Pettigrew's Daughter

'If I'm lucky," Professor McGonagall thought, 'I'll catch her while she's still at breakfast.' She hastened, nearly running, down to the dining hall. She didn't realise, until she got there and everybody stared, that she hadn't done her hair. Eyes swivelled towards her from almost every angle but nobody said anything. Nobody laughed. 'Damn,' she thought, as she felt the knotted mess about her face. 'How is it that I manage to get dressed, write an owl for Iris, brush my teeth and still forget to do my hair? It's pathetic. Still, it's too late to fix it now. Everybody's seen me. Besides, I have to find to find Poppy, quickly.'

"Good morning school," the Professor said with a weak smile. Her eyes flicked across the staff table. Professor Dumbledore smiled slightly while the others gave expressions ranging from complete mirth to disdain. Madam Poppy Pomfrey was not there. 'I could have saved myself the embarrassment and gone straight to the Hospital Wing,' she thought, figuratively kicking herself. 'What am I going to do now?'

As graciously as she could through gritted teeth, she said, "Good morning school... again. I'm looking for Madam Pomfrey, but she appears not to be here. I think I'll try the Hospital Wing." She walked slowly until she was out of view, then transformed into a cat and bounded off to the Hospital Wing. She could hear the chatter and laughter behind her.

**

It had been a long night for Timothy Abberline, Private Crime Consultant. He'd been woken at 04:00 by the tap of a beak on his window. It was a Ministry of Magic Owl, bearing a letter:

Dear Mr Abberline,

You have been hired to consult on a murder case in a Muggle area.

The Ministry of Magic has reason to believe that this is a magical

crime, the victim being a Witch turned Muggle that lived alone.

The following documents must be handed to the Muggles that are

processing the crime scene. The story is that you and the other

Ministry of Magic men involved are government specialists on gas

explosions - the GSG division. Never mind that the Witch's house

is not equipped with gas.

The Ministry is very busy at present and does not have the

resources to carry out a full investigation, therefore a lot of the work

will have to be done by you alone. The officers we have sent in their

official capacity to process the crime scene will not be with you the

entire time as they have other commitments. Therefore it is imperative

that your work is as precise as possible. We wish to utilise your

expertise both in Muggle artefacts and paraphernalia and in

the analysis of motive. We expect your work to be of the highest

calibre.

You will be paid according to your usual salary. If you perform

well we may consider reinstatement.

Signed:

Griggory Smales

Secretary

Ministry of Magic, Crime Division

Abberline had groaned. He hated dealing with the muggle police. But there was no helping it. After all, he was getting a good salary for what he did. He had quickly dressed in the GSG uniform that Griggory Smales had sent him. Then he had shaved and brushed his pale hair off his face. He didn't have time for breakfast, but chucked an apple along with a thermos full of perpetually hot coffee (a present from his ex-girlfriend, Tabitha) into his briefcase.

On apparition at the address marked on his papers, Timothy Abberline had met with the muggle inspector in charge of the case. He was a red-faced man with a body that wobbled from an excessive combination of fat, sweets and alcohol and pale blue eyes that bulged from his face like a fish. It had taken Timothy and the other Ministry men three hours to get their information processed by the muggle police. By the end of that time they had managed to remove all muggles from the crime scene and alter their memories sufficiently to the view that this was an unfortunate gas explosion that had killed one woman. Bob Stuart, one of the Ministry men dealing with the muggle witnesses, had reported that nobody had seen anything until the house exploded.

Timothy now stared at the gaping hollow rimmed with splinters that had once been a house. The south wall had been ripped apart by an explosion, leaving debris all over the lawn, the pavement and the road. In this debris lay the body of the murder victim, now being examined by Dr Pruenella Watson.

'Whoever did this,' Timothy thought as he approached Dr Watson, 'Must have wanted someone to know that he'd killed this woman. She lived alone, he could easily have left the body in there for weeks and nobody would even notice. He could have made it look like suicide, perhaps. So why kill her like this? What is the message and to whom is it directed?'

"Is this all that's left?" Timothy Abberline asked, gulping back a rush of vomit. He felt glad that he hadn't eaten breakfast.

Dr Watson, a tall, chubby woman with pure white hair, shook her head, "The legs are located inside and there is a trail of viscera pieces and bone fragments between here and there."

