Note: Final part of today's triple bill. Enjoy!

Chapter Thirty-Four

RAB Revealed

"Will she be ok?" Hermione asked the mediwitch. Madame Pomfrey did not answer immediately, but eventually she nodded.

"I think she will be fine, although it is too early to say for certain," she replied thoughtfully. "What is it about this school that attracts cursed necklaces?" she muttered under her breath as Hermione moved away to rejoin the boys, where they were sitting on a bed having been patched up following their fight with the horcrux. Thankfully Madame Pomfrey had not asked too many questions about the accursed jewellery, merely treating their minor abrasions and returning her attention to the far more pressing case of the stricken arithmancy professor.

"Hermione, only you could be so concerned after the welfare of a crabbit old professor," said Ron, shaking his head in disbelief.

"Ron, be fair, she's just been almost possessed by Voldemort," said Harry. "I'd be concerned for the welfare of anyone who'd undergone such an ordeal."

"I know, I know, it's just the principle of the thing!" said Ron, his long arms windmilling as he tried to explain his point with little success. "What if it was Malfoy?" he asked finally.

"Ok, then I might not be so worried," said Harry. A ripple of laughter ran around the group but Hermione was only half-listening to the conversation, her mind still going over the myriad inexplicable ideas that had been occurring to her ever since she had seen the locket hanging around Professor Vector's neck. How had it ended up in her possession anyway? It was a well-known fact that the arithmancy teacher wore a locket inscribed with her initial and a switch would not have been so difficult to engineer, but who would have done such a thing in the first place, and why? Hermione found her thoughts coming back to the same person, but this answer always seemed to have something illogical about it. The most obvious suspect was, of course, Snape, but why would he take such an unmitigated risk? For it was a risk, hiding something in plain sight. However safe a stolen walking stick was amongst other walking sticks, there was always the chance that someone might recognise it as being not quite as it seemed. And where could he have got the locket from in the first place? Would RAB have given it to him, whoever RAB was? Had Snape stolen it? Hermione shook her head as her theories became ever more ludicrous and threatened to overwhelm her capacity for rational thought. Perhaps she was simply using Snape as a handy scapegoat.

"We should probably go," said Ron, looking down the ward at the clean white beds, all unoccupied apart from the curtained off one at the very far end , and the one upon which they sat. "Madame Pomfrey'll probably want to dose us with something if we stay here much longer."

Hermione and Harry agreed and they made to leave the hospital wing. They had barely come through the doors when they had to stand to one side to allow Professor McGonagall and an elderly man to hurry into the ward. Hermione caught a snatch of their conversation as they passed her, and she paused at the slightly open door, hoping to hear more.

"It was her necklace, Brian," Professor McGonagall was explaining. "Her necklace was cursed."

"Necklace?" Mr Vector's voice had sounded surprised… and more than a little guilty. Hermione shook her head once more; it was a mark of the times that she was so paranoid as to believe that Mr Vector had deliberately given his wife a horcrux in a locket, but one could never be too careful.

"Hermione?"

She turned to find Harry and Ron staring at her suspiciously.

"I'll catch you up," she said, waving them away frantically before someone passed the hospital wing and commented on their presence. The two boys left her, neither seeming to be entirely convinced of the sanity of her actions. Hermione smiled wryly, sinking back against the door to allow Professor McGonagall to leave the room without noticing her. She was not entirely convinced of her sanity herself, but she knew that she was not going to rest until she got to the bottom of what had just occurred. To Hermione's logical and scientific mind, it was not enough to simply have destroyed a horcrux and be done with it. She wanted to know how the blasted thing had ended up in the school in the first place. Who knows, she said to herself. It might help them along the way to finding the next one. She inched inside the doors, taking care not to disturb them and cause them to creak. She sat down on the nearest bed and tuned into the conversation, albeit a slightly one-sided one, that was taking place at the other end of the ward.

It was not the first time that Hermione had done something less than morally correct in the quest for knowledge – stealing ingredients for polyjuice potion sprang immediately to mind – but it was the first time that she had felt truly uncomfortable about doing it. Purloining ingredients from Snape was totally different to eavesdropping on a husband's private regret for an event that, had fate been allowed to take its course, would have claimed the life of his wife. Hermione tried to reorder her jumbled thoughts. That made it sound like he was regretting the fact that she was still alive.

"Oh Sep, I'm so sorry," said Mr Vector presently. "It's all my fault. I swear I didn't know. I didn't mean any harm, but I know how much you loved that locket, and you would have killed me if you'd known…"

The tale was becoming stranger and stranger, Hermione thought, and it was in that moment that she decided that the best way to get to the bottom of the mystery was to stop beating about the bush and start asking questions. She slid off the bed and started down the ward.

"Mr Vector," she began, feeling it better to announce herself. The older man gave a startled squeak and peered round from behind Professor Vector's curtains. He was what muggles would call a typical academic: wide and darting eyes blinking at her from behind bottle-end spectacles. His robes were dusty and ink-stained with patched elbows, and he was sporting a truly magnificent grey beard that could have rivalled Professor Dumbledore's. He most certainly did not look to be the sort to dally with danger whilst his wife was away.

"Hello?" he ventured nervously. "Can I help you?"

"Erm, I hope so. My name's Hermione Granger…"

"Ah, you were the one who realised," said Mr Vector. "The headmistress was telling me what had happened." He paused, looking down at his boots for a few moments before finding Hermione's eyes once more. "Thank you," he said, with genuinely heartfelt gratitude. He glanced back at his wife. "I really don't quite know what I'd do without Septima to keep my feet on the ground."

