Nymphadora Tonks and the Liquor of Jacmel

15. How Could I Have Been So Stupid?

Monday August 17^th 1994

The wizard sauntered along the street insouciantly as Tonks walked beside him. He looked down at her and said casually, "I heard some strange gossip from Finley that a number of people were poking around his place, but funnily enough they all kept tripping over things. Bit suspicious that, I thought. Something to bear in mind."

He laughed in a rather unpleasant way as Tonks looked up at him dully, and continued talking to her in a careless manner as he walked her down the street.

"You fooled me completely when you turned up as that Easton woman. Assuming you aren't her, that is, and I bet you're not. Then you tripped when you left and that started me thinking about it. Then I remembered - you had seemed a bit more forward. Gave me rather a surprise. I was quite glad I'd made sure I gave myself time to investigate you a little before I sold you any of the good stuff. You really should have worked on your sense of balance before doing this undercover stuff. Bad technique on your part. Got to admit, you're good at disguise though!" He snickered.

They moved slowly along Diagon Alley past the rows of familiar shops, practically all of which were closed at this time on a Monday night. He kept a tight grip on her arm. There were only a few people around, and none of them were paying much attention to a man and a woman looking for all the world as if they were a couple out for an evening stroll

He glanced at her again. "Who are you anyway?"

"My name's ... name is ..." She hesitated.

"Yes?"

"T ... T ... Tonks," she said eventually, in a thick voice.

"Not Easton then." He sniggered. "Didn't think it would be, not after I was told you Flooed straight over to the Ministry after our last meeting instead of going off home like a good little girl. You should have realised someone was following you. Tonks, eh? Isn't that a funny name for a woman?"

"No. Well ... family ... name."

He looked at her appraisingly. "Fighting against it, eh? Don't worry, give it half an hour, you won't be. Effects will have fully kicked in by then. First name?"

"Ny - no."

"Sorry?"

"N - no."

"No? You are fighting it, aren't you? Your first name, Miss Tonks. Now."

"Ny - Ny - Nymphadora."

He laughed. "That's better. I'd be reluctant to tell people that, too." They were walking past the entrance to the Leaky Cauldron now, towards the quieter parts of the wizarding business area. "So what does Nymphadora Tonks do for a living? Tell me."

Tonks stopped walking for a moment, half-heartedly trying to pull away from his grip on her arm, but then started again as he tugged impatiently at her elbow. She looked at him glassy-eyed, with a horrified expression as if she couldn't quite believe what she was doing.

"Again. What do you do?"

"I'm ... an ... an ... an Auror," she said, in a dazed manner.

He stopped walking for a moment, but caught himself and moved on immediately. "Well, what a surprise. I don't think. I presume that old idiot they threw out the pub was with you?"

"He's not." She had a shifty look as she said this; the wizard looked at her sharply and glanced at his watch.

"Hmm, another few minutes yet." Although most of his face was concealed, his eyes looked gleeful. "You think you can stop this - Nymphadora? You can't. It's very powerful stuff. I've used it before. I didn't oversell it to your friend Easton - or was it you the whole time?" He shrugged when Tonks stuttered incomprehensibly at him, "Never mind. I'll find out soon. You'll do whatever I tell you." He snickered again. "Now then, he's not what?"

"He's not an idiot."

"Ah." He chuckled. "But he was with you? Yes?"

"Y ... ye ... yes." There was a little sob in her voice as she said it, a fact which seemed to give him great entertainment.

"Excellent. Well, my mates should have headed him off once we came out the pub, so if there's still a bit of you thinking he's going to get you out of this, dream on. So, how long has Nymphadora Tonks been an Auror, then?"

"Month. Yeah. About a month."

"A month?!" He actually laughed out loud. "And they send you out doing something like this straight away! Bleeding hell, I knew the Ministry were having trouble finding them, but they must be getting desperate. In over your head, girl. You're not very good at this, are you?"

"I am." This was said with a hint of mulishness.

"Yeah? What are you working on?"

