The Purloined Prophetess

XXXIV: Medea

'What does he mean, 'DON'T GO HOME'?' I exclaimed. 'My wife is at home.' In a flash, I was sixteen years old again and staring at the Dark Mark hovering above the only stable home I had ever known.

My fist clenched around my car keys as I lunged for the door. Remus held me back - he was stronger than he looked, but I was heavier, and the next thing I knew, I'd knocked him down and we were engaged in a full-out wrestling match on the floor.

The rat Fred had been levitating fell to the floor with a plop. I looked around and saw that Fred, Tonks and Reg all had their wands pointed straight at me. I froze.

'Will you - listen to reason - Jack,' Remus gasped, 'or do we have to - bind you up - like Mr Nott there?'

'I'll listen,' I said. He picked himself up off the floor and rubbed his jaw where I had hit him, and I felt contrite. 'Sorry about that.'

'Don't mention it. Trust me, you would not find it easy to do me any permanent damage, and you don't have a chance against four of us.' He looked me in the eye and I realised his threat had been serious. 'You're not going anywhere except Grimmauld Place. I don't know what's going on and I'm in no position to make any promises, but I'm certain Alastor will do everything possible to keep your wife safe. I can also virtually guarantee that there is no way you'd be able to help.'

He was right, of course. I shouldn't have come in the first place; I couldn't do a thing except stand back and be protected, placing an additional burden on the others. I swore under my breath. I hate being this powerless.

A second post owl flew into the shop. This one was clutching a longer letter and a packet labelled Pixie-B-Gon, which looked like the same one that had been sitting on my bedroom windowsill for several weeks.

Jack -

I hope Alastor's note didn't scare you too much, he can be a little paranoid sometimes. Your wife is fine. She's here at headquarters. Please use this Portkey to join her. We've just arrested Medea Nott outside your house and we're checking the neighbourhood for other Death Eaters. Everything's under control. You have nothing to worry about.

- Kingsley Shacklebolt

This wasn't precisely as reassuring as Kingsley seemed to think it would be, but it helped a little.

Tonks opened the packet and turned it upside down. A small blue pellet fell out on the counter. 'You'll have to help us transport Nott as well,' she explained. 'Take hold of one of his hands, and make sure you both touch the Portkey at exactly the same time. Got it?'

I nodded, breathing a little easier. At least I was useful for something in their world.

'Then we'll see you at Grimmauld Place.'

Travelling by Portkey was a new and dizzying experience for me. I had the wind knocked out of me as I landed underneath of Jephthah Nott in the front hall. Harriet helped me up, grinning. 'Did you have fun getting here? I think it's the best way to travel ever.' (She also likes roller coasters. I don't.)

I looked around the hall. The others had already Apparated from the shop. An auburn-haired woman in her early thirties was lying on the floor, bound and gagged just like the rat-shop owner. Unlike Jephthah, she was still struggling actively against her bonds, and there was a wild, mad light in her eyes. Kingsley Shacklebolt was standing over her with his wand firmly pointed in her direction. He looked solemn.

'What happened?' I asked.

Kingsley explained, 'Harriet spotted Medea Nott destroying the model of Hogwarts in your garden and guessed who she was from Madame Rosmerta's description. She remembered about the packet of Pixie-B-Gon, Portkeyed herself over here, and told the other members of the Order. Your wife has enormous presence of mind and, if I may say so, extraordinarily good luck. She was very fortunate that Medea didn't see her first - and that you had already told her everything about your work for the Order. That probably saved her life.'

'Medea would have killed her?' I blurted out before I could stop myself.

'I hate to be so blunt about it, but - yes.' said Kingsley. 'I'm not going to undo her gag until we're ready to interrogate her, but if you could have heard her when we arrested her - well. She was only coherent part of the time, but she was definitely in a homicidal frame of mind.'

Mad-Eye Moody had arrived while he was speaking. 'That's putting it mildly, Shacklebolt,' he said. 'The woman's a raving psycho. The good news is that there don't seem to be any more of them involved. It appears that she tailed Larry and Reg to the Evanses' house a few nights ago and decided on her own to attack them.'

'But why would she want to attack us?' I asked. 'What possible threat could we pose to her?'

Kingsley looked at Harriet and me with an odd, troubled expression before he answered. 'The particular form Medea Nott's mania takes is a homicidal obsession with Muggles who are aware that the wizarding world exists and find it ... too attractive. You, I'm afraid, fit that profile exactly. By the way - it's a good thing you built that model. She couldn't resist wrecking it before she went after the people in the house, and that gave your wife time to get away.'

