First Depression
Marietta lived in a group flat. Indeed, that would make getting the permission to search her place tricky, even with reasonable suspicion, but part of that was probably the same root cause, which was that the world had not been kind to her after her graduation from Hogwarts. If Justin understood it all correctly, she basically got everything done without anyone causing her any problems, leaving just before the Death Eaters showed up. Work treated her kindly initially, but when everything came out, and everyone realized she had basically caused Dumbledore to nearly get arrested and have to flee the castle, then she was let go a few times and had to move in with some less judgemental people, namely a witch addicted to Cheering Charms, a wizard who had broken parole more times than he had ever been in jail, oddly enough, and an out of work merperson who was just in a tank of alcohol every day.
"Excuse me, what's all this?" he said, turning to see them in his tank when they came in.
"There's dark stuff here," Harry explained hastily. "We found your friend with this on her," he said, showing off the wand from the evidence locker.
"I don't believe you one bit. When the others get back-"
"Confundo."
"What were you saying again? I wasn't paying attention before."
"Edgecombe was carrying a wand with loads of dark curses in its memory when we brought her in connected to another case."
"It's funny; I really did hear you the first time, but I wondered how you'd explain it differently-"
"Confundo."
"That's not going to work. I'm not in a position where I could get any more off balance. If you knew anything about that charm, you'd understand that there's only so many times before you either break the subject, or break the spell. In this case, it's definitely the spell. We merpeople are just like that."
"Where are the others?" one of the Aurors asked, pivoting slightly. "We can give you a deal on your charges-"
"I haven't been charged with anything."
"No?" Harry asked. "What about tax evasion?"
"I don't owe any taxes. None have ever been delivered to me?"
"Oh, but that's not how this works. You owe us the gold, and you have to find out how much. Living in a tank isn't going to get you out of this, not if you have an address where we can send you letters."
"According to section three hundred-"
"Don't even think about it; we'll just use the Lawyer Exclusion Charm," Robards threatened. "Let's save us all some time and make things simple. We're not here to look through your things, just Marietta's. Unless you had something to do with it, then there shouldn't be any problem. Just show us where we can find anything she might have done, even if she did something sneaky, like hiding it under the floorboards."
"Don't worry about it if we find something else in the same hiding spot," Justin said after a moment of silence.
"Very well," he said. "If you can promise that, then-"
Without further ado, they pushed past him and searched the place, finding the hiding spot after the merperson apparently decided it was much less risky to point it out. It was a hollow in one of the walls where the corners did not quite meet. They drew out some suspicious papers and started reading them. Pushing his own tank somehow, the relatively cooperative witness objected.
"Hey, you weren't supposed to be reading all that."
"Technically, it was only our star witness who said that," Robards said. "He's not part of our department."
"What? Who is he, then?"
"Oh, I'm sorry; I never introduced myself. My name's Justin Finch-Fletchley. I work for a normal company and I've never had a run-in with the law."
"Is that supposed to impress me or something?"
"No, not really. I just didn't know how to introduce myself."
"Look at this," Harry said. "It's a letter from the boss himself. Does anyone know the handwriting trace spell? I don't have a clue if this is legitimate, or just an alias."
"What does it say, though?" he asked. "Even if it's an alias, the contents could tell us how to find him."
"It implies he's at the club and he never leaves. He has servants, lower ranking members, bringing in food and other things. Apparently Marietta was one of them. There's no other reason he would be asking for the usual shipment of meals." He squinted. "They didn't serve food there, did they?"
"No, they served alcohol, but I was never asked to bring a patron food." He frowned. "It's funny. I don't know what else they might have needed to run the place, even though I was there for a few days. In a muggle establishment there's all these other things like gas and electric, but that's all done by magic, and some places don't even have the same needs in the first place." He frowned. "They could probably afford to be pretty independent, so we wouldn't know about what they were doing from third-party contractors."
"That's true," Harry observed. "Most of the dark wizards we've pursued so far have never needed anyone else around; it's almost funny that in the muggle world they say that man is a social animal."
"Wait, are you telling me muggles are always stuck with each other?" one of the other Aurors started. "They can't light out on their own?"
"Well, they can, but they'd have a much lower standard of living, and in this day and age, it wouldn't really even occur to a lot of people. They would rather just stick with everyone else, even if it means conditions they would otherwise consider intolerable. They normally look at the choices available to them as if that isn't a choice at all," Justin explained.
"It's strange to think about life like that. What do muggles even do for... never mind, now I feel embarrassed; there's so much that I should have known if I paid attention in the class just for that."
"Well, I don't think that's important right now," Robards said. "We should really focus on the case itself. Either the man who sent this letter that we're sending to be traced is the owner of the club, or someone high up in the system. He's the one we really need to arrest to get a complete picture on this case."