"Not supposed ... to tell you."

"I'm sure you're not. What are you working on?"

"A case."

"Of course you are. What are you working on? Details please."

"Case with potion ... illegal. Not common in this country. Nobody knows ... much about it. Where it comes from. What is does. Who sells it. Who buys it."

"Don't they now," he said with great amusement. "Well, you may just be getting a little bit of an idea by now. I said you might like what it did to you. Of course, I lied."

They had reached an alleyway that led her into a small yard now and Tonks tensed up slightly.. She looked around her with an unfocused air, but there was no-one else around.

"What ... are you doing?"

"Just taking you to a convenient little place we can confer in private," he said merrily. "This way. We wouldn't want anyone else to overhear our conversation, would we? I sure we have lots of interesting things to discuss."

He entered the yard, which was bigger than it had seemed it would be from the alleyway, turned to the door and touched his fingers to a panel on the side. He chuckled once more as the door sprang open.

"Not that you'll ever be telling anyone what we talked about."

"Wanna bet?"

The wizard turned around sharply to see Tonks grinning at him, with her wand pointing at his heart. His face was a picture, registering utter shock.

"I hadn't realised that you'd spotted me, actually," she said cheerfully, "but did you really think I'd be stupid enough to drink that stuff? Or go in that room and let you get a wand on me?"

The wizard looked at her. "But ... how ..." he spluttered, obviously struggling to work out what had gone wrong.

"That drunken clown created quite a nice diversion when he had a go at my partner," she said, enjoying the moment. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, eh? "While you were watching the floor show, it gave me enough time to Transfigure the glass of stuff you gave me into a bottle, slip it in my pocket, then Conjure something that looked like it. Standard practice. I'm rather good at the more advanced Transfiguration techniques," she added conversationally.

The wizard made a twitching movement, and then looked, if anything, even more horrified. Tonks' grin widened. "Oh, and I also cast Remansio on you while I was there for good measure. You really should have been listening more carefully to what I was muttering. Wouldn't want you going anywhere without me, would we?"

She raised her wand to point at the wizard's face. "Let's see who you are then." She flicked it slightly; the scarf twitched, but stayed in place. "Oh, fixed so only you can move it?" she said. "Fair enough. Does this work? Finite Incantatem." She flicked her wand again, but with the same lack of results. "Oh," she said with slight disappointment. "Never mind. I seem to remember there is a counter-charm for this, but they'll have to do it back at the office. Very interesting what you were saying to me. You were being very suspicious pushing that special Firewhiskey. So I thought you might be a bit more communicative if I kidded you along a bit. Hence my little charade. Good, wasn't it?"

Tonks grinned again; in her pleasure at having turned the tables, she almost missed the noise behind her. But not quite. She'd been too well trained for that.

Crack!

Tonks jumped back out of the way just in time as a jet of red light hit the wall next to her head, scattering shards of stone that scraped her face painfully as they went past. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the wizard who had cast the spell running down the alleyway towards the entrance to the little yard. Behind him were two more men with wands drawn.

Instinctively, she pressed the panic button on her robes with her free hand. The wizard next to her took the opportunity of the distraction offered by his friends to go for his wand, but she pointed her own at him and said "Abigo!" He was blasted back into the wall of the building on the far side of the yard, yelling with pain at the impact. He slid down it and lay slumped at the bottom, a trickle of blood staining the scarf that covered his face. Take that! A good idea, Ches. Remind me to thank you for it sometime.

Her heart was thumping at twice the usual rate. Practice duels were all very well, as were the occasional small-scale magical punch-ups she'd found herself in the middle of during her travels. This, however, was the first time she'd been in a real fight with no quarter expected. And the odds weren't good, despite the advantage of her training. Come on, Don, Arnie, she thought fleetingly. Get your arses in gear. I need help here! She didn't even have time to worry about what might have happened to Cassius.

