Angelinus

Chapter 23

Puzzle Pieces

A weight landed in the middle of Severus' back and he jerked awake, his wand flying to his hand. Giggles made him stop his first, panicked reaction. He pushed a hank of black hair out of his face to almost bump noses with a little blonde who had invaded his space. Groaning, he endured a barrage of kisses and giggles before sitting up and scrubbing at his face. Angelinus settled cross-legged at his side and grinned at him cheerfully.

"What have you done to yourself, Child?" he was forced to ask as he focussed on her face and took in her splendour.

"Me and Silky put on makeup. Aren't we pretty?"

"Humm, a slightly less heavy hand might be more appropriate," Severus said, and then quickly changed his mind as the smile threatened to turn upside down. "However, it is a very artistic use of colour and very nice blending of ... er, very pretty lipstick," he managed diplomatically and was rewarded by a sunny smile again.

"Linus doesn't like it at all and he doesn't like playing dress-up, but me and Silky do. So he has gone to sleep." The little girl paused thoughtfully and gave him a very adult look. "Linus wants to play quidditch all the time, but I hate quidditch. We had a fight because Thorn asked Linus to play and Silky asked me and we had a fight and Aunt Hermione said we were not to scream and pull our hair like that." There was a shimmer and a number of facial contortions before the face structure changed subtly under its garish layer of colour.

Linus was there instead of Angel. "She only wants to play with her dolls and stuff, but I want to play with Thorn. I don't want to fight all the time, but sometimes I want to be .... Having friends is hard."

Severus pulled the small, miserable child up close and hugged them tight. He looked over the soft, silky hair to where Remus was framed in the doorway listening with tears in his eyes. "It's time to resolve this situation," he murmured as the little one cried. "As soon as the direstium crisis is over, we are going to solve this problem once and for all."

Remus nodded his agreement as he came in and placed a tray on the bedside table. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he made it a three; no four way hug, regardless of the excess make-up that was being liberally transferred to his clean robes. They stayed in a comforting huddle for a short while before shrieks of outrage echoed down the corridor. Hermione was heard to threaten death and destruction to the person who had been into her make-up case.

"I think we need to polish our apology skills at this point," Severus said dryly.

Remus broke into laughter, scooping their errant child up with a shaken head and conspiratorial wink. "Never fear, we will protect you," he assured the child

~~<*>~~

Hermione browsed the contents of the server Draco had brought for her, shaking her head in puzzled dismay. A lot of the files were just the usual bookkeeping and junk, but some were simply lists of names and dates. There were shipping files, invoices for various things, a lot of extraneous 'stuff' and none of it made much sense. Sighing, she turned to the second desk where Remus was going through the papers taken from the filing cabinet with a ruthless single-mindedness and concentration that was formidable.

"Have you got a clue, Remus?" she asked, picking up her coffee and grimacing to find it was freezing cold.

He blinked and blinked again, coming out of his daze. "I may have an inkling of a glimmer. Some of these names are tantalisingly familiar, but I can't think why. Listen to this. Grimshore, Ben. Higginbottom, Violet, Rose, Daisy, Pansy. Mergeson, Paul. Smith, Gary, Angela. And here's a familiar one, Rossier, John. Any sparks?"

"Violet, Daisy, Pansy, Rose and...damn, it's so close I can taste it. Don't you hate that? Okay, leaving the names aside, let's see if this sparks you. Brighton nine, Godric's Hollow thirteen, Lewiston two, Little Marshside four, London four hundred, Manchester fifty three, Marmesett four, Newcastle on Tyne forty nine, Port Augustus five, Tiddwell six, Shadwell, five..."

"Wait! Let me think a moment. Towns and numbers, why does it... Dead! Little Marshside was a small village near Middlesex, population twenty nine. After the Death Eaters had been through there was only twenty five left, four dead. The pack I was leading at the time passed through a half an hour after they had left. Godric's Hollow lost thirteen when Pe... Peter killed them to frame Sirius. They are towns and the numbers are dead Muggles, killed by Death Eaters during the war. Newspapers! We need back issues of both Muggle papers and the Prophet."

