Chapter 12: Aurors Abound

"It makes total sense," said Hermione. "Pansy Parkinson's disliked me since first year, but it's not just me—her Slytherin crowd used to hate the DA. And we've all been so successful since we've left Hogwarts, and she's just a total non-entity."

"We'd have to work out how she did it, of course," Ron said. "But she'd be a prime candidate for a suspect."

"How are you going to approach her?" Seamus asked. "Arrest her, send in a squad of us Hit Wizards? But it's just a hunch still—will you have to bring her in to assist an investigation, and formally charge her later?"

"I don't know," replied Ron. "I'll talk to Harry, he'll be better at—"

"Wait a minute," Lavender cut in. She was frowning at a piece of parchment she'd pulled from her bag, which she handed to Hermione. "Look at this. It's detailed instructions on how to brew the potion which causes pregnancy—Padma sent it to me this morning."

"It's complicated," Hermione said. "Wow, and it takes three weeks to brew, but you have to stir it for an hour each day...that's a lot of effort to put into a potion. And some of the ingredients cost an absolute fortune!"

"The Parkinsons aren't exactly hard up though, are they?" asked Seamus.

"It's not that," Lavender said. "Think about Pansy in our old Potions class at school. Now, I dropped it after OWL, and I think she did too, but...she wasn't great at Potions. She was like me: not on Crabbe or Goyle's level, but no skilled Potioneer. And, no offence, Hermione, but I think even you might struggle with brewing this."

"It's a fair point," said Ron, "but she doesn't have to have actually brewed the potion herself. She could have got someone else to brew it—this could be some sort of larger plot that she's only one small part of. She could even have stolen a pre-brewed batch from St. Mungo's or somewhere!"

Hermione and Seamus nodded at this, but Lavender seemed unconvinced. "Look, don't get me wrong," she began. "I hate her. I think she's a complete and utter cow and I have done since first year. But. I really don't think this is her. She's not stupid, but she's definitely someone who gets other people to do the dirty work for them. Also, if she'd tried to poison everyone in the DA, that'd be one thing. But make them pregnant? I know different people react differently, but for the majority of married couples—which, let's face it, is what the DA is these days—a baby is good news. Pansy Parkinson, conspiring to make us all happy? I don't think so."

"I see what you're saying, but I think it's that she's likely to be part of a bigger conspiracy," Ron said. "I agree she's not bright enough to do this alone, but who knows how many people are involved here? If we bring her in for questioning, we can do the whole good cop/bad cop thing and get her to at least name the others who are involved."

"So you definitely think she's a part of this?" asked Hermione.

"It makes sense," her husband replied. "When Harry and I first joined up, one of our first raids was on the Parkinson house. Her father and older brother—or maybe it was a cousin; I dunno, I'd have to check the file—were convicted as Death Eaters. They only got ten years, I think, because they weren't quite in You-Know-Who's inner circle, but they sympathised enough that we could get 'em on other charges. Maybe she thinks she's avenging them." Lavender still did not seem convinced, but before she could say anything, a tall, broad-shouldered Asian man approached Seamus's cubby, where the four of them were gathered.

"Pardon me for overhearing," he began. "But I couldn't help hearing you say that you had a suspect for the case? Is that true?"

It took Hermione a moment to place the man, but she quickly realised he was Pavarti's husband, Ashwin, who was a Deputy Head of the Hit Wizard Squad. He had been at the Hospital the previous night with his wife, and as her twin sister was a Healer, he presumably knew the case almost as well as they did.

"I only mention it because I have some authority round here," he continued. "If you need someone to be brought in, don't bother with sending an official request down from the Auror Office. I'll authorise it myself now, and deal with the paperwork later. This is important; I want to find the suspect now and not wait to see if they harm other people."

