Author's notes: Written for the ron_draco_fest (LJ) to prompt Number 57 submitted by my dear friend emansil_12.
Many thanks to my beta, starstruck1986. Title adapted from the following Raymond Chandler quote: "I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room." (Farewell, My Lovely) . Style adapted crudely from Raymond Chandler generally. Apologies to the prompter and the Chandler estate for what I've done here.
Warnings: Parody, infidelity, fat!Hermione, inferences of het, voyeurism, implicit sexual description, bad puns.
The wonderful world of Harry Potter belongs to the wonderful mind of Ms JK Rowling, we make no profit from playing within it.
Knockturn Alley wasn't the prettiest of places, not even in the sunshine. I liked to think my face made up for that, but on a day like that one I would have needed Veela blood to make it worth anyone's while taking a trip down there for aesthetic reasons. It was the kind of day that the Impervius spell was invented for. Luckily, the broad who stood on my nice, dry office carpet was invented for casting spells. When I say broad, I mean wide. Three pregnancies had done her no favours around the hips. I remembered her from school, of course. The brightest witch of her age, or so they said.
"Mr Malfoy," was her opening gambit. She wasn't one to forget a face, especially not one she'd planted a fist onto years before.
"Hermione Weasley," I replied softly, leaning back in my chair. "Have a seat."
"I never took his name," she said in a voice that could snap wands. "I'm still Granger."
She was still Granger all right. Her hair might have been straighter and her belly more curved, but she was the same ball-breaker she'd been at Hogwarts.
"And what can I do for you today, Madam Granger?"
I had a pretty good idea already; dames don't park themselves in my office because their pygmy puff's gone missing. I know what my reputation is, and I deserve it.
She clearly knew, too, and she'd had enough of the pleasantries. "Get me her name and the photos. I'll take it from there."
Merlin help whichever silly little witch had been dumb enough to take a fancy to the Weasel. Merlin help the Weasel, too.
I took the case. It was full of galleons. When she'd gone, I opened the top drawer of my desk and looked at the firewhiskey bottle in there. I needed a strategy for this case, and a drink helped me to think. It also made me forget why one drink was enough and I'd woken up in the dust under my desk too many times already that week. I closed the drawer. I thought about throwing around a few cleaning spells, too. Not now, I had a surveillance to start.
The worst thing about these cases isn't the cold, hungry hours spent watching windows, or the smoky dives the husbands take their floozies to. It isn't even dodging the hexes of desperate wizards who know they've been caught out. No, the part which I find least pleasant is the part which some of my friends most envy. It's the photographs I have to develop so that the wives have proof.
I've seen too many wrinkled, hairy arses too close to the parts of ladies I'd hoped never to have to encounter – too much grey body hair and too many magically enhanced boobs. I love the moment I hand the wives those envelopes, no matter how much the poor witches cry, because those photographs are out of my hands then.
I dread my first sight of the husbands, knowing that eventually I'll have to see those bald, sagging, middle-aged bodies naked. It was a pleasant surprise, though, when I finally caught sight of the Weasel sneaking out of the back door of his brother's 'joke' shop. He hadn't aged too badly. In fact, the silver streaks at his temples made that garish hair less offensive. His wife might have been eating for three, but it looked like that included his portions, because he was as skinny as he'd ever been.
I appreciate skinny. I like the feeling of hip bones grating against my own. That didn't mean that I was thinking of the Weasel as a potential grate-mate. I was just thankful on account of the photographs. The ginger pubes would be frightening enough.
I followed him at a safe distance. I can keep to the shadows and still see; my old Hand of Glory still comes in useful for that. My footsteps were charmed silent, but his tapped noisily over the cobbles until he reached the alleyway behind Gringotts. Just before he charged down it, though, he cast a tell-tale furtive glance around him.
I increased my pace, keener for that corner than a werewolf for a pram, but the Apparition crack sounded before I made it. Apart from the stink of goblin piss, that alley was emptier than a pot of Leprechaun gold in the morning.
Some private eyes give up at this point. They head for the nearest bar to start collecting up their receipts for expenses claims, and then stick all those drinking hours on their timesheet. Me, I take a flat rate for a solved case, so I've developed Tracing Charms and customers who recommend me to their friends. Granger's not a dame who hires also-rans.
The Weasel's was the only recent presence on the scan, so he hadn't met his piece in the alley and side-alonged. I cast the second trace, the one for the co-ordinates. They came up far too familiar.
Most of the simpering witch maidens who play around with married wizards live in dowdy bedsits in the wrong parts of the wrong towns. That's what makes them want a share of other families' silver, and means they don't mind earning it on their backs. In my line of work, I'd grown familiar with a whole lot of co-ordinates my mother had hoped I'd never hear. I'd also memorised the positions of all the inns who rented rooms out by the hour and the bars where they asked for gold instead of answers.
