I Don't Own Harry Potter Or Sherlock!

Chapter Four

(Edited)

I was sitting on the couch in one of my favorite pairs of sweatpants when I got the phone call I had been waiting for. Pulling out my phone I smiled slightly and thought, 'Finally, Lestrade is calling.'

Remus looked over from where he was standing trying to find a book he hadn't read seven times, a confused look on his face.

I got up and went outside, answering the phone as I stepped through the door.

"Hello," I said to Lestrade.

"Thunder, I've put off calling you, but," The Detective Inspector let out a defeated sigh on the other side of the phone. "We're at a dead end again."

"Tell me what's happening," I told him. "Include as many details as you can tell me now."

"There's been weird graffiti appearing everywhere lately. Most of the time in blue and green but sometimes in yellow," Lestrade said. "It's not pictures or English, though. We know that there has to be some kind of pattern but we can't find it. Can you come down to the yard sometime soon?"

"When will you be there next?" I asked.

"I'm there right now." The inspector might have said more but I cut him off before he could.

"In that case, I'll see you in a bit,"

"What do you-"

I ended the call and walked back inside. I changed my clothes into a simple dark blue shirt and my coat with a pair of loose dark blue jeans. Informing Remus of where I was going, I ran out of the door and shifted into a wolf. I ran about a mile into the woods before activating a portkey to an old abandoned part of London. Not my favorite way to travel but almost the fastest. Shifting into an osprey I made my way a few streets over from Scotland Yard and walked over.

'Five minutes,' I thought, looking at my watch. 'Not bad.'

I walked into the station and over to where I saw Lestrade getting a cup of coffee, it was, after all, the morning. Sally Donovan, who was leaning against the wall nearby drinking a coffee said quite rudely, "Hey kid you can't just walk in here get out, we can arrest you for trespassing. Wait a minute! You're the kid that left the crime scene a few days ago!"

"Yes," I replied. "I am. And I actually think that I can walk in here because I was asked to come."

"By who?" Donovan clearly didn't believe me.

"Detective Inspector Lestrade called me a few minutes ago," I said. "He told me that you were at a dead end."

By that point her snapping had gathered the attention of everyone in the room.

"And he think that some kid is going to be able to do what we can't?" At this point Donovan was almost insulting. "You just need to run home to mummy and daddy and leave crime solving to the professionals. Why would he even think to call you?"

That was it. She brought what happened next on herself.

"Because I'm good," I said. I looked over at Lestrade to see if he'd stop me before I made a fool of one of his officers. Seeing that he just stood there, calmly sipping his coffee, I continued. "Apparently better than you anyway."

"What?" the indignation was sharp in Donovan's voice.

"That man over there," I pointed at an almost sloppily dressed police man staring at us. "He's your boyfriend, right?"

"Yeah," Donovan said. "That's not that hard to figure out."

"Well, is it hard to figure out that he's cheating on you?"

Looking back a Donovan I said, "Oh, wait, you didn't know that did you, Lestade, if she's one of your best then I fear for the rest of your division."

Lestrade, who was trying to hide a laugh at the look at Sally Donovan's face said, "Yes it seems like that's another thing you and Sherlock would have agreed with. Where were you I didn't think you would get here this quickly."

"Oh, you know, just around. I never really stay in one place, it's not really that hard to travel around London quickly if you know your way around," that's not really what he was asking for but I couldn't exactly tell him that I was practically on the other side of the country.

"So he's really the person you called to help on the case," Donovan whined. "I don't want to have to deal with some untrained kid that thinks he knows everything. Besides we barely know him, we don't even know his name."

"But I already know so much about you," I said in a bemused tone. I then allowed my voice to lilt across the awkwardly quiet room. "Where's this encoded grafiti you told me about, then?"

Lestrade jumped into an explanation on what had been going on, "The weird writing appeared all over the walls of London. One day there's just one color of paint and writing and then later there might be a picture near it in a different color and somewhere else in the town there will be more writing. This has been going on for the past 3 days and no one has been able to see who's doing it."