"Well, we wouldn't know him from Cornelius Fudge," Brooke said. "Marietta is clearly our only link to him, and she wasn't here."
"That wasn't why we came," Harry said. It was clear he was annoyed with her and Justin decided not to try to calm him down, even if it was because she was a background character. "It's obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that this is the first place we would go if we lost track of her, so of course she wouldn't try to hide here."
"Yeah, and we found good evidence here," one of the other Aurors said. "I'm tempted to suggest splitting up if this isn't going fast enough for you, but I can't, not when there's someone with some trick spells out there."
"It's more than just tricky spells," Justin continued. "We're not sure who all is cooperating. The last thing I want is to speak ill of your department, but I wouldn't even go in groups of two at this point. We're trying to go after the boss because he's the most culpable, but he's also the only one who knows everyone who's been working with him."
"Exactly," the Investigator said, shrugging. "Anyway, I wouldn't worry so much about speaking ill of our department; there's no law against it, and they didn't exactly treat you fairly until it was shoved in their faces that you couldn't have done anything."
"You're out of line," Harry said after a moment. "We'll have a talk about that later, though. Dorothy, the letter's going to Records for handwriting trace, but you're going to look through finances. If Robards is right and the goblins didn't know anything about this, then they have to have some way of paying for things without gold transfers; the goblins would have figured it out a long time ago if that was what they were doing."
"It's as you say," the mentioned Auror confirmed. "They're not at all lax about trying to figure out what everyone's doing with their money, and it's not illegal, but they won't tell you unless you give them a good reason. If the witness has confirmed for us that one of their own is being held captive, though-"
"Please, I'll sign a confession if it helps anything along," Justin offered.
"That won't be necessary. We've built up a credit with them, and they know that we're not taking the piss. Instead, you're going with your new friend and the new kid."
"Very well," he said, looking back to see a young man who seemed to be fresh out of Hogwarts, if that. He was sure that those sufficiently invested in a career in magical law enforcement could get the work if they wanted it badly enough, and if nothing else, the kid wanted it.
"I won't let you down, sir. We'll look into that supplier just like you said."
Justin asked no questions before being apparated off, grateful not to have been made an enemy of the goblins for life. Apparently, it was hard to get ahold of all the probity probes, and a supplier said that a crate of them went missing, so that was something they at least had to check. If it seemed like a less important aspect of the case, that was fine with him; he was sure the more experienced members of the department were handling the more important parts.
"I can't believe this," Brooke said in obvious disagreement. "What did I do?"
"Well, I probably shouldn't say this, but Harry thinks that it's strange that you would show up right after Mundungus disappeared."
"Does he want to see the paperwork that basically forced me to go down there?" She sighed. "Whatever. It's not your fault. I shouldn't take out my anger on you."
"If you're unhappy with this, you can help me get it done so that we can get back," the recruit said. It demonstrated some amount of leadership to solve the conflict by redirecting everyone to the task at hand. Most likely, he would do well on his evaluation if they just completed their objective and got back. "We need to get to the contact."
They found the supplier, an aging witch in a straw hat, of all things, who said that the probity probes were a special order. They were not mass-produced anywhere, so it was all the work of a single craftsman. They asked a few questions that seemed pointless to Justin until he had to pipe up.
"I'm sorry; if I've missed something, you can call me a fool, I suppose, but why is the craftsman just making a whole crate of magical artefacts? Does he just make whatever you want if you have enough gold or can only specific clients request probes for specific purposes. I'm lost here. I don't know what the laws are."
"Well..." Brook started, looking back at him. "Technically, there isn't a law. No one ever asks for them. The artificer would have seen this as something of a windfall. Do muggles have the expression 'don't look a free thestral in the mouth'? It's kind of like that."
"I see. I see, so no one would have expected him not to jump at the opportunity, so it doesn't register as weird for anyone." He frowned. "If there's no law against it, then, he might not have even needed to know who was ordering them. I'm sure the order could be placed without leaving a trail as to who did it, and even if we followed it back to someone, there's no guarantee it would be the boss himself."
"Then you understand the gravity of the situation," the Investigator said. "-and you can see why this is basically a dead end. The most generous way of looking at this is that it was a way of testing the prospie to see if he could identify it for what it was, and he sent us as decoys, making it look more legitimate."
As soon as she said it, Justin was sympathetic. He knew that Harry would not deliberately endanger him, and he had no problem with that, but at the same time it did not seem like a way of getting the new kid any experience. Was it fair to use the term 'kid' like that in the first place when they were barely older?