Abberline stared down at the victim's head. The face had suffered little to no damage besides being splattered with filth. 'She wasn't young,' he thought, 'but probably not that old either. Late thirties, early forties,' he estimated. Her hair was a mixture of grey and dark brown and had been burnt in places so that it hung, ragged, about her head. Her open eyes were bright blue, surrounded by the beginning of crow's feet and creases between her brows. The head was attached to a tattered banner of skin and exposed bones. Timothy choked down another wave of nausea. "So what can you tell me so far about what happened to her?"

"This is off the record," the doctor said. "I can't really make too many judgements until I examine her properly. What I can tell you is that she was fully clothed when it happened, because if she wasn't we'd see greater blistering on the surviving skin from the contact of the curse. For example, this area around her shoulders is practically un-blemished," she pointed to the skin with a white gloved hand. "Death was probably instantaneous and would have coincided with the explosion that destroyed her house."

"Have you ever seen anything like this before?" Timothy asked.

"The most recent one I've seen would be the murder of Peter Pettigrew, more than a decade ago," Dr Watson replied. "I dare say you didn't work on that crime scene."

"No," Timothy said. "I was still in school, my first year at Hogwarts."

"But this one is different, of course," Watson said. "With Pettigrew, the only body part that was not totally obliterated was his finger." She stared at Timothy for a moment, then whispered, "May he rest in peace."

"So why did parts of this woman's body survive?" Timothy queried.

"There are many variables to control. No two murders with the same curse give identical results. For example, angle of the wand, distance of the wand from the body, height of the wand in relation to the body, type of wand used, etcetera all effect the result. The wand that Sirius Black held when he killed Pettigrew, must have been further away from the victim than the wand held by whoever killed this woman. I believe that whoever killed this woman had the wand touching her flesh when he killed her, the resulting explosion creating a hole in the abdomen region and enough energy to blow her head clean from her body, leaving the legs standing where she was killed," Dr Watson's voice cracked. "A horrible way to die. Have they finished photographing her yet?"

Timothy looked around for the photographer, who nodded, "I think so. Do you want to move her now?"

"Yes," Pruenella said. "The longer we leave her here, the longer she is exposed to the elements producing stiffening-"

"Yeah," Timothy said, plugging his nose with his hand as Pruenella rolled the head onto its side, producing the distinct smell of burning flesh.

Pruenella ignored him, combing the hair away from the victim's ear with gloved hands. "See this," she prodded at a sticky mess of dark blood in the hole above the ear lobe.

Timothy Abberline shivered. "Mmmhmm," he replied, covering his mouth with his other hand.

"The tympanum - that's the ear drum, was burst."

"He stuck something in her ear!" Abberline exclaimed, his inclination to vomit suddenly replaced by disbelief.

"No," Dr Watson said, roughly. "It means that whatever curse that was used to kill her gave off enough energy, probably as sound, to vibrate the bones in the inner ear so much that both they and the eardrum were broken." She eased the head back down so that the face was orientated upward. "You don't look so good, Timothy, perhaps you'd better go and sit down."

Timothy brushed his fair hair off his whitened face. "I'm all right," he grimaced.

Pruenella smiled wickedly, "Of course you are. Does this mean that you're back working for the Ministry of Magic?"

"No," Timothy replied. "I'm just filling in. They're very busy at the moment."

"Yes, we are," Pruenella Watson acknowledged, as her assistants began to assemble the tattered, blackened remains on a stretcher. "I expect we will continue to be so for quite some time," she paused for a moment, then asked, "By the way, what was the victim's name?"

Abberline flicked through his papers, searching for the name. "McGonagall. Iris McGonagall." A flash of memory struck him. He'd heard the name before.

"What's the matter?" Pruenella asked.

"This woman has a daughter with the last name of Pettigrew." Even now, he remembered the girl. He'd been hired, by a branch of the Malfoy family, to investigate claims that the girl had been delving into illegal magic, causing extreme distress to the boy, Quintus Malfoy. The fact that Quintus was a bully, a cheat and generally unsavoury did not matter. According to reports that the teachers at Storax had provided, the girl was not much better. She was 'consistently rude, disruptive, arrogant and destructive' and 'showed no respect toward other people or their property.' Despite this discouragement, Abberline had decided to meet with her. He had found her, to be blunt, brilliant.

