide, a natural death, a suicide, etc. Dr Ravenwood most likely put the cause of death as cardiac arrest, but the manner of death remained undetermined.

3) Feliks is Scottish. I love accents, I'm trying to give his lines a bit of a Scottish way of speaking,but I don't want to change it too much from 'regular English' because, as a non native speaker, I know how hard and annoying it can be when you try to read something and every single line of a character is filled with accents and such; also, I'm not an expert on Scottish accent/slangs, so... yeah.

I really hope you guys enjoyed this chapter and, please, give it a chance hahah. I know it centers around an OC, but I promise there's a lot of elements from the wizarding world and characters you'll recognize from the canon. :))) As always, reviews are welcome and motivate us to continue!