"I'm not so sure," the junior official said after a moment. "If we can find out how they were stolen, then we might be able to figure out who did it. Even if the supplier, or distributer, technically, didn't know who was ordering the probes or why, or even what they were, I can't see anyone just leaving a crate of anything out in the open where someone could just walk up and steal it without a trace." He frowned. "I'm not saying this out of experience, just intuition- I doubt we'll get the boss like this, but anyone we can arrest is someone who could give us more information, and that's what we need to get the boss."
"Then we should at least look into it," Justin said, waxing diplomatic. "If there's nothing here, then that's all and we just go back."
The evidence was about as limited as he expected. His first guess was that the prospie was just trying to salvage the mission, or maybe just make sure to do his due diligence rather than relying on someone else's judgement, whom he technically outranked departmentally based on the levels of discretion on each unit, though she was at least three years older. They had two witnesses who said they saw someone who looked suspicious, but they had different descriptions of the suspect. Again to the dismay of the investigator, they decided to hear them both out.
"Well, I saw a young witch. I guess she wasn't as young as you, and she had long, black hair with green highlights," one of the workers said. "I got a good look at her."
"That can't be it. A young wizard walked right by me. He was kind of short and... I don't know, mousy... platinum blonde. I'm certain of it."
"You didn't think either of these people were suspicious?" Brook asked, tapping her foot. The workers exchanged a look.
"People don't just break in here to steal stuff. Nothing's labeled. You would have to crack open countless crates before you found anything you might be able to resell, and if you tried to resell it, it would be obvious that you stole it. Because of the kinds of products that come through here, it's almost unthinkable that someone would steal something to use it. It's mostly boring stuff. It's never going to be the first target for thieves."
"Not unless they ordered it themselves," Justin said, letting out a sigh. "I'm sure we're about to be told that they had the gold; they just couldn't be seen buying it. They placed a special order with the artificer and he put something in the box that allowed them to identify it at a range, like a magical plant with a peculiar scent. If he doesn't think twice about anything that he does, then he wouldn't have guessed that they would be trying to steal something when he got paid for it already."
"Even if they had such a plant, how would they find it in a huge distribution warehouse? Wouldn't the workers inside think there was something strange about it?" the junior officer asked.
"I wouldn't, to be honest," one of the workers admitted. "If it's like you said, and there was a scent coming from the crate, I would just think that was what they were shipping, unless the weight was way off. "To some extent, they could have followed it. They would have known how it was being taken into the warehouse." He shook his head. "This kind of thing just isn't supposed to happen. We're the only factory that serves the entirety of Diagon Alley with products from around the country, little bucolic shops here and there that most people wouldn't know how to find. It's ridiculous."
"Well, even if we don't catch the culprits, it'll probably never happen again," Justin ventured. "You probably don't have anything else they want, and they can't use the same trick twice. That witch, also, I'm certain that she's Gemma Farley. Since I told the Aurors about her, they've probably already looked for her."
The younger wizard nodded and confirmed that they looked for her, but she was missing. Ten to one, the other was Dennis Creevey. It was getting annoying; most likely right after his father, or someone who looked like him, broke Mundungus out of lockup, they would have known that Justin could speak against them, and they would have advised everyone he had seen to hide, and since he had not seen Marietta, they must have missed her. There was something else about that he found annoying, though.
"We can't do anything with this information," Brook said almost immediately. "Even if we know who did it, we already know those people are long gone."
"How did they know that, though?" he asked after a moment. "This plan only works if they knew they were going to disappear everyone involved. If they thought there was going to be no trouble from me, and that the authorities would never believe me, then why would they send someone to break someone out of lockup, committing a crime that I couldn't have done myself, making it obvious that I was telling the truth? If they intended to disappear, though..."
"Sirs, when did this crime occur?" the prospie asked. "We need to make sure that this is possible."
"Oh, well, there was only one day that it could have happened, because we noticed it was missing the day after it arrived. It was four days ago."
"That settles it," Justin said. "Even if they didn't expect to be rescued here, they left me alive, and as long as that's the case, they had to know that I would be able to match their descriptions to my own memory. They could have been disguising themselves when they ran into me, but it would be the easiest thing to just look at pictures of them that we have on record." He frowned. "There's a law against changing your appearance too much, isn't there?"
"Yes, it's illegal," his junior said. "My mother tried to make herself look just a few years younger and they got out this whole list of guidelines about how that was outside of the rules."
"That's what I would have thought," Brook said, shrugging. "Still, someone in the middle of a criminal act would have disguised himself as someone else. As far as I know, Gemma Farley had no criminal record and you testified that she was not one to take risks."
