Disclaimer: see chapter one.
Thanks to my reviewers. You really are an encouragement to me. Thank you also to Imogen and Firebolt909 for beta-help.
Chapter Three: Muggle London
Harry left his South Kensington flat the following day and walked toward Old Brompton Road and the tube station. He might have Apparated over to the Ministry, but today he wanted some time to think: one thing about most Muggle forms of transportation, they afforded time for thinking. Today, he was dressed as a Muggle, as well, in beige chinos and an emerald green cotton jumper. He enjoyed the anonymity of blending in with the crowd of Londoners on their lunch hour. Once he'd entered Diagon Alley, he would no longer be able to pass unnoticed.
He took a seat on the Underground and began to relive the previous weekend for what seemed the hundredth time. In his mind, the most surprising event had occurred at Ron and Hermione's wedding. As he had stood next to his best friend, the processional had begun, and he had had his first glimpse of Ginny as she followed Hermione down the aisle. He remembered being amazed at how stunning she had looked in her gown, whose pale peach colour had perfectly complimented her complexion, causing her to fairly glow. Her hair had been caught up in a simple twist with sprigs of baby's breath tucked into it, and he had found the manner in which it caught the candlelight fascinating. She had looked up with a shy smile, and his throat had gone dry. It had been all he could do to pay heed to the ceremony after that. He had snapped to attention just in time to hand the ring to Ron. Then he had looked back over at Ginny standing serenely next to Hermione and had made the decision to pursue her. And now he couldn't get her out of his mind.
And then there was the matter of the break-in. Under the best of circumstances, such an occurrence would have given him a bad feeling, but in this case, his instincts told him that there was more to this than met the eye. He sighed. He hoped Ginny had turned up something useful at her office.
The train slowed, and Harry realised it had reached Leicester Square. He disembarked and moved along with the crowd up to Charing Cross Road. As he headed towards the Leaky Cauldron, he was reminded of making a similar trip past these same shops in the company of Hagrid. It seemed a long time ago to him. He entered the Leaky Cauldron, nodded to Tom, but refused the offer of a drink. Instead, he went to the back of the shabby pub and entered Diagon Alley. He moved quickly through the crowd of wizards and witches in the street, keeping his head down and avoiding meeting anyone's glance, as he headed for the Ministry. Here in Diagon Alley, he stood out, as much for his Muggle dress as for his famous face, but he did not wish to stop to talk to anyone today. He had business to attend to.
As he went up the steps to the Ministry building, Harry noticed a tall man with a moustache and a bowler hat who seemed to be doing an exaggerated sort of goose step. His resemblance to Nearly-Headless Nick was uncanny. Harry shook his head. It takes all kinds, he thought to himself. Upon entering the building he noticed that a few new departments had been added to the directory. "Why do they need a department for silly walks?" he wondered. He'd never understand the logic, or rather lack thereof, of the Ministry of Magic.
He located the Improper Use of Magic Office in the directory and set off along the maze of corridors. He found the office and entered quietly. Ginny was sitting behind a desk writing something on a parchment. She did not seem to have heard him come in. He stood for a moment, relieved to see that she had safely passed the night alone in her cottage, and watched the play of colours in her hair as it caught the overhead light. He remembered how soft and pliant her lips had been when he had kissed her the previous day in her garden among the flowers. Finally, he cleared his throat. "Hullo, Ginny."
Ginny looked up with a bit of a start. "Oh, Harry, I didn't hear you come in."
Harry looked around the office. On one wall could be seen several large sheets of glass, rather like mirrors. Along the opposite wall was a bank of filing cabinets that reminded Harry of the ones in Argus Filch's office. He looked back at Ginny. "Just got here. So have you found anything?"
"Yes, actually, I did. I spent a good bit of the morning going through the files for the last six months. Most of it was the same old thing. It's usually the same wizards who cause all the trouble, mostly wizards who live alongside Muggles and get noticed, or underage wizards doing magic outside school. But that won't be a problem for a few weeks yet, when Hogwarts lets out. Summer's usually our busiest time of year; that or the Christmas holidays." Ginny took several files from her desk and handed them to Harry. "Have a look at these and see if you recognise any names. I definitely recognised one name and another seemed familiar."
Harry began paging through the reports. He stopped at one which had been dated the previous month. "Yes… Vincent Crabbe, one of Draco Malfoy's former cronies." In Harry's seventh year, Draco had shocked everyone, most especially his own father, by refusing to join the Death Eaters, and many of his fellow Slytherins had turned on him, making what had remained of his life very miserable. Lucius Malfoy was rumoured to have used the Killing Curse on his own son during the final confrontation with Lord Voldemort, but Harry hadn't witnessed it. No one he knew had.
"Yes, that was the one I recognised."
"And here's another, Millicent Bulstrode."
"I don't recall her, although the name rang a bell."
"She was in my year, Slytherin. Rather hard to miss, very tall and, well, solid. Looked more like a boy than a girl, really. You should ask Hermione about her sometime."