I stared at him, feeling dazed. So many little pieces of luck; so many things that might have gone wrong.

Severus Snape Apparated into the room with his potions kit. 'Get the Veritaserum ready,' ordered Moody.

I glanced over at Remus and saw that he had gone very white. 'All right?' I asked.

He nodded, with visible effort.

I crossed the room to where he was standing. 'No one's going to think any less of you if you take some time out,' I said quietly. 'It's been a long day, and the full moon is less than a week away.'

He shook his head decisively. 'No. It isn't that. I'm fine. Really.'

XXXV: Interrogations

Veritaserum. My stomach lurched, and I bit down on my lower lip, hard. You fool, said a small, mocking voice in the back of my head, what did you think they were going to use? Chocolate syrup?

'Sure you're all right?' whispered Tonks. I felt her hand tighten on my arm.

'Yes. It's just - I really don't like Veritaserum. There's no reason why I would have to be present when you question them, is there?'

'No, of course not.' She didn't ask any questions, but she kept a firm grip on my arm, and Jack was still looking at me with concern. Embarrassed, I muttered that I would explain later.

They questioned me for forty-eight solid hours after Lily and James died. No sleep, no food, the occasional glass of water when I became too hoarse to speak. I suppose it wasn't really the Veritaserum that made those two days into the stuff of my nightmares, it was everything else - the bullying, the way they told me about Sirius and Peter in the most brutal way imaginable, the absolute refusal to believe I wasn't guilty of something. (Fortunately, "Have you ever aided and abetted anybody in becoming an unregistered Animagus?" was not one of the questions they thought to ask.) We wouldn't do that to our prisoners - I hoped - and yet I couldn't face watching it.

Besides, with some people Veritaserum makes every guilty secret and dark thought they've ever had come spilling out, and I wasn't sure I wanted to know everything about our prisoners. I'd begun to have another, horrible suspicion about the content of one of those confessions.

Across the hall, Severus Snape was saying something to Alastor about the correct dosage of Veritaserum for a man of Jephthah Nott's size and weight. Like everyone else in the room, he seemed perfectly calm and collected, but it occurred to me that he was probably the only other person present who had experienced its effects in the immediate, personal way that I had. He wouldn't mind witnessing the Notts' interrogation; he would regard it as a job that had to be done, and done correctly. And I had called him a coward?

I thought back to what he had written about balance and measure, and accepted that there would always be a certain uneasy balance between our personalities.

Severus, our resident crew of Aurors, and the prisoners disappeared into a couple of the upstairs bedrooms for several hours. I tried to distract myself by reading Edgar Allan Poe, while Jack brought Harriet up to speed about the morning's events with many interruptions from Reg. We found a packet of crisps in the kitchen and called it lunch, ignoring Kreacher's offer to hunt down a yeti and fry it up for us. (At the moment, he is hard at work on a manuscript called Gilderoy Lockhart Is Explaining Exotic Cookery, although he hasn't yet been able to find a publisher for Gilderoy Lockhart Is Writing a Guide to Extreme House Cleaning.)

At long last, Tonks came down the stairs. She sat down next to me on the sofa and buried her forehead in her hands. She looked like she'd had a long day. I put an arm around her shoulders and asked what was the matter.

'Veritaserum doesn't work so well on people who are barking mad, that's what's the matter," she said. "Medea has confessed to at least twenty murders already, and some of the people she named as her victims are still alive. We can't get her to keep her mind on this crime long enough to learn anything useful from her. Alastor's still trying, but I don't think we're going to get anywhere.'

Kingsley's words about Medea's obsession with Muggles who were too much in love with our world had triggered something in the back of my mind. I glanced at Jack. If I was not mistaken, the same question was troubling him as well. 'Of the victims who aren't alive,' I said cautiously, 'is there a chance that she really did kill any of them?'

'Yes.' She paused. 'Do you want to know more?'

'No,' I said, feeling once again that I was an unspeakable coward. But, I told myself, even if the woman upstairs was my grandmother's murderer, what difference did it make? What was I supposed to do with that information so many years after the fact?

'Do you want to know, Jack?'

'Yes.' He was very pale, but he looked at her steadily. 'Please.'

'I can't say for certain whether she killed your adopted parents. We may never know that. But I will tell you that she believes she did.'

While he was still taking this in, Kingsley and Severus came out of the other room where they had been interrogating Jephthah Nott. 'Think,' Kingsley was saying urgently. 'You must have made some mistake with the Veritaserum. Did you forget any of the ingredients?'

