Aha! I'm back. I'm on holidays. Go me.

A/N and Disclaimer – I don't own anything, except a CCR Greatest Hits CD that I adopted from my father. 'Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori' is the title of a WW1 poem by (Owen Wilfred?) and is translated as 'it is sweet and fitting to die for your country'. The usage in the poem was entirely ironic. Any forensic science and investigations in this fic are entirely imaginary, and gleaned from an odd assortment of murder mysteries.


Chapter 4 - Honesty


"...Some folks are born with star-spangled eyes,
Ooh, they send you down to war.
And when you ask them, "How much should we give?"
Ooh, they only answer, "More! More! More!..."

It ain't me, It ain't me,
I ain't no military son, no.
It ain't me, It ain't me,
I'm no fortunate one..."

Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Fortunate Son"


"Draco?" His wife's voice broke into his contemplation. "What's wrong? Hermione told me you were upset, that you wanted to talk to me."

She came up behind him and put her arms around his waist, resting her chin on his shoulder. She was tall, his Ginevra – well, with six tall brothers she'd been bound to be – and strong; strong enough to put up with him, his demons, and his responsibilities.

"Did she?" he asked ironically. "That's good of her."

Ginny sighed. Even now, two years after their wedding, relations between her husband and her family and friends were…strained, to say the least. The birth of their son Julian had gone far towards alleviating the tension – at least it had for Molly Weasley, who had promptly absolved Draco of all his sins – but the tension at family dinners was still thick enough to cut with a knife, and her brothers still took great delight in taunting poor Draco at every turn. So when Hermione had told her that Draco was upset, she had known it was serious, and had come as soon as she could, leaving her mother to baby sit Julian.

"What happened?" she asked again.

His body was tense, quivering finely in her arms, but his voice was steady and completely without inflection. "Moody has had a brilliant idea."

She frowned, puzzled. "What?" What did the occasionally cracked products of Moody's paranoia have to do with anything?

She could feel the vibrations of his laughter. "You know, it is brilliant, in a way…"

Seriously concerned, now, she let him go and moved around so that she could see his face, see the truth in the brilliance or dullness of his eyes. "What is it, Draco? What's going on?"

He didn't get the chance to answer. A brisk, demanding knock sounded on the door, and Tonks – her hair and eyes ordinary brown now – came in and said, "Malfoy, Moody wants to see you – oh." She stopped when she saw Ginny. "I'm sorry Ginny; I didn't know you were here…"

Draco looked at his cousin. "Is he here already?" There was an odd vulnerability in his voice, so odd that it put Ginny immediately on guard.

When Tonks nodded with something like – sympathy? – Ginny knew there was something very strange going on. And whatever it was, if it could make Draco vulnerable, then she was going to be involved in it whether he liked it or not.

When Draco left the room with something like reluctance, Ginny went with him.


So, his son had become an Auror. A ruthless, intelligent fighter well respected by his fellows, if not well liked – accepted by most, and admired by more than a few.

Lucius would be the first to admit that he hadn't been a particularly good father. But it seemed that Draco had become a good man, despite that –

You created this situation, Father, with your damned reckless, infernal need to stir things up – and now you'll leave me to deal with it on my own? You care more for yourself and your own amusement than you ever did for your responsibilities…

Well, it was true enough. He had taken over the responsibilities of the Clan Lord after his own father's death, but they had never been anything more than a burden – they had never been a sacred calling, as they had been to Marcus and the other great ancestors of Malfoy legend. Lucius knew himself well enough to accept this; there had been more than enough time for meditation and introspection in the silent dark.

He had stopped lying to himself long ago.

"Well, Malfoy," Moody said dryly, "are you ready to face him?" Evidently, the whole of wizarding England knew about his son's repudiation of him. Draco must have spread it about to gain more support from all those who had ever hated him – no doubt it had worked brilliantly.

"Get it over with quickly," the old man advised. "And then you can concentrate on catching our assassin."

Lucius smiled. It almost reached his eyes. "Don't worry, Moody, I won't forget where my priorities lie."

They were standing in the Auror Corps' Hall of Honour, where all the aurors who had died in the line of duty had been commemorated. It was a huge, echoing hall, with small portraits, names and epitaphs of the fallen covering the white marble walls, stretching back to Elizabeth the 1st's founding of the Corps in 1558. He had only ever been in this wretched mausoleum once, to see his father join the exulted company on the walls –

Caius Marcus Malfoy

1895 – 1970

Order of Merlin, 1st Class

"Dulce et decorum est…"

Goddamn him and his rigid, hopelessly old fashioned sense of duty. And goddamn Moody, for trying to needle him like this –

He turned around as he heard a footstep behind them, and saw his son approaching, saw the uncertainty in his eyes and the confident indifference he used to disguise it. Draco did not look surprised to see him – he supposed gossip still ran through the Ministry as quickly as ever – but the woman at his side, tall, red haired and striking, looked stunned and aghast. She kept her tongue, though, perhaps sensing something unusual in the offing. Moody coughed and tactfully withdrew to the other side of the hall, ostensibly to examine eighteenth century portraits, but young Ginevra – for surely it was she – stayed stubbornly – possessively – by his son's side, staring at him challengingly.