Hermione thought it best to tactfully ignore the last statement and she pressed on with her own line of enquiry.

"Mr Vector…"

"Please, call me Brian, everyone does."

"Alright then, Brian, I'm just curious as to what actually happened. Professor Vector's had that locket for years; how did it come to be cursed?"

A slightly sheepish look came into Brian's eyes, and he glanced around furtively for witnesses before beckoning to Hermione to come closer. She stepped into the curtained-off cubicle and Brian drew up another chair out of thin air with his wand, motioning for her to sit. Hermione complied and after a few moments' pause, he began to speak.

"It's rather a long story, and a little embarrassing," he said. "I'd appreciate it if it doesn't go any further than here."

Hermione nodded her agreement and Brian began his tale fully.

"Septima's always loved that locket; she's had it since she was born, although it's had so many new clasps and chains and magical repairs that it can scarcely be called the same item.

"But that's slightly astray from the point. At any rate, the locket needed a new clasp this summer, and I planned to take it to the jewellers in Diagon Alley and have it fixed in time for Septima's birthday at the end of August. Unfortunately, as you can see, the majority of my pockets are afflicted with holes of varying shapes and sizes, and well, the inevitable happened." Brian broke off and picked at a fraying thread on his cuff. "She kept telling me to get new ones," he murmured mournfully before coming to himself and continuing his story.

"I searched all over for it but the locket was well and truly lost, and I knew that Septima would kill me if she found out. I only had one day before she would miss it, so naturally I was panicking a little.

Hermione hid a smile at this; Brian did not seem to be the sort of man who could panic a little without panicking a lot.

"As luck would have it, there was a hawker nearby selling bits and pieces of antique jewellery, so I went over and took a look. And, as luck would have it, there was a locket that was so similar to Septima's that I almost thought that I'd been pickpocketed. On closer inspection, it was not exactly the same, but the similarities were uncanny, even down to the 'S'. I bought the locket – well, I bought the locket after a bout of awful haggling on my part – and I cast a glamour over it to make it look the same as Septima's. No harm done, or at least I thought not."

He looked down at his unconscious wife and smiled sadly.

"Oh Sep, I never think, do I? You always say so."

He lapsed into silence and Hermione fell to thinking. Brian had been the unwitting cause of the locket entering the castle, but who had that hawker been? In Hermione's mind, there could be no doubting that he was the key to the entire conundrum.

"The only slight hitch was that the new locket wouldn't open," said Brian absently. "No matter how hard I tried. But since Septima has nothing in hers, I didn't think it was all that important."

It was at that moment that a thought struck Hermione with so much force that the blow might have been physical. She was hit suddenly with an image of the summer spent in Grimmauld Place before their fifth year. During their frantic cleaning of the derelict house, they had found a locket that no-one could open. And hadn't they caught Mundungus selling items from number twelve last year?

"Mundungus," she said out loud, causing Brian to regard her with a slightly startled expression.

"Pardon?"

"Was the hawker you nought the necklace from named Mundungus Fletcher by any chance?" Hermione continued eagerly. She was so close to finding the answers that she sought that she could feel herself leaning forward in her chair in anticipation of Brian's answer.

"I have absolutely no idea," the wizard replied faintly.

"Short and squat, slightly bow-legged, untidy hair and terrible fingernails?"

Brian nodded unsurely.

Hermione rejoiced inwardly, the pieces of the puzzle finally falling into place. Now only one problem remained, she thought as she thanked Brian for his time and left him alone with his wife. How had the horcrux ended up in Sirius's house in the first place? It was only once she was halfway to Gryffindor tower that she remembered it. Sirius's brother had been a Death Eater. A short-lived Death Eater. It was always possible that the reason his career in Voldemort's employ had been so short was his discovery of the horcruxes and their turning the direction of his opinions. Hermione stopped in her tracks, turned on her heel and ran towards the library, not stopping until she reached the Wizarding Genealogy section, one of the few parts of the history department that had remained intact. Madame Pince gave her a narrow-eyed look as she shot past the issue desk, but she said nothing to slow her down. Finally, Hermione found what she was looking for. Sirius's younger brother, one Regulus Arcturus Black. RAB.

She sat down on the floor heavily, the book balanced precariously on her lap as the adrenaline that had carried her through the past few hours finally ran out. The truth would have been so comparatively easy to find. They might have found out accidentally at Grimmauld Place had they stayed there any longer. It was strange, to have been so close and yet so far.

Hermione's progress back to the tower was a slow one, her footsteps weighed down with thoughts of what else they might have missed.

"Where've you been?" asked Ron, jumping up from his chair as she entered the common room. "We were about to send out a search party."

"I was talking to Brian Vector," said Hermione. "And then I went to the library."

Ron rolled his eyes and Hermione smacked his shoulder.

"I'll have you know, Ronald, that I found out some extremely interesting things," she said. "I now know, for example, the identity of our mysterious friend RAB."

Ron's jaw dropped open to such an extent that Hermione was worried about the number of airborne insects that might be congregating in there.

"You're joking," he finally managed to say. Hermione shook her head before settling herself in the empty chair beside Ron's and, tactfully editing Brian's story, beginning to tell them what she had learned.

Note2: Hope you enjoyed, and hope you liked Brian. He's slightly based off Brian in New Tricks. Anyway, fancy leaving a review for (very) old times' sakes?