"What years?" Hermione asked, typing rapidly on the keyboard near her right hand.

"The first and second wars I should think. Can we search by the town names?" Remus jumped up to look over her shoulder, all signs of tiredness gone as they studied the screen. "Yes, see, Manchester, June 1975, fifty three killed by unexplained explosion from the Times but the Prophet says, Death Eaters kill fifty three Muggles in a rampage through the heart of Manchester. A note left at the scene said that 'all those of mixed and mud blood will be destroyed, and their families with them.' Do we have a list of the names of the dead?" Remus' fingers itched to get at the keyboard but he knew Hermione was better at getting the Muggle machine to cough up the information he wanted.

"Here we go; Anderson, Foster, Kent, McDonald, Petersham, Smith, Snowdon, Thomas, Threadwell," she continued to read out the names but there was no connection made.

"Let's try a more recent one. Let's try Robert Vaughton-Crabbe," Remus said meditatively and watched as the information rolled over the screen. "Okay, do Anderson next and cross reference it with the list of names and numbers. Bingo! Now try the list from the Times. Are you seeing the pattern here? Can we look at the list of missing persons Ron gave us? Cross-reference it with..., yes. Oh dear, we really have stepped in it this time, haven't we?"

Hermione gave him a quick furtive look then picked up the phone. "I don't know about you, Remus, but I think it's time to call in the professionals."

"Agreed."

~~<*>~~

"You did what?" Ron's face was even redder than his hair as he bellowed at the group of adults in Draco's office. "You bloody Slytherin bastard! I could have you banged up in Azkaban for the rest of your life, do you know that! Tampering with evidence! Using an illegal time turner. Stealing...."

"Borrowing," Hermione put in mildly. "He only borrowed the papers so he could make a copy for me and he put them straight back. Now admit it, you didn't even miss them until I told you what had happened. And tell me Ronald Weasley, just how far have your precious Aurors got in deciphering this lot? I'll tell you how far they have managed to stumble, nowhere! Not a glimmer! Go on, admit it!" She was working up a fair head of steam as the unfairness of her friend's accusations sank in. "We offered to help but your departmental chief said 'oh no, can't have bloody civilians paddling around in the evidence, mucking it up.' The condescending bastard! And I'll have you know Ronald Bilius Weasley, Remus and I have put it together without help from your so called 'professional code breakers' because we are smart and they are ruddy government employees!"

"Merlin, she's gorgeous when she's all riled up," Draco put in an aside to Severus who was watching the show with a smirk that rivalled Draco's.

"You are a very brave man to be married to such a firebrand," Severus conceded, watching as Weasley slowly lost colour until he was as pale as milk, his freckles standing out starkly. He followed the movement of her finger like it was a loaded wand.

"Er, Hermione, I think the point has been made now. Shall we present the evidence?" Remus put in diffidently, tapping a nervous finger on the folder he had prepared.

Hermione stopped mid-rant and blinked, before nodding her agreement sharply. "Very well! We started by reading the lists we retrieved from the server, you know, the one Draco duplicated for us!" Everyone winced at her sarcasm. "Their naming system is very strange but it is possible to make some sense of it, especially when you have a few names to give you a clue. As a starting point, we began with the names Louise and Jennifer Anderson, and came up with the Input List. This list of names has a number after each one and a couple of dates, except those names that correspond with the people we rescued yesterday. They have only one date and again, extrapolating from Louise and Jennifer, the first date is day of capture and the second the day of release."

"They released people?" Ron asked, settling down now that his interest was caught. "Who?"

Remus passed a sheet of Muggle paper over and pointed to a few names near the top. "This information is what made us decide to call you in earlier than expected. The top names are marked with either a 'D' or an 'E' and we couldn't figure out what they actually stood for until we came to the name Vaughton. He has an 'E' but then a note has been added and the 'E' changed into a 'D' with the word 'addict' keyed in after it. Draco brought a Robert Vaughton-Crabbe in to Severus to test the direstium cure on and it worked. We thought he was an addict and treated him as such."

