A/N: Takes place in summer 2015. The police procedural format belongs to NBC, probably; everything else belongs to JKR.

All that summer, the only thing anyone could talk about was the fire.

It had roared up out of nowhere, hot and fast, consuming the little two bedroom house in Ailsworth, Cambridgeshire and leaving a blackened husk in its wake. The garage and the lad's room alone had survived intact, but the lad, who had been home alone, had not.

The lad's name was Toby Elliott, but that wasn't important. He was going to be fine. What was important was that Anthony Travers had started the fire. A bachelor and a loner, he had been aggressive toward his muggle neighbors before; had been threatening enough that they had filed a complaint with the police, which was, people noted significantly, on the record. Also on record: Travers' Death Eater connections, a history of supporting pureblood causes and documented anti-muggle sentiment.

But that wasn't all. Not only did Travers hate muggles, he had a personal history to fuel his resentment - in the trial after the war, his family had lost most of their money and their ancestral home, beautiful Brancebeth Hall, to pay war reparations. As his Death Eater brother died during the war, Travers' family was forced to pay twice over for his misdeeds, with every Galleon they had.

Surely Anthony Travers wanted to kill every muggle he set eyes on. The case was open and shut and the culprit was obvious to anyone with half a brain.

"You've got a pureblood fanatic - brother a former Death Eater! - living next door to a muggle family. It couldn't have taken much. Their dog takes a shit in his garden, the lad kicks a football over the fence - could have been anything to set off a maniac like that. Travers cracks. Incendio. Whoosh! He's got a nice cozy fire going until the muggles show up with their hoses."

Whatever it might have taken to drive Travers to arson was beside the point, however, as Travers couldn't have set fire to the Elliotts' house. He had been with his mother in Kent that day, helping her with some chores. Cornelia Travers was over 100 and not spry; age had left her foggy and irritable. As the Elliotts' house burned, Anthony Travers had been tending to a gnome infestation that had become so rooted they had begun creeping into the house and stealing his mother's food. His mother's testimony might not have been reliable, but several neighbors reluctantly vouched that they had heard him howling and cursing at the little beasts.

Well, if Travers hadn't set this house on fire, it was just a matter of time.

More than likely, a former lover had done it. Cleveland Shunpike had grown up not ten miles from the boy's mother, they had gone to the same primary school, the same year. And she was pretty, you could see in her pictures, even though they never moved, and friendly - all the muggles in town seemed to know her. Catherine Elliott and Cleveland Shunpike dated while he was home for the summer from school, he had been the other "C" from

C+C

2003

Love always

that had been carved on the oak tree in her garden. But Catherine chucked Cleveland for Toby's father, who got her pregnant when she was 18. Cleveland was a strange young man, his moods unpredictable. All that rage at Catherine, building up over time, as he watched her discard Foster and take up with another man who still wasn't Cleveland Shunpike. Finally he had snapped.

Cleveland Shunpike didn't really remember Catherine Elliott, though. Yes, they had gone to primary school together, but he was only there for two years, before his mother saved up enough to quit her job at the shoe store and homeschool him so he wouldn't be behind when he started at Hogwarts. And his family spent most of their summers in Wales; he had never had a girlfriend in Ailsworth, and said he hadn't spoken to Catherine since they were about 13 when he saw her at the ice skating rink.

Cleveland Shunpike might have been lying - it didn't matter. The truth would come out eventually. And if not him, there were any number of other prospects. Anyone could have crossed Catherine Elliott's path and fallen hard, whether it was a quiet affair, a fling between marriages, a lonely man growing obsessed with the young mother he saw at the market and deciding he had to free her from her humdrum muggle existence.

But no one in the wizarding world seemed to know anyone who had ever met Catherine Elliott; not by her current name, or her former (Foster), or even by her maiden name, Caty Cutcliffe, an 18 year old girl with dyed black hair and dark eyeliner that might have made some people anxious but for her wide, dimpled smile. Some people who had grown up near Ailsworth or Castor said she looked awfully familiar, that they had seen her on some wizard's arm. Perhaps they had, but no one had yet identified that wizard.

Could it have been the husband? Did he have a jealous girlfriend? A secret past in the magical world? Had he improbably become ensnared in debt to a wizard or, worse, the goblins? These theories tended to bore everyone, as Trevor Elliott was considerably less charismatic than his wife, and were seldom discussed.

"Too far-fetched," everyone said, and continued to speculate about anyone who might want to murder Catherine.

But there had been no lover. There was no arson. These stories existed in the fevered imaginations of housewives, barflies and journalists bored with a slow news season and a Ministry in recess. The fire had just happened. It was an old house and a hot, dry summer. An unattended hot plate had caused it, or an overused extension cord, muggleborns explained knowledgeably. It happened all the time.

Extension cords were very hard to explain, and harder still to understand, by people who had never used a lightbulb or a laptop before, particularly after those people had consumed several pints of beer, so this line of inquiry tended to be derailed by another party asking belligerently, "Well, if it was a muggle fire, why are Aurors investigating? Not enough to keep them busy with wizard crimes? Made honest citizens of all of us, have they?"

