"ᴅᴏ ʏᴏᴜ ꜱᴇᴇ ʏᴏɴᴅᴇʀ ᴄʟᴏᴜᴅ ᴛʜᴀᴛ'ꜱ ᴀʟᴍᴏꜱᴛ ɪɴ ꜱʜᴀᴘᴇ ᴏꜰ ᴀ ᴄᴀᴍᴇʟ?
ʙʏ ᴛʜᴇ ᴍᴀꜱꜱ, ᴀɴᴅ 'ᴛɪꜱ ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴀ ᴄᴀᴍᴇʟ, ɪɴᴅᴇᴇᴅ.
ᴍᴇᴛʜɪɴᴋꜱ ɪᴛ ɪꜱ ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴀ ᴡᴇᴀꜱᴇʟ.
ɪᴛ ɪꜱ ʙᴀᴄᴋᴇᴅ ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴀ ᴡᴇᴀꜱᴇʟ.
ᴏʀ ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴀ ᴡʜᴀʟᴇ?
ᴠᴇʀʏ ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴀ ᴡʜᴀʟᴇ."
― ꜱʜᴀᴋᴇꜱᴘᴇᴀʀᴇ, ʜᴀᴍʟᴇᴛ ɪɪɪ. ɪɪ
Chapter Three: Theory and Practice
The first day of the school year was always a day to be remembered, Harry thought as he ate breakfast in the soon to no longer be nearly empty Great Hall. The Sorting Hat was doing out-of-tune arpeggios to warm up for the song tonight, and Filch was busy shining every mildly reflective surface.
For his part, Harry was taking care of his menagerie du jour: Hedwig, of course, Hephaestus, Ruby's cat, a leftover weasel from the basilisk incident, and whatever grass snake who felt like following him around that day. As long as he convinced them not to kill each other, it tended to go relatively smoothly.
One more animal, he thought, and I'll turn into Hagrid.
Remus Lupin, the librarian, strode into the Great Hall.
He'd been gone for a few days. That'd be the full moon, Harry supposed.
"Hi," he said tightly.
"Hello, Harry," said Lupin, and he sat down heavily opposite him at the Gryffindor table. "Are you excited for term to begin?"
"Sure." Harry shrugged.
"Dumbledore mentioned them to me. Hermione is Muggle-born, isn't she?"
"She's the top of our year."
"Dumbledore told me that, too," said Lupin calmly. "The Defence professor will be arriving soon, ahead of the train. I was told to bring you."
Who will it be? Harry wondered. Who's crazy enough to take the Defence position this time? If the last two are anything to go on, it'll be another fame-obsessed murderer.
Nonplussed, he stood up and followed Lupin out of the Great Hall and into Hogwarts's grand entrance hall, where he had stood, apprehensive and awed, as a first-year, completely unaware of what horrors awaited him inside the castle.
The Heads of House were already outside, in a neat line; Professor Flitwick in smart tweed robes and sporting a pointy Dali moustache, Professor McGonagall stern and austere, with a pristine black witch's hat perched on her head, Professor Sprout smiling pleasantly, her beige robes streaked with dirt stains from the greenhouses and her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and last of all, Professor Snape.
"Good mornings" were exchanged. Snape and Lupin exchanged a look; or rather, Snape gave Lupin a piercing glance, and the latter avoided it.
Harry wondered where Professor Dumbledore was. Perhaps he was busy, or he didn't think highly enough of the new professor to be here.
The sound of hooves clip-clopping caught his attention, and he turned towards it. Professor Snape went to the Thestral-drawn carriage, and extended his hand to its occupant.
Who might it be? Harry strained to see, but Lupin had moved in front of him, and it was no use trying to see over the top of his head; he was far too tall.
"Welcome to Hogwarts, Professor," Snape was saying, in a sardonic tone. "We are overjoyed to have you here."
"Yes, yes, Professor," came a woman's soft, breathy voice. It sounded as if she were looking around for something. "I had been expecting to be greeted by Professor Dumbledore."
Harry began inching around an oblivious Lupin, only vaguely noticing that the man looked shocked.
"It is the first day of term, nothing more. Professor Dumbledore trusts that you can find your way to your quarters without incident. The others have managed as much."
McGonagall pulled a face. That might have been too far.
"Too busy, you say, Professor Snape, for the―"
Harry finally managed to squeeze past Lupin, and locked eyes with the new professor.
"―Senior Undersecretary to the Minister!"