It was not just Ashwin who was looking interestedly at them—many of the other Hit Wizards in the Office seemed keen to know what was going on, even if they didn't have a personal involvement in the case as he did. Hermione exchanged a worried glance with Ron. Ashwin was a nice person, as were most of the others. But the case was meant to be kept secret, and it wouldn't do to be broadcasting Auror Office information to a roomful of people, even if most of them were well intentioned.

Fortunately, Seamus seemed to have gathered this, too. "It's complicated, chaps," he said loudly. "If you've got time, I'll fill you in on what's been going on..." He turned back to Hermione, Ron and Lavender. "You guys go," he muttered. "I won't tell this lot anything important, so you go off and do whatever you need. But do send us down a memo if you need anything."

The three of them hurried off to the Auror Office, not talking much. Their tense silence was broken only by Ron announcing that he was off to find the file on Pansy's father when they arrived in the mostly deserted office. There were only one other person there, a rather elderly looking witch with an eye-patch. Taking a seat next to Lavender, Hermione found herself wondering where Harry had got to—he wasn't due to go home for another couple of hours. She hoped something unrelated to the potion incident hadn't come up; Ginny didn't need any more stress at the moment, and having him be injured in the field might just finish her off.

"Okay," Lavender said. "Let's think outside the box for a moment. Who else in the DA does Pansy Parkinson dislike?"

"Um, everyone who was there during the year the Carrows were at school?" Hermione responded, as though it was obvious.

"Mmm, yes..." Lavender said. "But the thing is, she was never really involved in what they were doing, not to the extent that some Slytherins were. Oh, don't get me wrong, she'd say loads of stuff. She'd call us Mudbloods, half-breeds, muggle-lovers, suggest we should all be put down for the benefit of society—all the usual Pureblood crap. But she didn't actually do much. She'd try to get out of actually performing the Cruciatus as much as possible—she'd actually delegate that to other people, like Crabbe and Goyle or a couple of other sixth years. I don't think it was to protect us or anything, but she never really...got her hands dirty, so to speak. Or maybe she was just too stupid to actually cast it correctly, I don't know. So if she is behind this potion, it seems a bit out of character."

"I see what you're saying," Hermione said slowly. "And to be honest, while I think Pansy fits the bill for a suspect in many ways, the one thing I can't understand is her motive. Why would she want to make everyone pregnant?! Like you said before, if it was poisoning us, that I could understand, but—"

"Excuse me," said a voice, cutting across her musings. "Do you have clearance to be in here?" It was the witch with the eye-patch, and whilst her tone had been pleasant, there was a glint of icy steel in her one visible eye that made Hermione start.

"Oh, er..." she stuttered, flushing slightly. Technically, she didn't. Whilst no one objected to her coming in to pick Ron up at the end of the working day, as a couple of other Aurors' partners did, she knew that involving someone who was not an Auror on a case to the extent that they were currently was, strictly speaking, illegal.

"It's alright," Lavender said smoothly. "Hermione's been helping us with our investigations."

"Be that as it may, the investigation you speak of has been taken over by the Auror Office, and, as Chief Intelligence Officer, Auror Brown, you of all people should know better than to bring a member of the public inside," said the witch.

Fearing Lavender was soon to be disciplined, Hermione stood up. "I'll just be going..." she mumbled.

"Oh, no no no!" said the witch, breaking into a broad grin, "I'm just joshing with you, love. I know who you are."

"Er...you do?" asked Hermione.

"'Course I do, dearie," she smiled. "Everyone knows Hermione Granger! Though you married our Ron last year, didn't you? So what are you now? Weasley? Granger-Weasley?"

"Granger at work still, as that's what I was known by professionally, but Weasley in my personal life," Hermione replied, thinking privately that this was one of the most surreal situations she had ever found herself in.

"Lovely, lovely!" cried the witch. "Anyway, sit down, sit down; I've got something to discuss with you ladies about this case of yours."

Hermione exchanged a glance with Lavender. "But Betty, you just said—" began Lavender.