The other three wizards had now all reached the entrance to the yard, close enough to fire spells at her at short range. She managed to deflect the first salvo easily enough with her Shield Charms. Her opponents evidently had only moderate skill; they had to aim carefully and shout the incantations, giving her ample time to react. She knew, however, that she didn't dare keep this going too long and risk being hit.

They spread out, obviously trying to hem her in. Not a chance, lads. Time for an outflanking manoeuvre. Tonks blocked one more Stunner and then Disapparated into the middle of the alleyway they had just come down, ready to attack them from behind.

It was a bold plan, and it almost worked. They looked around wildly as she disappeared; this tactic apparently hadn't occurred to them either. Unfortunately, she tripped over the hem of her robes on landing and clattered into a door, and the noise it made alerted them to what she'd done. Two more Stunners shot past her as she began to get seriously flustered. You moron, why didn't you just get right out of the way? She blocked another hex as one of the wizards, taking a leaf from her book, Apparated away to reappear the end of the alleyway.

She didn't have time for another Disapparation of her own as she desperately fended off more spells. A return Stunner of her own was blocked, but a quick Impediment Jinx to the legs got past the defences of one of the wizards still in the yard and knocked him over, taking her out of his line of fire for the time being.

Come ON, you Irish git! she thought desperately. What's keeping you? In the chaos, it didn't register that it had been barely a minute since the first hex was cast.

There were only two wizards left on the attack, but they were working together now, approaching from opposite ends of the alley and firing spells in relay. The narrowness of the alley didn't give much room for evasion, and the concentration required to defend against assaults from two opposite directions meant that she couldn't risk taking a second or two out to fix an Apparation destination in her mind. Twice her blocks came only just in time, the residual force of the spells hitting into her like a punch. Once a stray Stunner singed her arm, causing a nasty burn. She needed something to change the situation as quickly as possible. There was still no sign of her backup. Right then. Just about now would be the time to mix it up with something beyond the simple stuff.

Taking advantage of a momentary lull in their attack, she swung her wand in a wide arc, remembering one of the Really Neat Uses Of Transfiguration for combat purposes that Dawlish had demonstrated. Mercifully, it worked; the cobblestones of the alleyway morphed and sprang up into a thin circular wall that surrounded her, acted as a shield, and more importantly, temporarily hid her from view. Nice one Mr Dawlish. She'd been one of the pupils who had managed to use his suggestions effectively. The wall wasn't going to last more than thirty seconds or so, but then it didn't need to.

Her two attackers hesitated for a moment before casting another spell, evidently taken by surprise, and that gave her the chance to focus her mind and Apparate (which turned out to be a lot harder to do under the stress of real combat than it had been in training). She chose as her target the roof of one of the buildings, behind a chimney and out of sight of the alley below, and as she landed she heard two cracks, and the sound of her wall collapsing under the combined effects of the hexes (and, she supposed, the natural tendency of Transfigured objects to revert to their original form unless very powerfully conjured).

Wait a minute. Two cracks? Is that ...? The noise below intensified into what was clearly a duel, and she heard an Irish voice shouting "Tonks! Where the hell are ye?"

"On my way, mate!" She focused, chose her destination carefully, and Apparated down to the end of the alley to head off anyone trying to leave that way - only to be knocked flying by one of her erstwhile attackers, running as fast as he could away from the scene.

Winded and momentarily breathless, it took a few seconds before the fact that he was running rather than Apparating registered with her. She pulled herself into a half-sitting position and pointed her wand at him: "Vestigare!". He stumbled slightly as he raced round the corner along Diagon Alley, which gave her hope that the spell had hit home. With any luck, he was too far away to have heard what it was.

The sounds from the fight were dying down now, but before she could rejoin O'Gregan and Cornworthy, there was another pop and Cassius appeared in front of her. He was looking rather dishevelled.

"Tonks!" he cried, spotting her on the ground and extending a hand to pull her up. "Are you all right? I saw you signal me as you came out the pub to let you have space for a run at him, but when I followed some ... lowlife hit me in the back with a Stunner. I was lucky one of the Magical Law Enforcement Patrol came along and woke me up. He thought I was drunk until I showed him my identification." He looked around him wildly. "This is where I followed that man the other day, isn't it? What happened?"