'I never make mistakes,' said Severus coolly. (I repressed a sudden, juvenile urge to hex him. It didn't help that I knew he was right.)

'Then he must have some way of resisting the potion,' said Kingsley.

'You and your colleagues may brew a version of Veritaserum people can resist. I do not. The man is telling the truth.'

'I don't buy it,' Kingsley insisted. 'How can he not know some of these things?'

'Easily,' said Severus. 'They are Death Eaters. They don't eat together, they don't sit around drinking wine for hours after their meetings, and they don't gossip. They are professionals.'

'Feeling nostalgic for the good old days, are we?' muttered Tonks under her breath.

Harriet and I looked at each other. 'Tea,' we said simultaneously.

Once he had a mug of tea in hand, Kingsley explained in a calmer tone, 'We made good progress with him at first. He confessed at once to being a Death Eater named Jephthah Nott who operates the Happy Hippogriff under a false name. He maintains that his daughter is no longer an active member of the Death Eaters, but she has been helping them ever since Lord Voldemort's return by pumping her brother Theodore for information about Hogwarts, and in turn Jephthah confided in her about his own work.' He took a swallow of tea. 'He adores his daughter, by the way. Kept begging us not to hurt her. I wouldn't put it past him to try to shield her if he's able to resist the potion, but on the other hand, this part of his story is consistent with what we've learned from other sources.'

Harriet's words came back to me: Death Eaters are human, too, aren't they? Life would be so much simpler if they weren't.

Kingsley continued, 'Nott also admitted to passing himself off as Boardman in order to gain access to Larry Lovegood's office and steal the toenail clippings. Finally, he confessed that he persuaded his daughter to impersonate a Ministry employee and detain the real Larry at the Three Broomsticks.'

'What's the problem, then?' asked Tonks. 'It sounds like he's given us more than enough evidence to bring charges.'

'He balked when we came to the actual night of the crime. He insists that he didn't kidnap Sybill - his contact did. And conveniently, he claims not to have the slightest idea who this contact is or where he - or she - took her.'

'Then how did they communicate?' asked Jack.

'He presumes that his contact has a key to the shop, but he claims he doesn't even know that for certain. The contact came in at night and exchanged notes with Nott, and Nott says he left Larry's toenail clippings on the counter for the contact to collect, and agreed to get Larry out of the way on the night in question.' Kingsley shook his head. 'That's the part I think is completely unbelievable. He must have some idea about this person's identity if they worked so closely together. How would he not recognise the handwriting, or the personality?'

'And I consider it absolutely believable,' said Severus smoothly. 'You have studied how these people operate from the outside, but I have lived it. They work in an atmosphere of complete secrecy and distrust.'

'I said you had the wrong man, Moony.' Reg looked at me accusingly. 'You wouldn't listen.'

I would never have expected Reg to agree with Severus about anything, but of course he was a former Death Eater too; I keep forgetting because he has such an unlikely personality for it. If they both found Nott's story plausible, I thought they might have a point. 'All right,' I said. 'I'm listening now. What makes you think he's the wrong man?'

'Because he's not a performer,' said Reg promptly. 'He made about the least convincing singing sensation you can imagine. Nobody but Larry would have bought his Stubby Boardman act for a second, and we don't even know Stubby Boardman. You think he could pass himself off as Larry long enough to get Sybill to leave the tower?'

I suppressed a groan. Leave it to Reg to come up with something like that. Severus, I was pleased to see, looked equally disgusted.

'You might be right,' said Tonks. 'I thought there was something all wrong about him when he came into Larry's office, and we were only in the same room for about a minute.'

I looked to Jack for support. I hadn't realised until that moment how much I had come to count on Jack to be a voice of reason. To my surprise, he said, 'I think Reg's on to something. First of all, getting Sybill's guard out of the way and kidnapping her sounds like a mission for two, and if Medea wasn't officially involved, it stands to reason that the Death Eaters would have put a second person on the job. And secondly, Larry's a pretty colourful character, and he was Sybill's boyfriend. It must have taken some acting ability to pull off an impersonation that would convince her.' He paused for a moment. 'May I ask a question that will probably sound rather stupid?'

'Go ahead,' muttered Severus. 'Nobody else around here seems to wait for permission.'

'This Peter Pettigrew everyone keeps talking about - he isn't the same person as Remus' school friend Peter? The one with the wicked gift for imitations?'