The Senior Undersecretary to the Minister reminded Harry of a large, pale toad, from the black velvet bow perched like a fly on her head, to her wide and wrinkled mouth, clumsily-painted with lipstick. She wore a pink tweed dress, and over it a fuzzy cardigan that Ruby might have liked when she was three years old, and matching kitten heels.
He looked up, and saw that Lupin's jaw seemed to have unhinged from its joint.
Maybe he didn't know, after all. I must have misjudged him.
"May I take your bags, Professor Umbridge?"
Snape looked as if he wanted the ground to come up and swallow him.
Umbridge smiled. "Certainly. Thank you, Professor Snape."
She was coming towards him. Harry started to back away.
"Hello, Professor Umbridge," Lupin was saying as he extended a hand towards her. "My name is Remus Lupin, I'm the new librarian―"
But Umbridge took in Lupin's scarred, shabby appearance with an air of disgust, and ignored him completely.
"Mr. Potter," she said, with a triumphant look on her face.
Harry's stomach sunk to his feet.
"Hello, Professor," he said weakly. "Welcome to Hogwarts."
Umbridge reached out to pinch his cheek ― hard. She smelled like the kind of horrible, mumsy floral perfume that Aunt Petunia would wear.
"Thank you, Harry."
He was going to hate her. He didn't quite know why, not yet, but the hate was solid in his stomach, and the Obscurus agreed with him.
"Professor Umbridge, if you'll follow me inside?" called Snape over his shoulder, sounding peeved.
Umbridge gave Harry one last look before hurrying after Professor Snape, and he sagged with relief.
He'd better keep his Obscurus on a tight leash. Prove he was in control.
"What does the Ministry want with me?"
"It might not be about you, Mr. Potter," said Professor McGonagall in a clipped tone, as she turned to leave with the other professors.
"With all due respect, Professor McGonagall," said Lupin, "it might be primarily about Harry."
"About Harry and Professor Dumbledore," he amended.
"Then why would Professor Dumbledore let her come here?" asked Harry.
Lupin shrugged. "To do anything but is to declare war against the Ministry. And we cannot fight a war on multiple fronts. Not when one of those fronts is Voldemort. We must accept their attempt at interference. With any luck, she won't last the year."
"You say his name." Harry realised that Lupin had said it before, but it was the first time that it had registered.
He's seen everyone die and get tortured, and he still says his name.
"Why shouldn't I? As Dumbledore says, fear of the name only increases fear of thing itself." He lowered his voice to a whisper. "I refuse to contribute in any way to that twisted creature's cult of personality."
Grudgingly, Harry felt his respect for Lupin increase.
"Did you ever fight Voldemort... with my parents?"
Lupin shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and exhaled.
"Yes, Harry. I did meet him once, and survived to tell the tale. In fact, your parents fought him three times and managed to escape with their lives; a feat not many could hope to achieve. Alice and Frank ― Dumbledore told me their son's in your year ― they fought him too."
Is that you got your scar? he wanted to ask. But people usually didn't like to think about how they got their scars. Harry knew that well.
He was silent for a while, thinking of what Quirrell had told him about betrayal.
"Did you think you could have trusted them, before it all happened ― Sirius and Peter?"
Lupin tilted his head up, as if trying to collect himself.
"I-I thought I could. I would have trusted them all with my life, Harry. But Sirius got all paranoid, once Voldemort marked your parents as targets. He said I couldn't be trusted, that Voldemort was in my ear because he knew about my affliction, that I was a spy feeding information about them to the other side..."
"And you weren't?" he asked, maybe a little harshly.
"Of course I wasn't! We fell out. Sirius and I. We were twenty-one and stupid, not that it was any excuse. But it all made sense in the end." Lupin shook his head. "Sirius wanted them to be isolated, so no one would be there to protect Lily and James once he sold them out."
"But how do you know it was him?"
Lupin's expression was very intense, as he finally made eye contact with Harry.
"He was their Secret-Keeper, Harry! Their hiding-place was embedded in his very soul, and not even Voldemort could remove it by force. Him and Peter, they were clearly working together. Maybe Peter turned Sirius; he always had a charming, slippery way about him that I never quite understood. Sirius was too brash for Voldemort to choose him as a spy. All I know, is that the Secret-Keeper was Sirius, both of them were unaccounted for, and I was transformed that night. Ruby's survival didn't matter to Voldemort, and nor did mine. He'd probably make us into some sort of example, if it all went his way that night. Clearly, our friends didn't plan for the contingency that his plan failed."