Lucius ignored her, focusing on Draco instead. They stood there for a time, watching each other, measuring the changes wrought by twelve long, hard years, and then Lucius – perhaps influenced by his father's silver gaze above him – spoke to his son for the first time since he had been sentenced to Azkaban.

"Do you believe that?" he asked, tilting his head towards the Latin epitaph. He wanted – needed – to know.

If he was put out by the abrupt question, Draco gave no indication. Walking closer to his grandfather's portrait, he said quietly, reflectively, "That first year after you were…taken away, I used to come here, to see him – to try and understand. I used to think he could tell me something, some important secret that could explain why…" Ginevra's eyes softened and she put a hand on his arm, squeezing slightly.

"And did he?" Lucius highly doubted it.

"No." Draco shook his head. "Nothing. Only that 'it is good and honourable to die for your country' – and no, I don't believe such Victorian melodrama. I'll only ever die for two things –" he lifted his head, turned back to stare almost defiantly at Lucius, "for my family, and for the Malfoy."

"Everything else is unimportant." And he put his arm around Ginevra Weasley, and the conclusions were easy enough to draw.

His son had married a Weasley.

Lucius watched them both for a while longer, and then smiled fractionally – a real smile, this time. "Well enough, Draco," he answered the unspoken challenge. "As long as you are strong enough to enforce that claim…"

"I am." He said it easily, confidently. "I am strong enough."

And Lucius believed him.


There was a discreet knock on the door and a dark-cloaked Auror entered, making his way to Moody's side and whispering urgently in his ear. Ginny watched, frowning, as both Draco and his father seemed to stand just a little straighter, their eyes just a little more alert – really, she hadn't realized what how much Draco had been influenced by his father before now; watching them stand side by side, the similarities were startling.

But so were the differences.

Moody frowned direly as he listened to the Auror's message, and then he turned, unmistakably, to fix his rolling, wild eyes on Lucius.

"Well, Malfoy," he said with horrible relish, "it's time to earn your keep. The bastard has struck again."


The scene of the crime was a quiet, secluded little cottage in the countryside, very old-fashioned even for the wizarding world. There were Aurors everywhere, frowning and examining the ground meaningfully, looking as though they were doing something useful. When Moody saw them he groaned out loud, and sent Bill Weasley and Tonks to clear them out –

Get rid of these bloody clumsy fools before they do any more damage to the scene…

So that he and his elite squad – experienced in the worst aspects of counter-terrorism – could see what they could see. Or, more accurately, so that Lucius could give them the benefit of his dubious expertise. Draco watched his father somehow draw the attention of the squad to himself, so that it seemed as if he and not Moody were the one in command – and then he saw him check, hesitate, turn his head slightly to the right.

It appeared as though he were looking towards the body, or at least in the same direction. But in an instant, the strange impression was gone, and there was only professional expertise covered by cool irony, as there had always been for as long as Draco could remember.

The body – a portly, bearded wizard, his hair absent mindedly tangled and graying, was slumped bonelessly on the thick grass, his pipe still smouldering where it had fallen when he collapsed. Moody and Lucius, drawing on pairs of sterile gloves, went over to the body and, bending down, gently took it by the shoulder and rolled it over.

Draco drew in a breath.

He knew who the dead man was. He had never before met him, but he knew who he was – or rather who he had once been, when he had been the judge presiding over the second generation Death Eater trials.

"Sir Samuel Griffith," Moody said slowly. "He's retired now, but he was once very influential in the Ministry." He looked at Lucius, who was looking down at the dead man, smiling almost ruefully. "But I suspect you knew that already."

"Hmmm," Lucius answered. He reached out and touched two fingers to the dead man's neck, feeling the stiffness of the muscles, checking for any unnatural rigidity that would indicate the Avada Kedavra.

Every single one of them in that group was intimately familiar with the particular effects of the Killing Curse. They knew what they saw.

Tonks, who had had the misfortune to come up at just that moment with a message, coughed as tactfully as she could. "Sir, it looks like Bill's found something…"

Lucius turned his attention towards her, and the odd tension was broken. "What?" he asked crisply, none of his formerly languid manner evident.

"Ah…you might want to come and see," she prevaricated, unwilling to be the messenger. Draco could see his cousin's discomfort, and wondered what had so upset her normal optimistic, Gryffindoric self possession. She had never been so uncomfortable around his father before, on the very few times they had ever interacted. In fact, Tonks had always gone to great lengths to demonstrate that she was not intimidated by her formidable uncle-by-marriage.