Hermione took up the story next. "Then we went into the list of addicts that have been seen at St Mungo's in the past few months and guess who we found, six of our people from this list are on the St Mungo's list as deceased addicts. A further four people on our list are also found on the missing persons list as missing magicals."

"Hermione then had a very scary idea and pulled up a list of missing people in the Muggle world and then we found the rest of our donations list people. The people marked with an 'E' seem to be dead or missing which left us with the 'D' category." Remus flattened out the list where his hand had begun to crush it and sighed deeply before continuing. "One of the people is an ex-student of mine so we gave the family a call and they were all too pleased to tell us that Edith Rice-Gannon was all cured and living a real life. After a few more calls, we decided that the 'E' stands for 'Eliminated' and the 'D' stands for 'Discharged'. The number accompanying the name, we think records how many pints of blood the person donated, the first date is the 'admissions' date and the last date is the day they were either released or buried."

"Are we talking about what, twenty dead people here?" Ron asked incredulously, staring from one to the other in disbelief. "Do you know how hard it is to get rid of one body, never mind twenty?"

"It's very easy indeed," Severus murmured, then straightened as they all turned to stare at him in surprise. "Oh come now, you all knew what I did for a living back then, and getting rid of the bodies was basically an everyday task at one point. A body in its natural state is quite cumbersome but transfigure it into something else, a rock or a miniature, and it is simple. It doesn't even have to look human, change it into a small animal and leave it beside the road as road kill. How many dogs and cats get hit by cars on the motorways, not to mention rabbits and foxes?"

"Is that why we can't find a lot of the missing from the war?" Ron asked pugnaciously.

"Not from me, I usually tried to leave the corpse on the family's doorstep. It was usually both kinder and more sinister."

"Enough!" Remus snapped when Ron looked ready to begin a fight. "We can assume the bodies are long gone, one way or the other. The point is they took over a thousand pints of blood over a five-month period. Severus calculated that in full production, each pint of blood would yield about an ounce of direstium so that would give about a thousand ounces of the filthy stuff to account for."

Hermione shuffled her papers into a neat bundle, then sighed and looked up at Ron. "How did tracing the shipments go?"

"We followed three of them to the highway and heading toward the Midlands, but then we lost them. It was as if the direstium just faded away and died," Ron confessed gloomily. "Any further information we might be able to use?"

"An interesting point, possibly nothing but a curiosity," Draco mused softly. "All the paper in the filing cabinets was Muggle, not a slip of parchment to be found. There were no spells of any sort on the cabinets or the computers, not even an untangle spell on the filing system. After we found those poor quality charms on the building I sort of expected something, but there was absolutely nothing at all. Very odd, don't you think? As if the magical elements were relegated to the outside, and the inner sanctums were kept unadulterated. In fact, on physical evidence alone, I would think this was a Muggle matter, not a Wizarding one at all. You know, we have always thought this was too subtle for Death Eaters or the Purebloods First party. I wonder if we aren't looking at this from the wrong angle." Draco continued to stare off into space, many miles deep in his own thoughts.

~~<*>~~

Sandy Solstein grinned at her companion, taking his hand as they crossed the narrow cobbled lane to the bistro tucked away in the back streets of Oxford. Brian Bridgewell was tall and broad, his soft London accent reminding her of home. He was a Masters Degree student and more in her age bracket than the rest of the kids who were starting their freshman year. They had met at a small soirée Professor Bartholomew Trews had arranged to introduce her to Oxford Society.

It had been a stuffy affair, the uncomfortable conversation of older men and women who weren't at all sure why they were there. Sandy had been equally uncomfortable, as Professor Trews had told her flatly that, if Severus Snape requested something, then anyone who had half a brain and any regard for the safety of their own skin, would comply instantly. Snape had been known to torture, kill or permanently maim anyone not complying with his wishes. Driven to defend her friend's cousin, she had said no, Severus was a lovely man, and very sweet to her. To which Trews had snorted, "Perhaps if you are female, fluffy and family."