"Why wouldn't they?"
"There's something that I think you already understand about Voldemort, Harry. You don't go up against him with the incident to defeat him. You escape with your life, particularly if he finds you interesting enough to toy with you, or you die."
Harry thought of Voldemort-Quirrell ("I've been waiting a long time for you, Harry"), kicking the Sword of Gryffindor out of his reach.
He shut his eyes.
"It would have been a favourable outcome... Killing you. But I saw that it was quickly becoming intractable."
"No, foolish boy. I am Lord Voldemort. You know it to be true."
What if one of them betrays me?
But that was a morbid thought, to consider all the ways the people he knew and loved might turn evil.
Harry lingered outside the Great Hall as the carriages neared the entrance hall, fiddling with the ends of his sleeves.
I don't know why I'm so nervous. Nothing's changed. It's the same as first year and second year.
"Isn't it?" he asked, aloud, and then his heart sank when he realised why he had even spoken and why no one answered.
The sounds of hundreds of feet resounded through the hallway, and he straightened up, trying to compose himself.
Ron was the easiest to spot due to his conspicuous hair, and Harry elbowed his way through the crowd towards him.
"How've you been?" shouted Ron, even though they were standing right next to each other, it was nigh impossible to be heard over the crowd.
"Fine!" Harry shouted back. "Fine, really! What about you?"
"Summer holidays were decent. We went to Egypt, did I tell you that? When Bill was impersonating you-know-who, he invited us down as well."
Harry had noticed that he looked slightly sunburnt, especially on the tip of his nose.
"But we're third years now," Ron went on excitedly. "Got our Hogsmeade passes and everything."
Hogsmeade passes. Harry vaguely remembered some slip of paper being given to him over the summer.
"Is it supposed to be good, then?"
"Is Hogsmeade good? It's got all the best shops, and―"
"Didn't realise you were so passionate about shopping, Ron," said Harry wryly. "Maybe you and Lavender could share notes on all the best shops."
Ron went nearly as red as his hair.
"That's not what I meant!"
For the first time in a while, a completely un-forced laugh escaped Harry, and he realised just how stir-crazy he'd been, holed up alone in the castle with no one for company.
"Come on, then. Stop moaning and let's go find the others."
Most of the crowd had dispersed by now, and now Harry could clearly see them; Hermione, her unmistakable bushy hair piled on top of her head and her copy of Hogwarts: A History tucked under her arm, and a boy who Harry barely recognised as Anthony. He had gone from being slightly stocky to looking like someone had stretched him on a medieval torture rack, his hair was several shades darker, and he was sporting a fresh set of adolescent pimples.
Most noticeable of all, though, Harry realised as they drew closer and Anthony rolled up the sleeves of his robes as he reached out to pet the enormous lion-cat-thing Hermione was cradling like her firstborn child, was his wand arm, which was no longer flesh, but made out of bronze.
Hermione's face lit up when she saw him, and she foisted the enormous cat off on Anthony, then hurried towards Harry to give him one of her bone-crushing hugs.
"Oh, it's so good to see you again," she enthused. "Come see Crooks! I saw him in the shop window in Diagon Alley when I was getting things for school and I just had to adopt him ― doesn't he have the cutest squashy little face?"
Cute and little were two adjectives Harry would never use to describe that cat. 'Crooks' was very large, bandy-legged, and ginger. He did indeed have a squashy face; in fact, Harry thought he looked as if he had run headlong into the wall.
"Crookshanks," cooed Hermione, as she took him from a bemused Anthony. "Crookshanks."
"You named it Crookshanks?" asked Ron, aghast, as Anthony gave them a short wave before going into the Great Hall.
"Oh, be quiet, Ron," said Hermione, gathering her awful cat into her arms, giving him one big kiss on the head, and then gently setting him down.
Harry bit his tongue to prevent himself from telling Hermione that Crookshanks was the ugliest cat he had seen in his life (and Mrs. Figgs had some truly shocking specimens).
The Great Hall had come alive as they snuck in halfway through the Sorting, buzzing with voices and lit by thousands of hovering candles.
And one not-very dead basilisk, thought Harry.
"Hi, Harry," whispered Lavender Brown, who was uncomfortably sandwiched between Ginny Weasley and Parvati Patil. He thought he saw her looking behind him for Ruby, her face falling when she didn't see her.
"Hi, Lavender," he muttered back. "Parvati, Ginny."