The witch—Betty, Hermione surmised—waved her hands around. "Oh, I was just making a point," she said. "Now, sit." Hermione, now slightly alarmed, sat, and the woman turned to her. "I don't believe we've been formally introduced. My name's Betty, Betty Callington. I know you, of course—Hermione Granger, Weasley, whatever. All us muggleborns do. Oh yes, my parents were muggles. Long dead now, they are, but they were muggles nonetheless. Didn't stop me becoming one of the best Aurors in the field back in the day, minor injuries notwithstanding," she added, pointing at her eye-patch. "'Course, all that was for naught during the war. Kingsley got me out this time; though to be honest, all I'd been doing since the war ended was paperwork... But he brought me back after everything was over—back out of hiding, I mean—he said we needed a safe pair of hands to help guide the youngsters, stop them from doing something silly. And he was right, wasn't he?" she said this last bit very sharply, and rounded on Lavender with an almost Professor McGonagall-ish glare.

Lavender jumped and stuttered.

"Oh, don't you worry, I'm not going to fire you," said Betty, relaxing back into her easy grin. "I'm just trying to make a point to you. Who are the three deputies in the Auror Office?"

Lavender's mystified look at this sudden change of subject let Hermione know that she wasn't the only one who was utterly confused by Betty Callington, but she answered anyway. "Yourself, Harry and Bob Shankley, and Gwaine Robards is the Head."

"Correct, of course," Betty smiled. She turned to Hermione. "Now, Gwaine is a good Department Head, but he's an absolute stickler for protocol. And, Auror Brown, you've hardly followed the correct protocols on this case, have you? Even now, you're still insisting on involving a civilian."

"But you just said—"

"I know what I just said, and I happen to think that Ms. Granger-Weasley here should be involved in this particular case," said Betty. "But Gwaine isn't going to see it like that. He's going to think that we should be concentrating on the Yaxley case, given everything that's going wrong with that, and the fact that his trial is due imminently. So Auror Potter running in and demanding that we drop all that to focus on this case, when you don't even have a suspect yet, and the majority of you have a personal involvement in what's been going on...well, you can see why he doesn't like it. You're also forgetting that Bob Shankley's sister and her husband and kids were killed by Yaxley in the war. If Gwaine pulls everyone in to help on that case, of course Bob's going to side with him."

"But you're not?" Lavender asked shrewdly.

"I think you're on to something important here," Betty said simply. "Besides, this isn't right. This person—whoever they are—has been taking away the autonomy of all these women in effectively forcing them to get pregnant. I don't agree with that."

"That's what Hannah was saying earlier," Hermione mused aloud.

Both women turned to look at her. "Er—one of the women who's been affected by this whole thing. She's going to have her baby, but I don't think she's happy about the timing of it, and she said she wouldn't have chosen to have a baby now, if she could help it," she said.

"You see? That's not right," said Betty. "Everyone has the right to decide what to do with their own body. I fought for that in the seventies with the Muggles and my mother, God rest her soul, was a suffragist!" Hermione raised her eyebrows. "I am over ninety years old, love," Betty said. "But yes, she fought alongside the Pankhursts for the right for women to vote. If she thought I wasn't helping out the cause here..." She drifted off and shrugged. Hermione looked harder at her: she'd originally put her in her mid-sixties, but then she remembered that witches and wizards tended to live older than Muggles.

"Well, it's not really the same thing, is it?" Lavender said. "Not like not having the right to vote, I mean. It's just a few people getting pregnant, most of whom happen to be married, or at least in long term relationships! I mean, the potion itself doesn't work if you're celibate, so—"

"Yes, but what if the potion had been slipped into the drink of a load of Hogwarts students?" asked Betty. "We all know what hanky-panky starts going on by the time you get to sixth and seventh year!" Hermione and Lavender carefully avoided each others eyes. "Then you'd get a load of seventeen year olds who are pregnant...not good at all, no, no, no."