"I don't know, let 's go see." She nodded towards the alleyway just in time to see her last two attackers Disapparate, to the accompaniment of loud swearing from the other two Aurors.

"Tonks! Cassius!" shouted Cornworthy, spotting them. "What happened?" It seemed to be a popular question at the moment. "Did you get the one who ran away? I managed to hit him with an anti-disapp, but we had our hands full with the other two. They caught us off-balance when we arrived."

"No, although I think I got a Tracking Spell on him," she said urgently, "but what happened the bloke against the wall in the yard?" Seeing their blank looks, she raced down the alleyway, wand at the ready, hoping that he was still out cold. In the confusion, it never even occurred to her to Apparate.

Her luck was out; she was just in time to see him limp painfully through the door he'd opened earlier and slam it behind him. She shot a Stunner at him, but found that she had the same problem as her assailant a few minutes earlier - trying to cast the spell while running threw her aim off, and it hit the doorframe instead.

She skidded to a halt, somehow managed not to trip over, and cast Alohomora at the door. The lock clicked, but then clicked back in place.

"Hang on, Tonks!" cried O'Gregan, panting, appearing next to her. "Wait for your backup! Has he put Colloportus on that door?"

Tonks gulped as she realised her own rashness but kept her voice steady. "I think so."

"Right." The other two Aurors had arrived, and he quickly said, "Line up. I run the knife over it, you three fire, OK?"

They nodded in assent, and he fished out one of K's gadgets, ran it quickly over the door frame, and flicked the door open. This was followed immediately by cries of Stupefy! from the others.

Unfortunately, the room inside was empty.

Well, not quite empty. On the far side was a fireplace, the presence of which clearly hadn't been obvious to Cassius looking in from outside when the room was dark. Now, however, it wasn't; the flames were giving the room an eerie green glow.

O'Gregan, on seeing this, began to turn the air blue instead. Tonks felt much the same. Her wonderful investigative coup was suddenly starting to fall apart in her hands.

Cassius was the quickest to react, reaching for his mirror phone. "Hang on, we might be able to trace him," he said urgently. He spoke into the mirror: "Floo Network office, monitoring liaison. Urgent call." His face showed relief as someone answered immediately.

"Mary, nice to see you again. We're in a small hall in a yard off Diagon Alley, a suspect just went through the Floo. Can you trace where he went?" He listened carefully, then turned to the others. "She needs a specific person to go through to a known destination so she can pinpoint the fire of origin. Can one of you step through to the Ministry?"

"I'll go," said Cornworthy unhappily. "I have to get back anyway. I was just finishing a report when she called." He stepped into the flames and vanished.

"Arnold Cornworthy went through," said Cassius to the woman from the Floo office. "He's an Auror, you'll have his trace on file."

They stood around watching each other as they waited for her to get back to them. Tonks couldn't quite look the others in the eye.

"Who was that on the other end?" she asked, to be saying something.

"Mary Edgecombe from the monitoring group," Cassius said tensely. "Don, when she calls would you keep an eye on things here while we go after him? Come on, Mary, ..." The phone rang and he answered it immediately. "Yes? Oh. Very well. Thank you, Mary." He looked up, his disappointment showing clearly on his face. "All right, Tonks, he popped out at the Leaky Cauldron. Let's go."

They quickly Apparated into the bar of the pub, but the scarved wizard was nowhere to be seen. Tonks realised, as she looked around, that travelling here was probably the smartest move he could have made. It would have been a very quick journey, giving him plenty of time to get away before anyone could trace him. It was a public place, so the destination hadn't given away anything about him. And it provided an immediate means of escape.

She gloomily followed Cassius over to the bar, where Tom, the bald-headed barman, readily told them about the man who had appeared in the fire, then immediately rushed through the bar and out of the front door into the Muggle street on the other side. A customer who had been entering the pub at the time, and nearly been flattened by the man as he dashed out, informed them that he had jumped into a Muggle black cab and been driven away.