Parvati waved, and Ginny snapped around so quickly that Harry feared she would upset the whole table. She cleared her throat, and offered a short "Hi."
"Ginny's trying out for reserves on the Quidditch team," said Ron, as they sat down on the other side.
"Oh." Harry tried to think of something encouraging to say. "I bet she'll be really good. Especially since Mafalda's been teaching her."
Ron made a funny sort of noise.
"Quiet, you two!" hissed Hermione. "Dumbledore's about to speak!"
Indeed he was. Harry watched him rise slowly, garbed in lavender robes set off by a starry pattern, and look out over the mass of students, lingering on the nervous, trembling first-years. Lupin caught Harry's eye, and nodded.
Hermione tapped him on the shoulder.
"Who's that?"
"New librarian."
"Oh. Who's Defence, then?"
"You'll find out," said Harry dryly. "Trust me, it's a surprise you won't want ruined, for full effect."
Hermione drew back, frowning.
"Good evening," Dumbledore said, and the room went dead silent. "I know you have made a long journey, and there is much on your mind, so I will not keep you for long. I extend this especially to the first years, who must navigate a new life and the seventh years, who must plan to leave this pocket of dis-reality and emerge in to a world more violent and feral than it was when you left it. I say this not to dishearten you, but to prepare you for the realities of the journey ahead. They may be harsh, but we will persevere. We are with you, and we will not―"
The most awful, affected cough Harry had ever heard resounded through the silent hall. Everyone was looking around to find out who dared to interrupt Dumbledore.
Snape was halfway out of his chair, and McGonagall had actually gotten to her feet as Umbridge made her way up to the front.
"Hem, hem."
It was impossible for any another two syllables to pierce his soul with such anguish.
All around them, the students began to whisper.
"Her?" Ron managed to stammer. "Not her?"
It had been a month since Aberdeen, she reflected.
Four months since Hogwarts. Ten days since Edinburgh.
"We need to go through Yorkshire," said Tee.
"Obviously we need to go through Yorkshire. It only takes up half the map. We've got to go through Yorkshire, we've got no choice."
"You don't need to rub it in, Potter," he snapped, snatching the map from her and tilting it towards the weak light of the fire.
When was their extending camping experience coming to an end? Ruby daydreamed (and sometimes really dreamt) about the warm, soft, clean beds at Hogwarts, with all the pillows and comforters and curtains.
Ah, Tee had said once they left civilization a third time. So this is the countryside. Nice of the Romans to cut straight roads for us.
They rarely followed any kind of path.
At least it wasn't so cold anymore. She'd been loath to tear herself away from Edinburgh, though. Everything had been not quite so real there. It was definitely big enough to disappear, and perhaps subconsciously, she knew leaving Scotland was leaving Harry, and returning to England, where bad things like the Dursleys had happened.
"We're about fifteen miles to the Yorkshire border," said Tee, squinting at the map.
"Brillllllant."
"We can stop in Greater Hangleton. It's the closest village."
"Mmm," said Ruby, chewing on the end of a dandelion.
"Hey, stop that!"
Tee looked up. "What?"
"Whatever you're doing. That weird poke-y feeling in my head. I can tell it's you."
"Can you really?" he asked, leaning forward and folding the map. "How fascinating."
Fascinating. Ruby was quickly beginning to learn that fascination was a gateway drug for Tee of the most dangerous kind. Like when his fascination with some vintage bomb shell from World War II began to attract questions he couldn't answer.
His approach to magic was terrifyingly haphazard, too. Ruby hadn't bothered with her wand to avoid detection since they'd left, but Tee, being fifty years removed from this time, would no longer be shackled by the Trace.
Or, it seemed, all rule and order.
He would string words from different languages together, sometimes speaking so softly and quickly that she would only see his lips moving and hear nothing, and then he would look pleased when the intended result inevitably happened.
For her part, she'd been using Lavender's meditation techniques (from "Volume I: Scrying in the Spirit Vision", by Aurora Aureus) to try and scry things before she went to sleep, usually Harry and Hogwarts. Ruby had found that using her fire-marble as her medium, which was close enough to a lump of glowing coal (anthracomancy) seemed to yield the best results. Sometimes she could catch glimpses of the turrets of the castle; or see flickers that looked like Harry.
Very, very occasionally, she tried to scry Voldemort, if only to check that nothing catastrophic had happened. It never worked, possibly because she'd never seen him before, only heard Harry describe him. All that would stare back at her was Tee from across the fire, his reflection stretched across the glass surface of the glowing marble.