It was not an auspicious start to the evening, which went down hill from there, right up until Brian had arrived with an older woman. She was also a professor and Brian's mentor, but they were not romantically involved. After a couple of glasses of the very ordinary wine, both of them had slunk away to take in a band at the local pub. They'd talked the night away, finding more and more in common until, at sunrise, they had said their sleepy goodnights. The relationship had grown since then and both of them were getting closer, close enough to make Sandy wonder how she was ever going to tell Brian where she went on the odd weekends. Occasionally she thought she heard a hint of the magic style Latin around Brian, but she wasn't at all sure, and simply didn't know how to bring up the subject.

Once seated in the bistro, they ordered a meal and for the first time conversation did not flow freely, Brian obviously having something on his mind, too. Finally, unable to stand the tension, Sandy sighed. "Okay, what's on your mind? You've been staring into space and biting your lip since we got here. Want to tell Aunty Sandy all about it?"

Brian smiled briefly at her cajoling tone, then ducked his head. "Look, it's complicated. I-I come from a really, really strange family, okay. I... oh damn, I never had to talk to a Muggle about...."

"Muggle? You called me a Muggle?" Sandy's eyes went saucer shaped and she clapped her hand over her mouth.

"No! It's not an English insult.... You're laughing? What... Sandy?"

Sandy managed to get her relief under control, as Brian grew more and more agitated. "No, sorry, no, I'm not laughing at you, I'm just so relieved! Brian, I'm a Squib, okay? I know it's nothing to brag about here in England but in Australia, it's pretty common, more common than full magicals, something about the heat and the lack of hard minerals in the soil. Are you a wizard or a Squib?"

"I'm a wizard. Oh Merlin, and that makes...." He began to giggle as he stared at her. "What a relief! Oh Sandy, you have no idea of how much garbage my family has been giving me about dating a Muggle. I mean, we are pureblood, but we aren't radicals; we're not Purebloods First Party or anything. We're not the silver spoon set either, but we are very well respected in wizarding circles. We've even been invited to an event at Malfoy Manor once, and I got to shake Lord and Lady Malfoy's hands. My father is expecting an advantageous match. A squib is not what he's expecting but it has to be better than a Muggle...." He broke off coughing when he realised what he was saying. "Sorry, that didn't come out quite right."

Sandy pursed her lips then smiled grimly. "Yes Draco and Hermione are very gracious when they hold public charity events but their friends are always put up in the family wing guest suites." She paused to collect her thoughts. "Although I gather you think your father's reputation is rather exalted in Wizarding circles, perhaps I should tell you who the person sponsoring all this for me is." She opened her hands wide to indicate her situation including the university. "My sponsor is Severus Snape, who is my cousin somewhat removed. You can tell your father that, if you like. Is that advantageous enough for him? See how he likes them apples!"

"Professor Snape? Of Hogwarts School? Oh crap! Sandy! Oh Crap!!! My father will piss in his pants! Snape was a Death Eater, you know? An inner circle Death Eater and.... Oohh CRAP!"

"He's also a lovely man, and my niece and nephew's guardian," Sandy said coldly, deliberately folding her napkin and gathering her things together. "I quite understand how my being a 'Muggle' might have been difficult for you, but quite frankly, I don't know if I want to meet your family. They sound like a right mob of stuck up drongos and totally prejudiced over the stupidest things. Besides, maybe they aren't good enough to meet my family. Tell that to your father and see how he likes it." She deliberately tossed a twenty-pound note onto the table and walked out.

Gob-smacked, Brian could do nothing but stare at the door as it flapped in her wake. What had he done? What had he done? Surging to his feet, he tossed another twenty on the table then ran after the vanished girl, peering left and right but she had already disappeared from sight. Cursing under his breath, he sprinted in the direction of the college before finding a suitable spot to dissapparated. A few seconds later he appeared into a small alcove in the curve of a building quite close to Sandy's dorm building.

The slight pop sounded much louder than usual in the quiet of the Oxford evening, loud enough to draw the attention of the couple that was walking on the other side of the road. The man muttered something to the woman and began to hurry away, but the woman tossed her head angrily and crossed the road with a determined stride. Unsure of what to do, Brian tried to meld himself into shadows until the woman was close enough to poke him in the chest with a bony forefinger.