Cassius thanked him, and turned back to Tonks disconsolately. "Bugger."

She raised her eyebrows in surprise. It wasn't as if he'd chosen a particularly bad swear word, but coming from Cassius, it was the equivalent of a four-letter tirade from anyone else. It certainly showed how frustrated he was.

"Can't we trace the taxi?" she said desperately. "They're all numbered, aren't they? Do we have any kind of contact with the Muggle police?"

Cassius snorted. "For something like this? We could send a memo via the Muggle Relations people. We might get an answer back before the World Cup if we're very lucky. Anyway, he only needed to go far enough to get out of sight of the pub. If that taxi driver's still got any memory of meeting him left, I'm Merlin's long-lost brother. And you're our little sister. Come on."

Tonks followed him quietly out into the small walled courtyard at the back of the pub, where he tapped his wand on the brick that let them back into Diagon Alley. Both of them seemed to tacitly agree that they'd prefer to walk back and calm down rather than Apparate again. That reminded Tonks of something.

"Hang on!" she said, stopping dead. "The Tracking Spell I cast! I'm sure I hit that bloke who knocked me over. Let's see if we're warm." She placed her wand on the tips of her fingers excitedly and murmured "Find my quarry".

The wand spun quickly round to point in the general direction of the end of Diagon Alley, but nevertheless her shoulders slumped in disappointment. There was no hint of warmth to the touch at all, which meant that the wizard, wherever he might be along the direction her wand was pointing, was now a long way from London. She wasn't going to be tracking him down by following the wand as it got warmer.

"Stone cold," she said despondently, storing her wand back in the holder that had proved so useful in the pub. That reminded her that she was still in disguise, and with a small grimace she resumed her usual appearance. She hoped she hadn't done anything to ruin Beatrice Easton's reputation, but at that point she really didn't care.

Quietly, to herself, she echoed Cassius' curse in the Leaky Cauldron. All of her bright ideas seemed to be going wrong tonight.

*****

The Ministry was practically deserted by the time they returned after clearing up in the yard, well past eleven o'clock, and even Cornworthy had finished his report and gone home. They waved tiredly at the few Aurors still in the office on the night shift and dropped into their chairs, exhausted.

Neither of them spoke for a moment. Then Tonks said nervously, in an attempt to lighten the gloom, "I don't think Don was too pleased at being called up like that."

Cassius gave her a weary smile. "Well, I can understand that. He said he had to leave a nice little candlelit dinner with Rhiannon Davies. Lucky they weren't in a Muggle restaurant, I suppose."

"Oh." That attempt didn't work, then. Another thing I have to apologise for.

As she turned to her desk, she suddenly remembered something. "At least we've got a sample of spiked Firewhiskey we can get analysed," she said, with a note of optimism returning to her voice. "That'll prove the stuff was used, won't it?"

She reached into her pocket eagerly and pulled out the Transfigured bottle, which promptly slipped out of her fingers and flew across the floor.

"Unk." The last sound came out halfway between a squeak and a sob.

It rolled to a stop ten feet away and remained mercifully intact. Tonks started to breathe again. Her heart rate slowly returned to normal as Cassius walked over and picked it up.

"I think maybe I'd better look after this," he said gently. "It seems to be officially Not Your Night."

Tonks looked away, and then as the frustration of the evening welled up in her, smashed her fist on the desk. "I don't believe how I screwed this up!" she wailed. "I just had to play the heroine and try to get him to talk freely, didn't I? All I had to do was arrest him as soon as we came out the pub. Or at any time as we walked down the Alley. I was so sure I had everything under control that I even told him who I was!"

Cassius' face fell. "You did what?"

"I know," she gabbled. "I didn't know what to do when he asked, but I didn't lie just in case he knew and wouldn't fall for the bluff if I didn't give him the right answer ..." The extent of her foolishness was starting to strike home. "I should never have done it. I should never have gone into that yard with him when I'd heard him say he had people watching his back. And I should never have tried to stick around and fight four of them at once!"