The thought of Isabel Spinnett—Alicia's cousin—popped into Hermione's brain, and she suppressed a shudder. She was right.

"Well, we have a suspect now," Lavender, who had clearly been thinking along the same lines, said brightly.

"You do? Tell me all the details," Betty said at once. Hermione let Lavender do most of the talking and she explained their suspicions. She had just finished talking when Ron appeared.

"Hi, Betty," he said rather absent-mindedly, clutching a folder full to bursting with parchment.

"Hello Ron," she replied. "I was just telling these two lovely ladies how your wife here is breaking all sorts of rules just by being in this room!"

"Oh—I—oh," Ron stuttered, looking from Betty to Hermione and back again. Betty held her severe look for a second longer, then broke into a broad smile. "Don't worry, I'm not going to discipline you. Just don't make a habit of it." She gave a conspiratorial wink. "Is that the Parkinson file?"

"It is," Ron said, dropping down into a chair next to them. "The trial of Pansy Parkinson's father and brother was one of the first cases I worked on. They both ended up being sent to Azkaban for ten years for aiding Voldemort—they were never in his inner circle, but they did enough to put them away for some time. But the interesting thing is, until they had to sell them to pay their legal fees, the Parkinson family owned a chain of Apothecaries in magical communities up and down the country. So it would not be inconceivable to suggest that she would at least know who to turn to to get the ingredients for the Potion—a quiet word in a certain supplier's ear, a promise to put in a good word for them when she manages to get her family out of jail..."

Lavender nodded, but Hermione was shaking her head. "See, we're back to square one again here," she said. "Say Pansy's behind this potion. She's the one forcing everyone to get pregnant; you get the proof you need to convict her. But, assuming we hadn't started suspecting her—or even that something was up—how does this help her get her Dad out of Azkaban?"

"She has a point," Betty said. "We should have you on our team."

"Oh, no," said Hermione at once. "Not me. Definitely not."

"Shame," said Betty. "Can I have those?" She held out both hands, and Lavender and Ron both passed her the stacks of parchment they were holding; Ron giving her the Parkinson file, and Lavender the sheets of parchment which bore Pansy's signature proving she was a waitress at the Ball.

"It could be a distraction," suggested Lavender. "You know, make us concentrate on this case, instead of something else much more serious like..."

"The Yaxley case?" suggested Ron. "Speaking of which, where the hell is everyone?"

"Robards called an All Auror Alert," Betty said, scanning the parchment quickly. "There was a disturbance at—" She paused and looked at Hermione. "The location where there was the incident a few weeks ago. You know, where Yaxley told us to go and a bunch of Aurors were ambushed. We've been monitoring it and...well, there was another incident. Everyone's out there now securing the premises."

"Shit," said Ron. "Any injuries?"

"Nothing major, but still not good," Betty said.

"It sounds like your distraction theory could be our best shot," Ron said, addressing Lavender. "We're all looking at this, when actually we should be concentrating on Yaxley."

"But we are concentrating on Yaxley," Lavender argued. "What if it's a distraction from something else, a third danger?"

"Can't you...I don't know, get a warrant to search Pansy's house or something for evidence of the potion?" Hermione asked.

"Nope," Ron said. "Well, yeah, but you need clearance from two of the senior staff to do that. Harry would, but he's out in the field, and—"

"I'll do it," Betty said. "We can search her house later, what we can do now is pull her in for questioning. You only need one senior authorisation for that, and my signature will suffice. And we need to do this now. Look." She held out the parchment that Lavender had given her, pointing.

"Yeah, she signed in at five," Ron said, and Hermione heard the unspoken "We know," at the end of his sentence.

"No, look," breathed Lavender. On the second page, below five or six other signatures was printed "P. Parkinson", followed by a second signature.