"I caught you, you bloody wizard! How dare you use your filthy magic in a respectable town like this! Why don't you get out of here, you perversion of humanity?" she hissed furiously.

Before Brian could do more than draw a breath, her handbag swept around and caught him in the temple with its corner. Stunned more effectively than a stupefy spell, he felt himself falling but could do nothing to save himself and his head slammed into the cobbles of the road. He could hear her muttering and cursing under her breath but could do nothing, not even open his eyes properly. There was a series of strange noises then he felt his head forced back and something hard cut into his lips. Opening his mouth to protest merely allowed a thick, disgustingly sweet liquid to flow over his tongue. There was a choice to swallow or choke, so he swallowed, spluttering a little as the flow became faster and the woman's monologue took on a triumphant note. Vaguely, he registered another voice yelling then his head was dropped to bounce off the cobbles, and he knew no more.

Mad as fire, Sandy marched down the footpath, arms swinging in a furious rhythm as she cursed Brian up hill and down dale. How dare he take that supercilious Pommy attitude with her! How dare he set himself up as some sort of aristocracy when she was just as well bred, really well bred, her parents were not to be despised in their own right. Sure, pulling Severus out of the hat was really rather presumptuous, but she was quite sure he would play along with her; his own nature was a little intolerant of upstarts at the best of times.

Still almost foaming at the mouth, she stormed around the corner and nearly fell over the sprawled body at her feet. For a second her brain refused to process the scene before her, then the crouched figure stood up and tried to push her away. Sandy snapped into focus and ducked as the woman swung her handbag at her head, raising an arm to prevent connection. Her hand tangled in the straps and they both pulled back, the woman cursing like a wharfie as the straps began to give. Sandy remembered the brief self-defence course she had taken way back in her first year of nurse's training, and kicked out at the woman. Her foot connected solidly with a meaty thigh and the woman let go of the bag to clutch her flesh, and give a strangled scream.

Sandy took a better grip on the bag and made to grab the woman, but she managed to back away and run off, hobbling as fast as she could. About to follow, she remembered the fallen man and crouched down to see if he was all right. It came as a distinct shock to see Brian's features under a spreading layer of blood. There was stickiness around his mouth and down his neck that didn't feel like blood. As Sandy leaned forward to see if she could identify it; her hand collided with something that clinked across the cobbles. It was a bottle bearing a very familiar label that screamed out at her, making the hairs at the back of her neck rise in horror. The stuff was haunting her!

In a dilemma, Sandy was torn between her conventional training and the realisation that human medicine was not equipped to deal with magical maladies. If the Sleep Tight was contaminated with the drug then conventional medicinal treatment would simply fail to help Brian, if not kill him. She needed magical help but.... The portkeys! The folder of stamps Remus and Severus had given her a few months before were still in her bag, only five of the twelve used. Her saliva was the activating ingredient but she knew from experience that it took about twenty seconds for the thing to pull a person away. If she licked and stuck it on Brian's forehead, he would be dragged off to Rosemerta's very cosy upstairs parlour at the Three Broomsticks. Rosemerta would know what to do with an ailing wizard, or at least she would have a better chance of getting the right help in as short a time as possible.

Pushing the handles of the strange woman's handbag higher up her arm, she opened her own handbag and fished out her purse. Pulling out two stamps, she giggled in dark humour as she licked and stuck the stamp on Brian's forehead, posting him off to the Three Broomsticks then did the same for herself. They arrived within seconds of each other, Sandy bolting downstairs to get the older witch as quickly as she could.

Rosemerta peered at the unconscious, bleeding man on the floor of her guest parlour and shook her head. "Severus and Remus are not here, I think they're at St Mungo's or perhaps Malfoy Manor. Look, I'll get Bibbsy to take you both through the floo to the hospital. You do know what a house-elf is, don't you?"

"Yes, I'm familiar," Sandy assured her in relief.

It took a matter of a few moments to make the house-elf understand what as required of her, then she grasped Sandy's hand, held onto Brian's shoulder with the other hand and they were whooshed off to St Mungo's with no more fuss than that.