That's not why I recognised these Apparition co-ordinates. This surveillance wasn't going to take me anywhere grubby or unpleasant. This address was a much more worrying one, for all its grandeur.
Five years ago I paid a substantial sum to the secret son of a notorious Dark wizard for the incantation for silent Apparition. Once again, my investment paid off as I landed silently on the south lawn of Malfoy Manor.
I live alone there now. My wards extend two feet beyond the house walls in every direction. Weasel was edging his way round my ancestral seat at a practiced twenty six inches out. And he was a man with some sharp edges for edging with. This was no time to be indulging in thoughts of his edges and my seat. I was supposed to be engraving his name on his wife's hit list.
My flowerbeds might be prize-winning, but they were no place for an assignation. For one thing, I didn't allow floozies within three hundred yards of the place. He stopped behind a box hedge, with the certainty of a man who's been there before and knows well enough to check for peacock shit before he sits down. He settled in and stared up at an unlit window. I counted along that side of the building to check my immediate theory. I might not be the brightest wizard of my age, but I was pretty sure I knew where my private bathroom was.
What reason could Weasley possibly have for watching the window of the room where I got naked, the one I'd never bothered to measure for a blind? Well, apart from the obvious. I thought it through. Apart from the obvious, there wasn't any reason for him to be watching me wash. That meant that the obvious reason was why he was there. So, the hero's sidekick was a peeping Tom. Or a peeping Ron if you prefer. I remembered the old landlord of the Leaky well enough to prefer.
I couldn't cast a tempus without letting him know I was there, but I was pretty sure that it was about the time I usually got in from work, on the nights when I made it in at all. On those nights, the first thing I'd do would be to take a shower. Between my working late and my drinking late, the Weasel must have sat on damp earth for a fair few nights with no reward, although I did regard a glimpse of my naked flesh to be a generous reward for anyone.
I had a few choices to make. None of them needed to involve me foregoing my fee. I left the great chess strategist ensconced between my bulbs and Apparated silently to his conjugal home. It was as sprawling and unkempt as his mother. It was term time, so the cubs would be at Hogwarts, and I knew where the man of the house was. Most of the windows were as dim as Potter. Only one room was lit as bright as Granger.
I'd been paid to photograph adultery and this was the only place where I was going to be able to do that tonight. The noises I heard, as I stood beside the lit window, told me everything I needed to know. I didn't bother looking through the window; it would be gruesome enough having to endure the images in the developing room. I just let my camera fly to a vantage point and choose its own angles.
Sure enough, back at the office, the moving images took the shape of a huge, white, female arse. It was Granger's arse, and so was the man sitting next to it. Longbottom was famous for his herbology and he certainly looked like he knew what he was doing in her bush. The next shot showed that he lived up to his surname. Another drooping posterior imposed on my sensibilities. The snake he was holding wasn't quite as big as Nagini, but it did have a head on it, one which Granger was stroking.
Looking at those filthy pictures made me feel so dirty that I decided to have a shower.
The hot water hit my skin, but it was Weasley's gaze which was burning into me. I knew he was safe there in my bed. I mean, of course, my flower bed. I had taken my time over stripping off, running my fingers over my more sensitive spots and pulling obvious faces. I didn't want to submit my body to the Weasel's bare instincts when the time came. His family couldn't afford sophisticated instincts.
Instead of slipping on my smoking jacket when I turned off the water (and by smoking I mean damn hot), I framed my perfect, bare form in the window and cast a lumos on my voyeur. He blinked up at me stupidly. Not that he had any other options in the way he blinked, nor the way he did anything else for that matter.
"Are you going to sit out there getting wet knees, or can you think of another part of your body you'd like to get wet?" I asked, wondering if I was being too subtle.
He flew into the unlocked house so fast that I wondered whether he'd hidden a broom in his pocket. When I got to look at the front of his robes, I wondered whether it was still there.
"How long have you been watching my ablutions?" I asked, hoping that he didn't know the word and would assume it was something dirty.
"Oh-o-only a couple of hours."
"I don't just mean tonight."
His face was Gryffindor red and his reply was Gryffindor golden silence.
"You know your wife's getting her lady-garden tended by an outside contractor?"
He shrugged. I was still naked, I suspected that his attention was all taken up with looking and that he wasn't bothering with listening.
"If you want me to stop talking, sweetheart, then you'll have to find a way to fill my mouth."
Even he wasn't dumb enough to miss that hint. It hit him as full square as his wife's fist hit my face all those years ago. Yes, I do bear grudges. She had this coming to her. And I was a very good boy who deserved what I was about to get, too.
Those hip bones grated just as sharp as I'd imagined they would. I'm not someone to forget a Quidditch position, and this man was a Keeper.