"Something's not right here," Betty said, reverting to a strictly professional tone. "Lavender, fetch the blue folder on my desk and a quill, and alert the Hit Wizard Squad. Hopefully she'll come quietly, but if she doesn't, we'll need back up. Ron, you will need to fetch her in case there is any trouble—my wandwork isn't what it once was. But you can't question her: you're too closely involved in the case. You, too, Auror Brown—I'll do the questioning. We need to find out exactly what went on that night to take this case any further."

"You can make Robards listen to us?" asked Lavender.

"I trained him," she replied simply. "I can't overrule him technically, but he knows when to shut up and do as I say. Oh—and Ms. Granger-Weasley? You'll have to leave, I'm afraid. This is pushing the boundaries of correct protocol even for me..."

"No, I understand," Hermione said. She had no desire to see Pansy anyway, and the sooner the case was solved, the better for everyone involved.

"I'll see her out, then be right back," Ron said, taking her by the arm.

"Go to Harry and Ginny's place," he said. "I don't think anything's likely to happen once we take Pansy in, but just in case—if she resists or has backup or whatever—they've got better wards. Harry'll be along as soon as he can, but if he's busy on this other case..."

"Yeah, I know," Hermione said. "I'll explain to Ginny what's going on. You take care, now."

"I'll be fine," he said dismissively.

"You'd better be, or I'll make sure you're not," she replied, trying—and failing—to sound threatening.

"I love you," he answered.

"I love you, too." They kissed, briefly but passionately, then she turned away, heading for the Ministry's Atrium from where she could safely leave for Godric's Hollow. Ron watched her until she disappeared round the corner, then turned back inside.


Hermione had just lost the seventeenth game of Exploding Snap (taking the overall score to eight-nine in Ginny's favour) when the floo burst into life. On edge already, both witches grabbed their wands and did not lower them until Harry had adequately proved who he was.

"Ron's going to be late," he said, stepping out of the fireplace. "He's absolutely fine, but he's—he's—he's—" he broke off, yawning hugely. Ginny immediately began fussing around her husband in a manner ridiculously reminiscent of her mother, sending him upstairs to change and reheating some food for him to eat, sprawled out on the sofa, and so it was several minutes before Hermione and Ginny learned what had gone on when Pansy had been taken in for questioning.

"Well," Harry said, around mouthfuls of casserole. "She denied everything. 'Course she did. Well, she agreed she was a waitress at the Ball—she said she needed the extra cash because the only job she can get is a two day a week position in Magical Games and Sports as a paper pusher and it's not making her enough money to survive on."

"My heart bleeds," Ginny said flatly.

"I know," Harry said, rolling his eyes. "Anyway, she maintains that she signed on at seven, and whoever the Pansy Parkinson signing on at five is is someone else. So we ask her if she has an alibi who can prove she was elsewhere at five—at work still, at her house, doing some shopping in Diagon Alley, whatever—and she says she does."

"But?" asked Hermione.

"But she refuses to give up his or her name, no matter what we say," Harry said.

"What?" yelped Hermione, as Ginny made similar noises of shock.

"She actually is as thick as she looks!" she exclaimed—and here, Hermione saw her resemblance to Ron.

"Well, that's what we were thinking," Harry said. "We were also thinking that Pansy Parkinson is in no fit shape to be brewing up a potion that complicated. Lavender told me that straight off the bat, whilst we listened to Betty Callington—you met...? Okay good—question her. And I agree: she's just not that bright," he swallowed some more food. "But our questioning's getting nowhere, so we send in a team to her flat. Absolutely nothing of any interest found at all; we used our best Dark detectors and they come up with nothing, the only thing she has is a few basic wards to keep out strangers, and let's face it, that's standard practise in magical households across the country. Then we open her kitchen cupboards. Sat next to the sugar bowl and breakfast cereal is a large phial of the potion. It's clearly labelled, and tests from St. Mungo's come back straight away saying yep, this is most definitely the potion."

"That's..." Hermione began, drifting off as she failed to put into words the absurdity of it all.