"There was one other strange thing I noticed." Ginny indicated the sheets of glass on the wall. "These are Dark Magic Detectors. Alastor Moody made a few improvements to the Foe-Glass, so that it could detect the use of Dark Magic over almost any distance. If someone tries to perform any illegal spell anywhere within the Ministry's jurisdiction, it shows up in the glass. There's a magic quill that makes a record of anything that comes up in the glass."
"So when your wards were broken over the weekend, it should have been recorded."
"Exactly. But there was no record of it this morning."
"Was anyone in the office over the weekend?"
"Yes, on Saturday, Eleanor Branstone would have been in. She's new, just hired on, but we needed someone here, since both Ms. Hopkirk and I were at the wedding."
"Well, now, isn't this cosy!" Ginny and Harry turned to see who had spoken. Mafalda Hopkirk was standing in the doorway with what looked suspiciously like a smirk on her face. "Not giving out any classified information, I hope, Ginny."
"Er, no, Ms. Hopkirk. Harry was just taking me to lunch."
Mafalda's smirk grew even deeper at this. "Then you'd best be off, hadn't you? Take your time, now…"
Ginny took Harry's arm. "Let's go."
Once they'd got out of ear-shot of Ginny's office, she exclaimed, "Of all the days for her to come back from her lunch hour on time! We didn't have time to find out much at all. On top of that she's one of the biggest gossips in the Ministry. It'll be all over by the time we get back that you and I are dating!" I occurred to Harry that Ginny left unsaid what she must surely have been thinking: that her family would also hear about this, after the scene with Molly the previous day. The thought hung in the air between them as they made their way into Diagon Alley.
"What do you want to do about lunch?" Harry asked at last.
"I wasn't expecting to actually have a normal lunch hour, since I almost never do. I ate a sandwich at my desk before you came in."
"Then let's do something a little mad and eat ice cream for lunch… my lunch anyway."
Ginny agreed to this, and soon they were seated outside Florian Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlour with decadent-looking heaps of chocolate and raspberry ice cream in front of them. Just as they were finishing, a shadow was suddenly cast across their table. Harry looked up to see a young witch wearing garishly coloured robes smiling at him. There was something familiar about her; he thought he remembered the dark brown hair, but the face was too heavily made up to be completely sure.
"Don't you remember me, Harry?" she purred.
"Erm….," he hesitated. "Is it Mandy Brocklehurst?"
"You do remember!" she said happily and proceeded to sit down uninvited. She scooted her chair closer to Harry.
"You know Ginny Weasley, don't you?" Harry put in.
Mandy gave Ginny a passing glance, acting as if Ginny was something she might scrape off the bottom of her shoe. "Oh, yes, you weren't in our year, though, were you?" Mandy turned her attention back to Harry. "So how's our national Quidditch hero?" she asked, laying her hand on his thigh.
It seemed to Harry as if the day had turned uncommonly warm. He cleared his throat. "In a bit of a hurry, actually, sorry."
Mandy looked disappointed. "In that case I won't keep you. But do send me an owl sometime. I'd love for us to … get together." She said these last two words in a voice dripping with promise. Then she got up and sashayed off.
Harry let out his breath; he hadn't realised he'd been holding it. He looked over at Ginny and saw her staring at him in a none-too-friendly manner. Suddenly, the warm day seemed about ten degrees cooler. He swallowed, wondering what tack he should take.
"Ginny, do you know where I live?"
Whatever she'd been expecting him to say, this was obviously not it. That much was evident in her expression. "Erm… no."
"I have a flat in South Kensington. In Muggle London," he emphasised. "Would you like to know why?"
She still looked confused as to where all this was leading. "All right. Tell me."
"Because in Muggle London no one knows who I am. I can blend in with everyone else. I don't have Witch Weekly photographers dogging my every step, and I don't have strange women proposition me."
"Oh." That seemed to be all she could get out.
"I don't come to Diagon Alley any more often than I have to. You realise, don't you, that the majority of those Witch Weekly stories aren't true?"
"But they're usually accompanied by a picture…" Evidently she had believed the stories, even as her mother did. Harry sighed.
"Yes, they are. There's always some small kernel of truth to those articles. Take today, for instance. Had there been a photographer around to snap a picture, there almost certainly would have been something in next week's edition about me dating Mandy, being engaged to Mandy, running off on holiday to Majorca with Mandy… But you just witnessed what actually happened."
"Nothing actually happened."
"That's right." He paused, considering his next words carefully. "And if no article appears linking Mandy and me, there could easily be one about you and me. Will you be able to handle that when it happens?"
"When it happens?"
"It will happen, trust me. If you and I are to be friends and be seen out in public like this, it will eventually be in the press. Your mother will see it. Can you deal with that?"
She hesitated, as if weighing her reply. Finally she said, "Yes, I think I can. As it is, it will be all over the Ministry by the end of the day. You and I will know the truth of the matter. I would hope anyone who knows me would know the truth." Her eyes suddenly became round. "I'm so sorry, Harry," she gasped. "I've just realised I haven't accorded you the same courtesy. It's just seeing those articles week after week, having lost contact with you… There came a point when I didn't know what to believe."