The Pettigrew girl had had big brown eyes that flashed with life. Standing beside her, Abberline had felt dead in comparison. She was only a third or fourth year (he couldn't remember which), but when talking with her he had felt as though he were talking to someone much older: she had seemed to know so much. At times it even seemed that she was interrogating him, not the other way around. Her speech had seemed very open, but he sensed that she was only showing a mask of who or what she really was. When he had asked her about the Malfoy boy she had admitted, freely, that she had done it. "Thirteen people saw me do it," she had said. "Why would I deny it?" She had laughed when he'd asked her why, but wouldn't say a thing. Despite using almost every interrogation technique that he had learnt, she would not budge. In the end he had asked her about her family. She had said, "My mother's name is Iris McGonagall. She was one of the best duellists in the United Kingdom."

"Was?" Abberline had asked, wondering if her mother was also dead like her father, "Is she dead?"

The girl had laughed, "No, not yet."

Those words came back to Timothy Abberline now as he stared at the ripped corpse at his feet. Iris McGonagall gazed back at him with a frozen expression of her last agonising seconds. 'Would a daughter really kill her own mother?' he asked himself. 'Or was it Black, getting revenge on the Pettigrew family? If so, for what?' Then he remembered the girl and saw a link. He still had the file, with her photograph, in his office. He'd have to compare it to one of Black.

"Mr Abberline- Sir-" it was one of the Ministry men, known as a 'junior' although he was of a similar age to Timothy.

"What?" Abberline snapped, the calculations in his mind interrupted.

"You should probably take a look at the inside of the house."

***

An examination of the bathroom thrust forth the answer to one of Timothy's questions: Why had McGonagall been awake and fully dressed at 03:52 (the time of the explosion)? She was an insomniac. He found several packets of sleeping pills prescribed by the woman's doctor, along with a half-filled brown bottle that smelled strongly of herbs. Abberline was never particularly good at Herbology and could not distinguish the scent. He gave it to one of the Ministry drones to have analysed and sourced.

The intact part of the kitchen rendered more questions than answers. To Abberline, it appeared to contain and awful lot of food in the cupboards and empty packets and tins in the rubbish for a woman that lived alone for most of the year. She was not a particularly big woman and it seemed unlikely that she had eaten it all. So who had she fed it to? The neighbours had seen no-one come or go. 'But they wouldn't, would they?' Timothy thought. 'It would be easy enough to use some sort of cloaking charm, apparate inside the house or use floo powder.' The only trace of animals that he found was the scratches from some sort of rodent at the base of the door. It seemed unlikely that anyone would be feeding a rat two jars of raspberry jam, seventeen cans of miscellaneous food, the carcasses of three chickens and numerous other biscuits and food bars. 'So who has she been feeding? It has to be more than one person,' Abberline wondered. 'How are we going to prove anyone was here at all?'

It was now nearing 11:00. Someone would have to inform next-of-kin. Someone would have to check the woman's bank accounts. Someone would have to be present at the post-mortem examination. Someone would have to guard the property to deter vandals. Someone would have to get the results of the samples. Someone would have to talk to the curse specialist. Abberline would have to organise all this.

***

"When will she wake up?" McGonagall asked Pomfrey. It had taken a variety of different spells to conduct Morgiana to the hospital wing without being noticed by the students, very difficult, but they had managed it. They felt both exhausted and satisfied that they had done the job.

Madam Pomfrey adjusted her nurse's cap and surveyed the figure on the bed. Morgiana lay on her back in an unmoving sleep. Her dark hair bushed about her pale face. The girl looked cold. Madam Pomfrey pulled the blankets up over the gaunt white shoulders before replying, "I don't know. We'll just have to let her let it off," she took a deep breath. "Really, Minerva, you should have contacted me as soon as you found her, instead of medicating her yourself-!"

Minerva was in no mood for a fight; she was tired and she already knew that the whole debacle was her fault. "I know," she interrupted in a quiet voice. "Believe me, it won't happen again." She felt like one of her students, not a teacher, not head of Gryffindor House. She felt ashamed in her own actions for the first time in at least a decade.

Poppy didn't push any further. "Good," she said. She surveyed the girl again - there were so many questions that she wanted to ask Minerva McGonagall about that girl, but this was not the time to ask them. Minerva would tell her when she felt it was appropriate, perhaps never. "You must have a class to teach now. I'll take good care of her," she added.

