Previously in the Darklyverse: The Ministry, now controlled by Death Eaters, tried to cover up the Order's reveal of Voldemort's corpse on the steps of Gringotts, but the story was reported in The Quibbler.

xx

November 5th, 1982: Agatha Savage

It's total chance that Agatha even finds out about the article: she might never have seen the thing at all but for the gift Quibbler subscription her sister ordered for her as a joke last month. If the photographer hadn't had her camera on her the day she snapped that photograph—if she hadn't thought to send the photograph to Lovegood—if the article had come out a month before Agatha's birthday instead of after it, the odds are very good that the story never would have reached her.

But it did reach her, and it's lucky that it did—because before Agatha became an Auror, she used to dabble in photography and learned a thing or two about how to identify a forged wizarding photo.

"It's definitely real," she tells Proudfoot. They're sitting in the break room at the Auror Office, both chowing down on fish and chips with the article spread out in front of them on the wooden table. "I went to Lovegood's house personally to check out the original. I ran all the tests I know on it—it's not faked."

"You're kidding, right?" Proudfoot says. She rolls her eyes while stabbing at a piece of fish. "There's no way. You know the kind of bullshit Lovegood puts in every issue—if this picture had even a smidge of credibility to it that the person responsible for it wanted to hold onto, they never would have dreamed of submitting it to him."

"Please. They probably didn't have much of a choice, did they? If the Prophet wouldn't run it—"

"Yeah, because it's fake. Just because Diagon Alley shut itself down to stop the spread of spattergroit—"

"Yeah, but do you really believe that, Proudfoot?" Agatha asks. "I mean, we know there are vigilantes out there who have been working against the Death Eaters. If one of them—"

"So you're on their side now? What happened to fixing the system from within?"

"I'm not saying they went about it the right way—but, I mean, it's not like we've gotten very far with our resources here, and if he really is dead—if the Prophet and the Ministry are covering it up—"

"Malfoy wouldn't do that," says Proudfoot staunchly. "I know he's a purist, but he's not corrupt like that. His administration wouldn't work with the Death Eaters."

But Agatha isn't so sure of that. If there really is a coverup at play here, the Minister himself doesn't have to be a Death Eater for members of his administration to be ones—and it seems a hell of a lot more likely for Malfoy to be one of them than, say, Millicent Bagnold might have been.

The nice thing is that Aurors have a lot of leeway to run with their investigations outside of supervision from Pyrites, who took over for Moody five months ago when all the vigilantes were apprehended. "I'd better take off," she tells Proudfoot through her last mouthful of fish. "I've got, like, four testimonies I need to follow up on this afternoon for the Coyota investigation."

"Really? I thought you were all stalled out waiting for Heywood's lead to pan out."

"I am, but I've got crap I need to cross-reference in the meantime. Hey, are we still on for drinks after work tonight?"

Agatha's "follow-ups" are a load of dragon dung, but neither Proudfoot nor Pyrites needs to know that—not as long as Agatha hasn't got any proof. She feels a little thrill of excitement as she gets in the nearest lift and takes off toward Obliviator Headquarters: she's always gotten a certain rush from breaking the rules. Ironically, it's probably why she makes such a great Auror. In this profession, you've got to be creative, flexible—and that tends to overlap with a proclivity for operating outside the lines of authority.

If the Ministry is covering up You-Know-Who's death, there's no guarantee that they've been using Obliviators to do it. Presumably, most Obliviators are not Death Eaters and wouldn't just be okay with helping obstruct the news that the darkest wizard in modern British history has been killed—they'd protest, complain to their spouses, something. But it's as good a place to start as any.

"I'm going to need records of your last week's worth of deployments, including overtime," she says briskly to the receptionist, Albert Dankworth, whose smile drips right off his face halfway through his greeting to her.

"On whose authority?" he says a little snidely.

"Look, you can check it with Pyrites if you want to," she bluffs, putting on her best exasperated voice. "I can't give details, but there's been a miscommunication between our offices on one of my cases, and it appears some Muggle witnesses' memories were modified in an incident related to one of our investigations before we were able to secure their testimonies."

Dankworth is scowling at her, but he doesn't appear not to believe her. "Always you lot with your secret investigations," he says, more to himself than to her. "Once, just once, it would be nice if you could loop us in before accusing us of screwing up your jobs."

"So I take it you don't have your documentation up-to-date?" she says cheerfully.

"You can come back next week if you want most of this week's records, but you're on your own from last Friday to Monday. Those ones are sealed on orders straight from the Minister's support staff."

"Sealed on orders, huh?"

He throws up his hands. "Don't ask me, lady. I just file the paperwork."

