Overlooked

I walk down the street, holding my purse, looking for a book in it. I pull out a beaten copy of The Return of Sherlock Holmes and am about to open it when two men run past me. I look up immediately. What are they running for?

A tall man with black hair, chasing a shorter man, light brown hair, rather fat. They are holding things - sticks. Something bright red shoots out of the one held by the black-haired man.

He corners him, near me, but they do not notice me. No one seems to notice me, ever. I don't mind. I see everything.

They hate each other. I can tell. Fourteen years of being overlooked makes you notice things yourself.

Before the black-haired man can say anything, the smaller one shouts, "Lily and James, Sirius! How could you?" He is holding two things in his hand. The stick - and a knife.

He cuts off - he cuts off his own finger. Oh, God...

He makes a motion with the stick, mutters a few words I can't catch, despite my good hearing.

The street blows up.

I can still see. The small man, the one who cut off his finger - Oh, God, why? - is shrinking. He turns into a rat.

The tall man laughs, bitterly.

Before I can understand what I've seen, men in - in robes come. "That's him!" "Sirius Black?" "Look at the street!" "God, look at all the Muggles. This will take days to cover up." "Whose finger is that?" "Eurgh!" "Look at the street! Cracked the sewers, he did." "Did you see anything, girl?"

The last is directed at me. "Kate," I say. I am still trying to figure out what happened. A rat?

"What?"

"Kate. My name is Kate."

"Oh, that's nice. Look, what did you see?"

"He," I wave my hand at the black-haired man, who is still laughing, "chased another man -"

"How did he look?"

I was just about to tell him that. "Short, rather fat. Light brown hair. He was holding..."

They are not paying attention to me. The one who was talking to me has turned to another man in robes. "That must be Peter Pettigrew."

"Black killed him?"

"Weren't they friends?"

"Don't know. Pettigrew's dead, isn't he? Black must have killed him."

"He's not - he didn't -" I say, but no one is listening.

"Memory Charm her, I haven't time," says the man who was talking to me. He goes off to interrogate someone else.

No one is looking at me. The men are taking away the tall, black-haired man - taking him into custody. He didn't do it...

I quickly slip away, before anyone notices I am here.

I still remember what happened.

* * *

Katherine Sage sipped her tea and switched on the television set in her kitchen. She had bought it to watch the news as she ate breakfast, before she went to Stonewall High, the local comprehensive, where she was a teacher. It was a Saturday today, and there was no school.

The newsreader was halfway through a report on an escaped convict.

"... the public is warned that Black is armed and extremely dangerous. A special hotline has been set up, and any sighting of Black should be reported immediately."

Black? She'd heard that name before.

A picture of the man showed up on the screen. Katherine stared.

He had a gaunt face and an elbow-length tangle of black hair, but she remembered his face. "He didn't do it," she whispered, staring at the face. "It was that man ... the one who turned into a rat..."

Anyone who heard her would have thought she was insane. She wasn't. She knew what she had seen.

Sirius Black was innocent.

"The Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries will announce today..."

How odd, Katherine thought. They didn't say where he escaped from. I wonder what prison he was taken to...