"What?" Professor McGonagall asked. Then the words were interpreted by her brain as a dismissal. "Yes," she replied. "Yes I do- First years, I think-" she regarded the clock on the wall, "And I'm late-!"

***

Being a Fifth Year, Harry took less classes, and so had time during the day to 'study'. The fact that it was the beginning of the year meant that only Hermione was studying. They were supposed to be supervised by a senior prefect, but no-one had shown up, so Harry and Ron had taken the opportunity to go and check out the Quidditch pitch... again. They would have visited Hagrid but he was busy, having returned from his mission during the holidays to almost full-time teaching.

"Where do you think McGonagall's taken her?" Ron asked. They'd heard all about the night-time excitement in the girl's dormitory from Lavender. In fact, most of the school had.

"Probably to the Hospital Wing," Harry said. They had nearly reached the outside door and no-one had stopped them from exiting the main Hogwarts building, yet. Security had become increasingly tight around the Hogwarts building after the death of Cedric Diggory and the infiltration of the school system over the past few years by death-eaters, such as Professor Quirrell. Harry reached for the handle, just in time to see someone else push it open from outside.

"Damn," Ron said, under his breath, as they faced the stranger.

The stranger was young, although not young enough to be a Hogwarts student. He had thick collar-length white-blonde hair and very dark brown eyes. His skin was coloured a deep olive-tone in direct contrast with his hair. He seemed as surprised as Harry was to meet someone at the door. "I expected this to be one of the doors with the least traffic," he said in a friendly tone. "Are you trying to sneak out?"

"No," Ron exclaimed at once.

"Of course not," the man said, cynically, his eyes twinkling like crushed beer bottles. He addressed Harry, "Perhaps if you have some spare time you'll be able to direct me to Professor Dumbledore's office. I'm happy to say that in my entire time at Hogwarts I was only sent there once, so I don't really know where it is."

"I'll show you if you like," Harry said. Ron internally kicked himself - this was going to take some time.

"That's if you don't have anything else to do," the man said. "I'm sure I can find it myself if you give me directions."

"It's too complicated for directions," Harry replied. "We'll show you."

"Well, if you don't mind," the stranger said, indecisively.

"We don't," Ron grunted. He now felt slightly interested, having sighted a Ministry of Magic logo on the papers the man carried. The man was dressed strangely, in a navy-blue overall with the logo 'GSG' printed above the pocket and across his back in bright orange reflecto-tape. A white identification card hung on a piece of wire about the man's neck, but it had turned and Ron couldn't read it. At the back of his mind, Ron felt that he should know who this man was. However, he didn't.

"This way," Harry announced as he lead the trio along the myriad of corridors toward the Professor's office.

"Thank you," the man said.

It was only now that Harry smelt the nose-invading smell of burnt meat that hung in an aromatic aura around the stranger. It made him feel strangely cold, sick to the marrow of his bones. He knew that something must be very wrong, not just from the smell but from the way the stranger carried himself. Something bad had happened. He wasn't really sure if he wanted to know what it was. Asking "What's your name?" seemed like a safe start.

"Abberline," the stranger replied. "Timothy Abberline." He fell silent.

Ron felt a flash of recognition. He'd heard either Charlie or Bill talk about this man, or perhaps even his father, Arthur. But when and about what he couldn't remember. It was too late anyway, by now they were at the door.

"Thank you," Timothy Abberline said in a quiet voice and tapped on the door.

***

Timothy Abberline found Professor Dumbledore engaged in a game of chess with a large black dog. He knew that Dumbledore had some 'eccentric' ways and chose not to question it. Instead, he accidentally dropped his papers on the floor and hurriedly picked them up. By now all his composure had gone and all he could do is stammer, "Excuse me, Professor Dumbledore, sir," (this was a man that commanded great respect), "I have been sent by the Ministry of Magic to inform you that Iris McGonagall has been murdered," before the old man could reply, he continued, "I will need to interview both Professor McGonagall and the woman's daughter. Morgiana Pettigrew, I think her name is."

"Of course," Professor Dumbledore replied in a calm voice, although sadness flowed through his ancient eyes. He stood up, moving quite freely for a man of his age (which Timothy estimated as incredibly old, at least four centuries), and began to clear away the chessboard, much to the displeasure of the pieces. "I'll send for someone to find Minerva immediately. In the meantime, you can tell me what happened."