Last of all, she tried to scry Tee's cave, or, at least, what she thought Tee's cave would look like. Unsurprisingly, it never worked.
"It's morning," said Tee. As usual, he paused, as if expecting her to extrapolate something from that fact which he would later call obvious.
"We can do twenty miles today."
"What do you want with Greater Hangleton, anyway?" asked Ruby, pocketing the marble. He'd been indifferent to every other populated area they'd been through.
"Nothing," said Tee in a disaffected tone. "I just happen to like the sound of the name."
"Well, don't get too excited. It's probably got five houses, ten trees, a chemist's, a school, and a pub, like all the other little villages we've been through. Maybe a creepy old stately home and a couple sheep if we're lucky."
But Tee was already scrambling to his feet and adjusting his cloak around his shoulders. Scowling, Ruby followed him down the crest of the small hill they'd slept on that night.
Unlike him, she'd abandoned her Hogwarts uniform entirely, choosing instead to wear simple, practical Muggle clothes that they'd 'borrowed' several towns back; denim overalls, a warm jumper, and sensible shoes.
Ruby supposed his uniform was the only thing he had left of his past self. He didn't even have his first name.
Eight sweaty, windy hours later, dark had fallen, and they'd passed a dingy little wooden sign (very J.R.R. Tolkien, Ruby thought) marked 'Entering Richmondshire. Two miles, Greater Hangleton. Seven miles, Little Hangleton.'
"What do they need two Hangletons for?" asked Tee, glowering at the sign in the dim light of his wand.
Ruby shrugged. "Hey, what have a raven and a writing desk got in common?"
He ignored her.
"I- I'm having an odd feeling."
"You're always having all sorts of odd feelings," said Ruby, with a haughty air. "Yesterday, you had the feeling that―"
"Shh!" said Tee harshly, and his wandlight blinked out. "What was that?"
"What?"
"That!"
There was a rustling sort of sound behind her, and she turned towards it.
A large, heavyset roebuck gazed out at them from between the trees, his large, dark eyes silent and inviting, and all of a sudden, wide with fright.
Then, the stag turned and bounded off.
"What's wrong with him?" asked Ruby.
"Nothing, probably." Tee clicked his tongue.
"I think we should follow him."
"I see. Now you've got the feeling, it's worth listening to."
"It's not a feeling!" Ruby wanted to stamp her foot, but that would be childish. "If that giant stag got spooked by something, I don't want to be around to see it, too. Are you mental?"
"But Greater Hangleton's that way!" Tee thrust an arm out, pointing at the worn wooden sign.
"Sod Greater Hangleton!" she screeched.
She began to do what she imagined was striding off in a dignified huff, but probably wasn't. The snapping of branches behind her told her that Tee was following her, and she picked up the pace, hurrying after the stag, who had taken a few bounding steps into the darkness and disappeared from sight, leaving only his tracks in the soft ground as a guide.
All of a sudden, a sound went up that made her spine ice-cold.
And again.
A mournful, cacophonous set of howls went up, followed by the gnashing of sharp teeth and the beats of many heavy feet on the damp ground.
Werewolves, a little voice told her. But the moon was new and the night was dark and still.
Another sign rose up out of the darkness as they stumbled through the underbrush, this one saying: Five miles, Little Hangleton.
Well, thought Ruby just as she got smacked in the face by a giant, wet branch, I suppose any inhabited area will do.
The terror-inducing sounds receded and the village began to rise up out of the darkness, shadowy and small, nestled in the valley between two steep hills, the westernmost of which they were currently stumbling down. On the eastern hill, Ruby could see what looked like the silhouette of the sprawling stone grandeur of an old manor house, in the dim dawn light beginning to stain the sky deep violet.
"Looks like five houses, ten trees, a chemist's, a school, and a pub," said Ruby, brushing the dirt off of her trousers. "A graveyard, too."
Tee made a face. "Greater Hangleton might have had fifty houses."
"Did you hear those things?"
He held up Lockhart's wand, as if to make some kind of point that whatever they were, he could apparently fight them off singlehandedly.
"We don't even know what they were," Ruby protested, but Tee was already scowling as he walked past her, his longer strides near-impossible to keep up with.
By the time that they made it into the village, Ruby would have guessed it was six or seven in the morning. It was near-silent; an uninteresting collection of houses and small shops. The garage seemed to be open, and a grimy-looking pub called The Hanged Man.