"It's worth investigating," the witness said. "It puts everything in a new light. Just think about it. The whole time, they intended- not to get caught, but to have something come out about them, and then for it to fall apart due to lack of evidence. They knew that Umbridge was a one of a kind white whale, the most hated character in the canon, and catching her would require careful planning. I'm not sure when it was decided that I would be the lamb for this, because I went after Zacharias myself, but he's a lot cleverer than I ever thought he was. Just as easily, he could have had this set up for years, or he could have improvised it all on the spot."
"Do you still need us for anything?" one of the workers asked.
"No," Brook said. "Technically, we should have dismissed you already."
"I have point in this investigation and I say that you should stay," the younger wizard said. "Apart from some possibly coincidental similarities, we haven't even confirmed that we're talking about the same people. I'm taking everyone to Records so that-"
"I didn't sign up for this," she said, rolling her eyes. "What we're doing is wandering out into the weeds, but I'm the only one here with enough experience to tell what's going on. The Auror Corps might have inappropriately taken on this case because of Harry Potter's name recognition, but in my own department, I have more experience and a higher rank-"
"Well, it's not high enough to stop me. Take the witness with you; we're going to records." He disapparated with the two workers.
"It must have been that Philpot didn't go along with some part of the plan," Justin said right as they were alone again. "They might have been able to tell that he wouldn't really go far enough; he wouldn't do whatever it took to win or something like that."
"No, I'm reasonably certain that he just skipped the meeting so that he could put a probe inside Griphook's urethra," Brook said as they started to walk outside, almost automatically. " I can't figure out why that's such a huge thing."
"Wait," he said. "How could you possibly know that? Also, if you thought this was a waste of time, why wouldn't you question the accounts of the workers? They could have been plants, or they could have just seen someone who happened to look a little like Gemma Farley."
"That was a bit of a misstep on my part, but I figured that kid would have to go with the next step of the procedure, so we would be alone again before long. Basically, because he's so inexperienced, people don't believe him unless he keeps everything in order and goes straight to the appropriate office for everything. He only has two hands, so he can only get two people out at once, and it's protocol to get both witnesses." She reached over and apparated with him to some place that he had never seen before, and he realized that he did not have his wand. "Sorry about all this. I had hoped that it wouldn't come to this."
"What do you mean?" he asked. "I mean... I suppose I should have realized by now that you were working with the enemy, sandbagging everything- but what do you mean you wish it hadn't come to this?"
"Well, Justin, you were actually shaping up to be a decent protagonist. More of an everyman than some kind of demigod, the story might have been about how you learned to catch up in a world that had mostly left you behind. That story, however, was not to be."
"So, you were the boss the whole time? Where is this place?" he asked, looking around. It was a small, dark space no larger than a closet.
"This is just a random building in Dover, why? It's not important. I'm not here to complete your quest for meaning." She pointed her wand at him. "Unfortunately, though, I can't kill you either. At some point, I have to dump you back into society, so you can be disgraced, and that will be the end of your arc, as the filler side character who tried to rescue the completely unlikeable characters."
"Harry doesn't want you to do this," he said. "If you cared about him at all-"
"We care about who we wanted him to be, which was a representation of all of us. We wanted him to be ruthless and exterminate everyone who wronged him. Did you know, that in his very first year of Hogwarts, his Quidditch teammates snubbed him during practice because he had lost them a hundred and fifty points due to breaking curfew with friends?"
"I mean, no, I didn't know that, but it doesn't surprise me- they were human. Winning the House Cup was important to them because they were normal teenagers and wanted to compete with the others. None of them knew that Harry was trying to protect the Philosopher's Stone-"
"That wasn't what he was doing, actually; he was smuggling a dragon out of the school."
"Okay, well there had to have been a better way of doing that. Even if he had good intentions; I assume he did- dragons are terribly dangerous, as he would later find out, and they have to be handled with care. The school doesn't allow people to keep them as pets for good reason and even if he found himself trying to smuggle one out rather than in, he had to have been ready for disciplinary consequences. Did you want him to demand an apology when he knew he was only taking responsibility for his actions?"
"Of course! That's the big flaw with Harry that keeps him from being a likeable character; he keeps annoyingly holding up a mirror to an observer's violent fantasies by forgiving and forgetting! When a schoolyard bully uses an unkind word to describe his friend, we want blood! When something isn't funny anymore after years and years, we want blood- and unfortunately for you, when someone gets in the way of our revenge, getting in between abusers and the consequences of their actions, we want blood- but we'll settle for having you invalidated as a witness."
She left without another word and Justin realized he was trapped when the door locked. As it was the second time in the last few days, he was frustrated, but there was nothing more he could do, and he was dreadfully tired. All things considered, he only wished he had insisted on going home earlier.