Chapter 11
The next day, Lucius Malfoy's collapse in the Alley was on the front page of the Daily Prophet. The funeral was a private affair. Aside from his wife and son, the only people in attendance were a team from the DMLE, who per the law, had to search the Manor and grounds for anything Dark or dangerous before the will reading in 30 days time. They had a field day. The search yielded a number of cursed objects, a supply of illegal potions and the ingredients for them, and hidden in the cellar, a small vault full of money, undeclared in the Malfoy financial records.
The whole lot was seized. But the icing on the cake was the contents of a safe hidden in Lucius' study behind magical and mundane protections. In it, there was a ledger, a box of receipts, and a single sheet of parchment with names on it. The DMLE team were ecstatic. If Voldemort had known Lucius had the ledger, he would have been killed for his foolishness. The ledger contained records of each and every illegal act a Death Eater had committed, some of which they had not been convicted of. The receipts were for everything a Death Eater had ever purchased from Borgin & Burkes. The list, though, was the best find. It named them. All of them.
Within the space of a week, Aurors tracked down and arrested every witch or wizard on the list that wasn't believed dead or already in Azkaban. Because of the ledger, the trials were swift. Not one was longer than two hours. Some of the Death Eaters already in Azkaban not under life imprisonment found their sentences adjusted as they were moved to the "lifers" wing of the prison. Some whose crimes now warranted the Dementor's Kiss were subjected to that final and absolute punishment. Among them was Bellatrix Lestrange.
Mr Borgin found his shop raided and himself arrested. He was convicted of purchasing Dark artefacts, selling Dark artefacts, supplying Dark artefacts to criminals, and 278 counts of falsifying inventory records. He was sentenced to 75 years in the minimum security wing of Azkaban. Due to his age, it was expected he would die there.
In the Weasley household, these events were discussed every day when the morning and evening editions of the Prophet arrived. For some reason, Scabbers was disturbed by the announcements in the paper. On a late Thursday night, in the last week of August, Scabbers made his move. Scurrying through Ron's open window, he slowly made his way to the ground by climbing down the roof of one floor of the house to the one below.
Eventually, running to the property line, the believed-to-be-dead coward Peter Pettigrew, known for the last twelve or so years as Scabbers the rat, starting making a plan for getting out of Britain in his tiny mind. He was dead before he knew it.
The more practiced an Animagus is in living as an animal, the better they are at it. Their instincts adapt, and they become truly strong among true animals: an animal with a human's intelligence. The danger however, is that the longer an Animagus spends as an animal without turning back into their human form, the harder it is to do so. Peter Pettigrew had spent at least twenty years without transforming. He couldn't have done it without someone casting the Homorphous Charm on him. He was excellent at being a rat. Unfortunately, his human fear and worry overpowered his rat instincts. As such, as he dashed across the Weasleys' garden, he forgot the existence of potential predators. That night, Hermes, Percy Weasley's owl, fed well – on a large, brown, rat.
In the morning, Percy discovered the bottom of Hermes' cage strewn with fur and pellets. The argument between Ron and Percy over who was to blame for Scabbers' death threatened to last the whole of breakfast until Mrs Weasley put a stop to it.