Tee had taken his cloak off and folded it over his arm so that it could pass for a coat. But nothing, Ruby supposed, but an adult travelling with them, could make them pass for anything else but runaway kids, especially outside of big cities, where no one paid attention anyway. Which they were, as a matter of complete and unquestionable fact.
Nevertheless, Tee shoved the door open, and she followed him inside, working her fingers through the knots in her hair as if that would make it any less tangled.
The early morning light streamed through the slightly-dirty windows, and the wooden stools were still flipped up on top of the table.
A wizened old man wearing a faded Leeds United jersey, who looked almost as old as Dumbledore, looked up from polishing the counter, and gruffly barked:
" 'Ang on, you two! Out! We don't open 'til eight!" With that, he jabbed a finger at the 'CLOSED' sign hanging on a hook on the door.
"The door was open," said Tee in a monotone voice. "We just want to sit down for a bit."
The landlord frowned, and opened his mouth to speak, but a warm, creaky voice emanating from a bundle of colourful scarves in the corner interrupted.
"Oh, leave it be, Tom. They're only bairns."
"Only bairns, Maggie? Like the Peebles and the Thomases, running up to the Riddle House like a couple of banshees and screaming about it in my pub? Back in my day, only bairns had respect for their elders!"
The Riddle House? thought Ruby. That must be the big manor house on the east hill. But... T. M. Riddle... could it be?
Tee exchanged a look with her; clearly, he was thinking the same thing.
Maggie emerged from her bundle of scarves, a face just as wizened as Tom's peeking out at them.
"Come here," she beckoned, "and Tom'll make you both a cuppa."
Tee went first, in a way that reminded her of a kitten trotting after its mother, walking up to the table in the corner and drawing up a seat, Ruby following after. There was something odd about this old woman, something distinctly witchy. Was she a Squib, perhaps?
And though she knew Muggles could be into that sort of thing, the last thing they needed right now was to run into a real witch or wizard.
"Let me have a look at you, dear," said Maggie, and before Tee could react, she had grasped his face between her bird-like hands, tilting it this way and that as if trying to see something.
As if she's trying to scry, thought Ruby, but then she remembered that people could concentrate on a number of things other than the murky future and she was just being paranoid.
After about a minute, Maggie sighed and let go of a relieved-looking Tee and turned to Tom.
"In't he the spitting image of the Riddles, Tom? Funny, eh?"
Tee's eyebrows nearly shot up to his hairline.
"Oh aye?" asked Tom, without looking up from scrubbing at the countertop. "There's nowt s'queer as folk, Margaret."
"Didn't know they had family in London, didja, Tom?" She turned to Tee. "Back here after all these years, eh? Bet you know all about the mystery?"
"How'd you know I was from London?"
"What mystery?"
"Your accent," said Maggie, with a wink. "Dead giveway. And," here she turned to Ruby, "how all the Riddles got murdered, of course. Must be fifty years ago, now."
Tee appeared to be busy mulling the first part over. Ruby, however, was concerned with the second thing Maggie had said.
"Murdered?"
"All three of them, dead in t' drawing-room with not a mark on their bodies and horrified looks on their faces. No poison to be found, either. We all knew the gardener did them in, at least we thought he'd done it, but there wasn't any evidence. Sounds like Cluedo, doesn't it? Who killed Dr. Black? Was it Miss Scarlett in the conservatory with the wrench, or the gardener in the drawing room with the poison?"
Ruby, unable to think of how to respond, said, thinking of Tee, "Yeah. Fascinating."
Maggie threw her head back and laughed, a long, cackling witch-like laugh.
An old man in a rainmac who Ruby hadn't noticed was nursing a pint and steadily glaring at Tee.
Ruby knew the answer to that cold case in one word. Magic. There was magic here, in Little Hangleton, or at least there had been.
And she'd seen the awful cluster of cursed scars on Tee's arm, the one he tried to hide ― mudblood scum.
The diary... the diary was purchased in Muggle London, because Tee's Muggle-born. These Riddles must be his family. What happened to them? Did Grindelwald kill them because they had a wizard kid? Try to get to Tee through them? But why would Tee be so important in all this?
Who are the Riddles? If they're a family of Squibs descended from Slytherin, or, better yet, secret wizards, there's got to be evidence.
One thing was for absolute certain; they needed to get into the Riddle House, if she wanted to have any kind of idea what kind of a mess she'd gotten herself into with the Heir of Slytherin.