She buried her head in her hands. The phrase she'd used before, when she'd merely thought that she'd screwed up, leapt to mind again. "How could I have been so stupid?" she yelled.

"Inexperience, Tonks!" said Cassius, in a strained voice. He seemed to realise he was being snappish and made a visible effort to calm down and joke about it. "Maybe when you're a hundred and five you'll have changed, eh?"

"If they keep me on the job that long," said Tonks miserably.

Cassius shrugged his shoulders. "Look, none of us go very long on the job without messing up something, somehow. It happens all the time. You have to get used to it. I would probably have done exactly the same as you when I started out. I might well have done it tonight if it had been me working undercover. Beat yourself up over it, yes, that's how you learn, but not too much. You'd never have made it as an Auror unless you had confidence in your own ability. We're supposed to be the elite, after all."

Confidence. Elite. Yeah, right. "OK, Cassius," she said tiredly. Another thought suddenly struck her and sent a chill down her spine. "We're going to have to report this to Claymore, aren't we? He's going to spit fire, isn't he?"

Cassius hesitated. "Well ... yes, I'm afraid so," he said, in an apologetic tone. He attempted to joke again. "But no further than a Welsh Green. And he doesn't usually turn you into a frog for a first mistake." It didn't work.

"Great. That's going to be about as much fun as the first time I met him, then." She reached bleakly for a roll of parchment to start drafting the hapless apologia that was going to be her report. Cassius looked at her with what was - finally - pure sympathy.

"Listen, Tonks, to be fair you did play with the odds," he said quietly. "The rub of the green simply went against you. We've still got other leads to work on, and this chap won't be able to show himself in public to do business for a while. And no-one got killed because of it."

She looked up at him with despondent eyes. "Yet." She shook herself. "All right, mate, points taken. I'm just going to write my report, then go home and torture myself for this, OK? Then come back in tomorrow morning and try to pretend I'm not too embarrassed while everyone takes the mickey out of me. After all, I would."

She dipped her quill in the ink and started to write. "Oh, that reminds me - thanks for talking to Shacklebolt for me. I don't need him looking down his nose at me as well."

"Kingsley?" said Cassius with a bemused look. "Haven't said more than hello to him for the last couple of weeks."

"Oh?" She looked up for a moment, puzzled, then shrugged. "Well, never mind. I'd better get started on this if I want to get any sleep tonight."

*****

Tonks was woken from an uneasy doze by a ringing sound, which turned out to be her Auror mirror phone on the bedside table next to her. She looked at the clock and groaned; she hadn't got to bed until gone two in the morning, and she really hadn't wanted to be woken for at least another couple of hours. She reached for the phone and mumbled "Hello?"

"Tonks?" It was Cassius, sounding excited.

"Cassius? What on earth ... it's six o'clock in the morning! What's up?"

"Remind me. When you did the Tracking Spell last night, I'm sure I saw your wand spin straight round and point in a definite direction, correct? It didn't just spin round and round aimlessly?"

Tonks blinked. "Yeah, it did point," she said blearily. "But so what? The wand was stone cold."

"But it pointed. It means he hasn't cast a counter-charm on himself. I knew it! Probably doesn't realise what you hit him with. That means we have about twenty-four hours to pin him down. Try it again for me, will you?"

"But ..." Tonks was finding this hard to take in on less than four hours sleep. "Oh all right."

She picked up her wand from the bedside table and tried the incantation again; the wand repeated its previous performance, but was as cold as ever.

"OK, it did it," she reported. "But how does that help? If the wand's cold, doesn't that mean he could be anywhere on a straight line from here to France? What are we supposed to do, Apparate every quarter of a mile and try not to wander off line while we're doing it?"

Cassius sounded disgustingly cheerful for this time in the morning. "If necessary. But we're really only supposed to use the official Apparition points. I know a little trick that might narrow it down a lot, though. Throw some Muggle clothes on, Tonks, and get yourself up to the office ASAP."