"It's like walking into Gringotts with a bag labelled 'Swag' and announcing you're going to rob the place," Ginny said. "Insanely obvious."

"Absolutely," agreed Harry. "So Betty's still questioning her at this point, and she mentions that we've found this potion. And Pansy absolutely swears that she has nothing to do with it—her whole manner changes. Before, it was like we were wasting her time and she's too good for us; now it's like she's realised that she could get into trouble for something if she's not careful, and she's panicking because she's innocent, but she knows she doesn't seem it."

"So have you arrested her?" asked Ginny.

"Nope," Harry said. "No, hear me out. If we formally charge her, she's allowed to talk about the whole thing, so she can get a lawyer and whatnot. If we don't charge her, we can get her to sign a magically binding contract that says, basically, 'we think you're innocent for now but we don't want word of this top secret investigation getting out, so in exchange for walking free, you're forbidden from talking about this with anyone'. It's legal, because if we do charge her at a later date, she's completely free to talk about the questioning with her legal representation or whatever, and it prevents our information being leaked."

"You don't think she's behind it then?" Hermione asked.

"I think she's perhaps behind some kind of distraction, or maybe she's even being framed, I'm not sure," Harry said. "But she's certainly not the sole mastermind. We're running fingerprint tests on that phial right now, though, so hopefully that should give us another lead on who to question. If not, it's back in with Pansy, though I honestly don't think she knows anything worth knowing. Think about it—would you want someone like Pansy Parkinson planning a coup or whatever with you? No, you'd have her as the fall guy. Girl. Whatever. If we let her go free, we're hoping that the real person who's behind this will approach her, and she won't be able to warn them we're onto them because of the magically binding contract."

"Is that where Ron is, monitoring the situation?" Hermione asked.

"No, he's trying to sort of some of the Yaxley stuff," Harry sighed. "He seems to be communicating with someone outside—or they're communicating with him—except of course that's impossible. We've confiscated his wand and are monitoring all his letters in and out, not that there have been more than three. The only person he's been allowed to see was his wife, and that's only been twice—oh, and his lawyer. But even their visits are monitored; we leave Aurors in the room with them. It's a mess," he sighed. "Ron's trying to get to the bottom of it with Robards and Shankley and some of the others, but don't expect him back until the small hours."

Hermione echoed his sigh. "I'll go back home to wait for him, then," she said.

"No," said Harry. "He said—and I agree—that just in case...well... Look, we don't think the whole potion thing or the Pansy thing is too big of a risk at the moment. But just in case it somehow gets out that you are involved, Ron wants you to stay with us tonight. He'll come here too when he eventually clocks off, but he thinks the idea of you being alone tonight is not a good idea."

"Definitely," nodded Ginny. "No arguments. I'm going to get our guest room sorted now." She left the room, leaving Hermione and Harry alone.

"When does this end?" she asked. "Every time we think it's over, there's some new threat. When will it stop?"

Harry had no answer.


Firstly, my apologies for missing a week. I'm afraid I have some bad news: I have a job now (not recommended for anyone, this real life business) and so because I'm so busy, I'm only going to have time to update once every two weeks. I'm sorry, I'm sorry! BUT there are only two more chapters and an epilogue to go, so you won't be waiting too long.

Also, you may have realised that it is not quite Wednesday (unless you live in the future, like the Australians). However, this forms part of the reason why you cannot kill me for the above announcement and must instead leave many lovely reviews on this chapter: I'm turning 21 tomorrow. Aah! Yah! Wah! So I probably won't have time to update then, so here it is early. And seriously, there is no better birthday present than a review... *obnoxious staring*

And finally, thank you so much to everyone who reviewed the last chapter. I absolutely loved reading all your theories! PS: a note on Betty Callington—technically she's my OC, but there is an Auror witch with an eye-patch in OotP, so she's also not an OC, I guess?