"Perish the thought," someone else would call out, and glasses were clinked.

People who thought this was a matter of bigotry or revenge or a simple house fire were blind fools. This fire was much bigger than that. This wasn't the work of a lone pureblood fanatic, this was part of a campaign of violence against muggles perpetrated by a secret network of former Death Eaters and Death Eater sympathizers, financed by the Malfoys; or else part of an operation by former Order members and Ministry insiders to discredit wizards who sympathized with pureblood ideals; no, these weren't Death Eaters, but a new cult, because this fire looked just like the fire in Leeds a year ago, and everyone knew that had been tied to Wizards for a New Day even if the Ministry wasn't ready to acknowledge it; this wasn't Wizards for a New Day, this was the Ministry striking back at the muggle government because exchange rates were down and the Galleon was affected, that was how these things happened - couldn't you see that?

After all, they wouldn't have put Harry Potter on the case if it weren't something big. Everyone, at least, could agree on that.

Harry Potter liked to close his cases quickly, move onto the next before the bureaucrats could come after him with their questions and their fine tooth combs, but this one lingered. The Aurors were still working the area - but carefully, carefully, so as not to alarm the muggles. They even went to see Toby in the hospital. Everyone marveled that the lad had talked to Harry Potter and thought he was just a policeman, some bumbling fool with a pension and a small town officer's slow reflexes. Aurors had fake badges and identification they used when they needed to interview muggles, and Harry Potter's fake police badge had been by far the most impressive thing about him to Toby.

Once in a while someone would say something like, "I'm just glad the lad's alright." Or, "Can't we talk about something else? Makes me ill, thinking so much about it."

The attention wasn't unseemly though really because Toby was going to be fine. Toby had been in hospital covered in burns but the papers said he would make a full recovery. His parents marveled that there wasn't a scratch on him, and his mother thanked God for his mercy. On the news on telly and on YouTube she wept at Toby's side in his hospital bed, and her husband, Toby's stepfather, wept as the doctors wondered at this astonishing medical marvel, but the witches and wizards who speculated about this did not see these clips. While they understood that fires were deadly, most of them did not understand what third degree burns and smoke inhalation really meant, and they had not seen Toby when the firefighters rescued him from the two bedroom house in Farrant Court in Ailsworth; if they had, they might have wept, too, to see him smiling and playing games on his mother's phone.

Muggleborns pointed to Toby's recovery as evidence of the incredible advances made by modern medicine in the last decade.

"Muggles are catching up," they said. "Technology's changing faster and faster."

They dreamed of parents and siblings and cousins free from cancer, safe from heart disease, vehicular fatalities a distant memory, like polio. If doctors could save that little boy, surely they couldn't be so far from any number of breakthroughs Others looked at this progress with growing alarm; if muggles could heal themselves now, they would live longer, advance faster, their population would crowd out wizardkind.

All of this excitement, though, was a trifle premature.

"It's a miracle," Catherine Elliott had moaned in one oft-played clip. "It's a bloody miracle. God gave my baby back to me." She wrapped her arms around Toby, her tired hazel eyes wet, and he smiled uncertainly, frozen with the iPhone in his small hands.

Harry Potter watched the YouTube clips, and the local news coverage, which he watched on the television at the hotel room he had let for the past several weeks to give the appearance of being a policeman, doing police work, investigating a crime.

It was not so different, pretending to be a policeman. There were plenty of days Harry still felt like he was pretending to be an Auror. And then there were cases like this one, that were all make believe, all fiction, because up was down and nothing made sense and all the rules were part of a strange Wonderland logic, that he had been trying to understand for the past 24 years and realized only now that he never truly would.

The case had worn on longer than anyone would have liked, and there seemed to be no ending in sight. Catherine and her husband Trevor had been at first stunned by his presence - a police officer, talking to our son? Toby's a good boy - and then reassured, as the media started to swarm around the mysterious fire and the pretty young mother and the miracle boy. But as the days wore on, they grew increasingly concerned by the fact that Harry lingered; that when Toby got better, the case did not go away.

He stopped in one morning with a few follow up questions, and escorted Catherine down to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee. By now he knew that Catherine took her coffee black, with two sugars (Trever was a tea drinker - milk, no sugar). She had been grateful, the second day he was there, that he had remembered her order, but now she seemed to find it invasive, drawing her long cardigan tightly around herself.

Answering Harry's questions, she was distracted - I don't know, I told you, I don't remember - but Harry was patient. He waited.

Finally, she burst out, as if the question were something on a leash that she was no longer able to contain, "Do you really believe someone did this - " she was barely able to bring herself to say it, lowering her voice to just above a whisper - "On purpose?"

"We're still investigating that," he told her. "We can't say anything for certain right now."

It was one of a thousand lies Harry had to tell her, every time they spoke.

The matter Harry was investigating has been an entirely purposeful act, although it had been carried out with shaking hands and trepidation; carried with it enormous consequences, even the potential to destroy someone's life. But as he watched Catherine retreat into herself, gazing with fear and wonder through the windows of the hospital room at her sleeping son, he could not bring himself to regret that someone had done this.

If they hadn't, Toby Elliott would have died.