Harry reached across the table and squeezed her hand. "As long as we're being perfectly honest…" He hesitated here. He wasn't sure he was exactly comfortable telling her this, but then he forged ahead. "I won't lie to you, Ginny, and say I've never succumbed to temptation. I did a few times in the beginning, but eventually I realised it was all meaningless. None of those women wanted anything more than a piece of me… money, a piece of fame…"
"A piece of arse…"
Harry smiled grimly. "To put it bluntly, yes. But once I woke up to that fact, that sort of temptation became much easier to resist." He looked down and noticed he was still holding her hand. "Shall we be off? If we sit here much longer, you will most certainly be in next week's edition."
They rose to leave. "I wish I didn't have to go back to the office so soon," Ginny said.
"Then don't. You told me your boss skives off often enough, and she did tell us to take our time. Will you be in a lot of trouble if you come back late?"
"I doubt I really will be. No one wants to work in that office, so I can't really be fired. I'd be too hard to replace."
"Would you mind if we got out of Diagon Alley and went into Muggle London? Less chance of being recognised that way."
"We can do that." Ginny looked down at the robes she had worn into the Ministry that morning. "I'm not quite dressed the part, though. Just give me a minute." She took out her wand and transfigured her robes into a simple summer dress. Harry thought this was a definite improvement over the long robes she had been wearing; the summer dress showed more leg.
They set off down Diagon Alley and left through the Leaky Cauldron. Out on Charing Cross Road, Ginny paused. "Harry, can we have a look in here?" She indicated the record shop next to the Leaky Cauldron. "I like to pop in for a look every so often, and see what they've got."
"I didn't know you liked Muggle music."
"Oh, I have since Hogwarts. One of the girls in my year had quite a collection, along with a CD player that had been charmed to work by magic, instead of electricity. I've been looking for some of the CDs she had for ages."
"Do you have a CD player that works in Hogsmeade?"
"You know my dad, he can't resist fiddling around with Muggle things. When I told him about my friend, he had to go out and find himself a CD player to charm. When he'd got it to work, he gave it to me for my birthday a few years ago."
"If you want to look at CDs, there's a better place to go than this. Come on, it's not that far."
Harry took her hand and led her to the corner and on across Charing Cross Road. Soon they were walking past the bustling shops of Oxford Street. There were many types of expensive-looking goods on display in the shop windows, but Ginny didn't seem very interested. In the middle of a block, they came to a building marked HMV. As Harry held the door for Ginny to go in, he thought he saw someone dressed in wizard robes out of the corner of his eye, but when he turned for a better look, he could see nothing unusual.
Ginny gasped in delight when she saw the selection of music available. The shabby little record shop next to the Leaky Cauldron was nothing compared to this. She moved off and began to look through the racks of CDs. "I've been looking for these for ages," she said at last, her brown eyes shining with delight. She showed him two CDs, neither of them anything recent, but then Harry supposed this was music she had listened to at Hogwarts with her dorm-mates.
Harry pointed to one of the CDs. "Oasis, yeah they're good, I know them. I've never heard of the other."
"Oh, she's not known very well here. She's a Canadian singer. One of my dorm-mates had a cousin in Canada who had sent her this one. It's really good."
Harry looked at the title. "Fumbling Towards Ecstasy?" he said, arching a brow. "Sounds interesting." Suddenly, Harry looked around again. He was sure he had seen the wizard again from the corner of his eye. Not wanting to alarm Ginny, he said, "It's getting late. Perhaps you should pay for those, and we'll get you back to work before you really get into trouble."
Ginny's face fell. "Sod it, I don't have any Muggle money on me. I wasn't expecting to leave Diagon Alley today."
"I've got some. I'll pay for them." Then he quickly added, as he saw Ginny open her mouth to protest, "you can pay me back in Sickles."
As they waited to pay for their purchases, Harry was sure he saw the wizard waiting outside by the doorway. Harry couldn't see the wizard's face, since he was facing away from the interior of the shop, but he could see that the wizard was massive: both tall and large. "Ginny," Harry said in a low voice after they had left the cash, "there's a strange wizard outside the shop by the way out. He must have some sort of Unobtrusive spell on him, because the Muggles are just passing him by without a second glance. This is the third time I've seen him now, and unless I miss my guess, we're being followed. It could be a photographer, but then again it might not be. Either way, I don't think we want to meet up with him. I think we should go over in that corner and Dis-apparate directly to the Ministry."
Ginny craned her neck and looked out onto the street. The wizard could still be seen there. "All right, let's go," she agreed.
They reappeared in the reception area of the Ministry. Harry noticed that the hand on Ginny's watch was pointing to "you're late". "I guess I'd better get back to work, then," she said. "I've been gone far too long now. Thank you for taking me out to lunch." She smiled up at him, reached out and squeezed his hand. and then she was gone. Harry caught one last glimpse of her hair before she turned a corner and disappeared from his sight.
He turned and walked back out into Diagon Alley. He decided to make one last stop before returning to his flat. With this in mind, he headed for Weasley's Wizard Wheezes.