"Alright," I said. "You've managed to spike my curiosity. Have the original symbols been covered or are they still there, and have you taken pictures of the symbols? And you have taken samples of the pain to check for type and possible toxicity, right?"

Thinking ahead, I figured that it could just be different people using similar paint. But that wasn't likely. It could also be a bit more morally bad than just some grafiti. The people doing the graffiti could have went out of their way to choose poisonous paints so that it will make people sick or poison any nearby 's also unlikely, though, so it's possible that is just a few people talking and planning, or a few kids taking the mick out the police with pointless pictures and a made-up language - which is very possible.

Donovan pulled a file from her nearby desk and shoved it towards me saying, "Here this is all we've done so far." She then marched away to the other side of the room where she could pretend none of this had happened. Her bad mood was obvious.

I opened the file. I could see that they had some pictures of the area before and after the picture had appeared near it. The writing in blue mostly started around 7 feet up the wall showing that the person was tall, each letter was around a foot tall and wide, meaning it was very easy to see and read. Due to the fact that the colors they choose were very bright, the people didn't care if anyone else saw it meaning they thought that it was either a very safe code or that the information wasn't important.

Now, I tend to get bored very easily and at my elementary school we had to learn a different language. The thing with me, though, is that I learned two languages as a baby. One was, of course, English. The second was Latin. James and Sirius both learned it as young pureblood heirs and my mother saw the logic behind learning Latin so I learned it. Because I was already fluent in Latin I quickly learned all of the Romance languages. So, naturally I stood out as intelligent, I held back anywhere else I could stand to put up with the idiots trying to figure out and remember all those vocabulary words and declensions. I started with French but then he got moved to a more advanced class due to me writing in it for fun on a regular basis. Once I mastered French I moved on to Italian and later Spanish. Once I exhausted all of the school's language options I took to the internet to learn what I could from there.

After looking for a pattern in the paint I was very amused. The police were right in a sense. It wasn't one language. It was multiple Focusing now on the pictures I saw that it was a small picture of the next area, or at least what it looked like 15 years ago.

"So," I said as innocently as I could manage, "Where has the most recent marking appeared?"

"On a bank," Lestrade was slightly shaken at his tone of voice. "Why?"

"No reason," I said. "Do any of you have spray paint on you that I can have?"

Very hesitantly someone walked up to me and handed me a can. I got up to leave. Lestrade and a few other officers followed me. What did they think that a teenage boy with blue hair was planning on doing with a can of spray paint in the middle of London, put simple graffiti on something?

We reached the bank after a short walk. I opened the can of purple spray paint and painted a picture and a few letters beside the markings and then made my way to the bakery. There I sprayed a short message in the same code that they were using. They had mashed together multiple fictional languages. They had used both letters and actual words from those languages to make their code. Once I managed to see which ones were there it was simple to see the pattern in it and write my own response.

I looked at my work with a sense of happiness.

"You figured out the code then?" Lestrade dared to ask. "What did you write?"

I turned and looked at him, trying to keep the smugness out of my voice as I said, "I wrote, 'Your code really isn't that safe. You really shouldn't talk about starting a riot against how expensive ice cream is at Udderlicious Ice Cream, you will most likely be banned from there if you do'."

I wrote down how to solve the code on a slip of paper. I took more time than I needed to fold the paper and placed it and the can of purple spray paint into Lestrade's hand.

I began to walk down the street but didn't get far before a car pulled up next to me. A weird man opened the door and practically ordered me to get in. I normally would have to be much more bored than I was then to get into a car with a strange man, but I recognized the vehicle. I slid inside and smiled at the woman who was also sitting in the back. She was texting on her phone as quickly as she could. She didn't even bother to look up. Yes, I knew exactly whose vehicle this was.

Huge Thank You to my editor Catz4444 for editing my story!

As a new writer her experience has been very helpful!

Go Ahead and check out her stories...

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