"Can I at least get a list of employees who put in overtime last weekend?"

xx

Agatha whips out another bullshit excuse to peruse the Administrative Registration Office for the addresses of all the Obliviators on the list, but she has to wait until after hours to actually start making house calls and asking them what they did for work the previous weekend: after all, running around the Ministry interrogating its employees about their activities right around the time You-Know-Who's alleged death got leaked to the Quibbler would get her caught in no time. Finally, after the workday wraps up and she whiles away a couple of hours with Proudfoot at The Leaky Cauldron (which is open for business again now that the "spattergroit outbreak" in Diagon Alley has been contained), she tells Proudfoot she's heading home when, really, he's on her way to pay her first unwitting victim a house call.

The first two Obliviators she talks to don't pan out—all they'd done was work on routine magical mishaps that Muggles witnessed—and the third isn't home. But the fourth—the fourth visit absolutely convinces Agatha that there's foul play at work here.

"You're telling me you made seventeen house calls last weekend, but you don't remember what you were doing there or whose memories you wiped?"

The Obliviator, McCaw, shrugs and crosses his arms. "Look, I remember my boss telling me I was needed for some top-secret something or other, and I remember her handing me a list of names, but then everything goes blank."

"And you don't remember what names were on the list?"

"It's rare, but it happens. Sometimes, we're called in to modify memories about events that we don't have clearance for. It's not unheard of in our line of work."

"But it doesn't strike you as suspicious that you conveniently don't remember the purpose of modifying the memories of witches and wizards instead of Muggles? And the timing—"

"You're talking about that lunatic Quibbler article, aren't you? God, you sound just like Reaney. She's a crackpot conspiracy theorist if I've ever seen one."

"Reaney?"

"Yeah, Aurelia Reaney. She got called in over the weekend, too. Keeps going on about how You-Know-Who is dead and Malfoy's trying to cover it up, as if the Ministry and the Death Eaters are actually in cahoots. Can you imagine?"

"Yeah. Lunatic," Agatha agrees absently. "Look, I'm very sorry about this, but I can't have you telling anyone I stopped by, so—"

The irony is not lost on her when she Obliviates the Obliviator. Yep—sometimes it's way too much fun to flout authority.

Scanning her list, she finds Reaney's name and address near the bottom and makes the executive decision to pay her Agatha's next visit—and it pays off. Agatha's hardly been on Reaney's doorstep in Belfast before the witch is inviting her inside, pressing a steaming mug of tea into her hands, and raving about what she's been able to piece together of what the hell happened last weekend.

"Here's the weird part," says Reaney in a confidential, carrying whisper. "Almost everybody in the office worked overtime for four solid days. There were multiple incidents with Muggles that got pushed over to Tuesday because of whatever hazard was going on over the weekend—and we never do that unless it's totally necessary; you don't know what a pain it is trying to track down every person that every Muggle may have spoken to so that we can wipe all their memories. I remember all my cases from Saturday, Sunday, and Monday—I was pulling triple duty for the people who were on whatever crisis was ongoing—but I only lost about twenty minutes of time on Friday, and my paystub doesn't reflect any overtime on Friday at all."

"So you're saying they wouldn't have called you back on Friday unless they were planning to work you all evening?"

"They can't have done. There's no way—not if it was all hands on deck. I must have raised some kind of ruckus about what I was being asked to do for them to have taken me off my caseload. Whatever I did, there's not going to be any retribution for it because they're not allowed to tell me what it is I did that I don't remember—it would be oddly satisfying if it weren't so frustrating."

"And you think it's related to the Quibbler article on You-Know-Who."

"It's got to be. The timing is too suspect," Reaney confirms. "I know that people don't know who to believe right now—that their faith in the Light is shaken now that witches and wizards they used to love and respect have been found out as vigilantes and are being framed as the real criminals—but if I believe in one person, it's myself, and things would not have gone the way they went down for me that evening if I hadn't had serious ethical concerns. I had to have had a reason. I had to have known that my supervisors and peers were in the wrong."

Tea entirely forgotten, Agatha leans forward in her chair. "The Aurors all think it's a joke—the idea that You-Know-Who could be dead, I mean. I almost got laughed out of the office for suggesting that it had any credibility, and that was after I followed up with Lovegood and ran tests on the photograph to verify that it's real."

"So it is real? It's not just—some fantastical story somebody dreamed up to explain the coincidences?"

"I'll bet you my inheritance that it's real, and I'll bet you my pension that it's what you were objecting to that day."

"And—you're really going to look into this?" Reaney presses. "You're not going to wipe my memory of this conversation or something to cover your own arse?"

"I mean, that was my intention," Agatha admits with a snicker. "You just—don't know who you can trust these days. Even now—we hardly know each other."

"Yeah, but—if Malfoy's administration is compromised, and the vigilantes are in hiding, we're going to have to find like-minded people if we ever want… I'm not a fighter, okay? I'm never going to be the person on the front lines, but I can't just sit back and—and watch our world destroy itself."

Agatha leans forward and takes Reaney's hands in her own. "I know you have no reason to trust me, but—you can trust me. I'm going to get to the bottom of this." And she believes herself as she says it.