Harry sat in the police station unable to process what he was reading. The words were perfectly legible and made sense, but the content...the content.
There had been a reason that Sirius Black had been confined to Order headquarters after Voldemort rose again, and it hadn't been just because Dumbledore was a manipulative bastard. Dumbledore couldn't have not known about this...
...after which the victim had been urinated on...
...victim was found hanged in...victim had been forcibly dressed in women's clothing...
...found tied to a tree with an apple on his head...the arrow entered the victim's throat at a downward angle, severing the jugular before exiting between the fourth and fifth vertebra...
File after file, all with the victims marked as "Unknown". They weren't unknown to him. He didn't know their given names, but as he looked at their pictures, a litany of surnames ran through his head. Crabbe, Flint, Nott, Malfoy, Goyle, Parkinson...
It seemed that Theo Nott's elderly widowed father was actually his grandfather, and that there was a very good reason for why Marcus Flint had looked at him with utter hatred every time they encountered each-other.
Not all of the victims in the files that the police had set before him had borne the Dark Mark. In fact only a third of them had.
He should have known that something like this had been buried in his godfather's past, considering the fact that he'd been willing to feed a fellow student to a werewolf merely "for existing".
It wasn't the fact that Sirius had been involved in this that shocked him however. It had been the reason that he'd been called in to the muggle police station to answer any questions that he could so they could solve a number of cold cases that had left him reeling.
Had the muggles not accidentally run the genetic sample that he'd given at the scene of a crime as an elimination sample through the system, he would have continued living his life believing that his father had been a good man.