His father had always been perceptive.


The common room of the Grey Kneazle, a run down hedge tavern in the depths of Knockturn Alley, was always dark, dingy and smoky, even in the middle of the day. This could be attributed to sheer laziness and lack of cleanliness, but in fact the real reason was so that the innkeeper would be able to say, with perfect truthfulness, that he had no way of knowing anything about the private business of the customers who patronized his tavern. Certainly, the place was identified as a genuine Death Eater haunt by the Aurors, but because it was always only the small fry who were fool enough to flaunt themselves in such a manner, the Aurors left the place alone most of the time, only making sporadic raids every three months or so. There was no real purpose in it, none of the Death Eater godfathers were ever found there, and besides, they had better things to do with their time.

However, had they bothered to make a raid today, they would have found themselves in possession of a very unexpected prize.

A lean, greying man with a lopsided ironic smile was seated in the corner of the room, his flat watchful eyes scanning the common room in what seemed to be an automatic reflex, drilled into him by years of hard experience. The two men sitting across from him watched him anxiously, as if they could not believe that he was actually here, that they were truly in his presence.

Inwardly, the man sighed. The ranks of the Death Eaters seemed to be getting younger and younger as time went on – or perhaps he was just getting old. These puppies were green, barely competent and overconfident into the bargain – they should not have been sent on this mission. In fact, they should still be living at home and causing trouble for their parents…

And he himself should be home, sitting by the fireplace, not running about killing as if he were twenty years old once again. He had thought he had been safe enough, that he'd earned an honourable retirement –

But some things you could not walk away from.

"Well?" one of them asked nervously. "Is it true? Has Malfoy changed sides?" Even now, Lucius Malfoy's reputation was the stuff of legends among the Death Eaters. He had not been one of the founding fathers of the group, being much too young, but he had been the most brilliant of the next, younger generation recruited to bring the Dark Lord's vision to life, birthed in blood and chaos, at a time when such things were not impossible. Yes, back then, there had been a genuine chance of success – especially when Lucius Malfoy had brought his energy and particular genius to the task.

He hadn't believed in the Cause. But he hadn't believed in the Auror's Cause, either, nor in the Ministry's cause, nor any other –

Utterly and unashamedly amoral, he'd happily caused chaos and disorder because it had pleased him to, because he was less than twenty years old and such things had appealed to him, then.

In the time since, he had changed a great deal.

"Yes," the man said quietly. "Moody got him a transfer out of Azkaban and the prospect of immunity –"

The other young man cursed. "Treacherous bastard…"

Treachery? Perhaps. But things looked different, once you had passed fifty years of life. No doubt Lucius had his reasons.

"So you saw him then?" That was the first young fool, the anxious one, who perhaps knew more of the consequences and implications of this startling development. "How close were you?"

He shrugged. "I waited until the Aurors came, and then again until Moody's squad arrived. He was there, with his son and with Moody – there's no doubt of it. You can't mistake him, no matter how much he's changed." He stopped to reflect, a small smile growing in his eyes. "I left him a little message, just to tease him, to see how much of the old Lucius still remains…"

"What!" hissed the second one. "Are you mad? Why didn't you just kill him, instead of trying to give the game away?"

The man cast him a slow, considering look. "He knew I was there. I could never have gotten through his defences. And besides," he said, the smile growing stronger, "where would the fun be in killing him on the very first day?"


Bill Weasley, it seemed, had found the spot from where the assassin had cast his curse. The wide, sheltering tree on the outskirts of the forest was a good hundred metres from the dead body itself, bearing out the theory that it was the same assassin – but there was something else, something disturbing in its implications.

Sir Samuel had been in the habit of walking in his garden at the same hour every single day. It was so predictable that you could set your timepiece by it, and had – in the forty or so years Sir Samuel had lived in the neighbourhood – become a matter of no little local amusement. But the grass and undergrowth squashed beneath the tree where the assassin had lain before casting his spell was far flatter than a short wait for a victim to manifest himself would warrant.

And there was the matter of the still smoking, still warm cigarette butt.

Of course. To watch the authorities scramble to make sense and solve the crime that you yourself had committed – it was an incredible ego-boost. Lucius should know, he'd done it himself a few times.

The bastard had been here all the time, watching and gloating.

He had known it, on an instinctive basis – a rising of the hackles, a thrill running down the spine – and yet he had almost ignored it, almost dismissed it as fancy. Had he not strengthened his defences, he might have been killed where he stood. No, he was not what he had once been, not even anywhere close to it. But a return to that mindset – as much as he could return to it, nearly thirty years later – might be necessary, if he wanted to survive…