‘Did you see that cat,’ Sir Cadogan exclaimed one evening, when he was visiting the portrait of his friend Violet.
Violet looked around her anxiously. She couldn’t stand those four-legged fur balls ever since that Umbridge person had unleashed an army of them on the Castle to spy for her. She shuddered involuntarily at the thought of that horrible woman and her equally detestable pets.
‘Not in here,’ Sir Cadogan said exasperatedly, ‘down there, in the corridor.’
‘What are you on about? You know full well that there is only one cat in Hogwarts that roams the corridors at night.’
‘But that is what I am trying to tell you, this cat wasn’t Mrs Norris.’
‘Have you been drinking, Sir Cadogan?’ Violet said with a wink, as she herself had poured the knight at least two glasses of the finest red wine.
‘No more than usual and not enough to be seeing things,’ the knight replied indignantly, ‘and before you say it, No it wasn’t Professor McGonagall, I mean Headmistress McGonagall, either. Her markings are very distinct and she doesn’t generally roam around in cat form.’
He decided to drop the subject for now, but somewhere in the back of his mind the thought was beginning to form that this might be worth investigating.
‘Sir Cadogan and the case of the mysterious cat had a nice ring to it’, he thought to himself, as Violet poured him another goblet of wine.
~ ~ ~ a passage of time ~ ~ ~
Over the next few nights, Sir Cadogan kept his eye out for the mysterious cat, but he saw no further sign of it as he visited his friends all over the Castle.
He wasn’t of course allowed to venture into any of the private accommodations of the teaching staff, or the headmaster’s office or the House towers and other House areas, but that still left him with quite a bit of room to patrol.
When he didn’t spot the mystery cat again, and did not find any other witnesses who had seen sight of it, rather than giving up, he decided to seek out Peeves, which was not as easy as one might think.
Sir Cadogan could visit any painting in the publicly accessible areas of the castle, but that was the full range of his movements. Peeves on the other hand had more freedom and wasn’t a stickler for rules, but he could not lurk around in any paintings and often didn’t stay in one place long enough to be hailed by one of the occupants of these wall hangings.
‘Yo, Peeves,’ Sir Cadogan eventually managed to shout, when he spotted the poltergeist loitering near the entrance hall.
‘Yo, Cadogan’, Peeves mimicked.
‘YO, CADOGAN!’, he repeated louder. ‘Yoo, hoo, hoo, Cadogan, Nighty Night, Knighty Knight,’ the poltergeist cackled and disappeared into the night, laughing. The Knighty knight’ could be heard echoing through the corridors, even after he had disappeared from sight.
‘Well that was a waste of time,’ Sir Cadogan grumbled.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
‘The Fat Lady had a good laugh, when she heard about his wasted efforts of trying to get Peeves to assist him. ‘Don’t looked so peeved,’ she giggled, ‘why not ask one of the students?’
‘They are not supposed to be out of their beds at night.’
‘When has that ever stopped them,’ the Fat Lady harrumphed.
‘What I meant was, a lot of the students have cats and they are supposed to keep them in their rooms during the night. You could ask the Prefect of my House to help you,’ the Fat Lady said importantly.
As if summoned by these words, a tall curly-haired brunette came into view.
‘Hello, Sir Cadogan, nice to see you here,’ Hermione greeted him, ‘and lovely to see you too, as always, Lady Abigail,' she added with a smile.
‘Abigail?,’ Sir Cadogan said with a frown.
‘I refuse to call her ‘the Fat Lady’ and she refuses to tell me her real name, so I try a different name each time I see her. The only time she refused me entry and went walk-about for three hours was when I called her ‘Rumpelstiltskin.’’
‘Your friend doesn’t have much of a sense of humour,’ she whispered conspiratorially to Sir Cadogan, who laughed heartily.
It wasn’t long before he outlined his quest to her.
‘I know it isn’t your cat,’ he said, ‘you could not mistake that f… eh… bushy tail for any other cat.’
He had been about to say ‘flat face’ but since he was here to ask for her help that had seemed a bit rude. True, but rude.
'No problem.'
Hermione took out three pieces of parchment, wrote a message on one and used a copying spell to copy the message two more times. With another spell she folded the parchments into paper planes and sent them on their way.
It was something she had picked up from the Ministry and used to communicate with her fellow prefects in the other houses.
Why go out into the cold and risk slipping on that old spiral staircase that led to the owlery to fetch an owl, when you could just use magic.
She had to clear it with the Headmaster and Heads of Houses first, of course, but it didn't take much persuading, especially as the new Head was also her Head of House.
The privilege of using paper planes was only reserved for Prefects, for now at least.
Minutes later one of the paper planes returned.
‘Hi Babe,
No problem.
Will do.
Not many cats here.
Pansy, who is a cat lover and has three cats at home, says cats like the sun. Bringing a cat into a dungeon would just be cruel.
X D’
‘Babe and X D, huh?,’ the Fat Lady smirked, as she looked over Hermione’s shoulder.
‘It is his way of annoying me,’ Hermione said defensively, ‘I may have hexed any messages to him with a spell that set flame to it every time he used derogatory language, like Mudblood,’ but there was no denying her crimson cheeks.
‘’X D,’ sounds awfully intimate, though,’ Sir Cadogan added, ‘I know that he signs his letters to his parents ‘Your son DLM, without any X,’ momentarily forgetting his real mission. This was a juicy bit of gossip.
Hermione was saved from more questioning by the arrival of two more paper planes.
‘Hi Herm,
All Hufflepussies are accounted for.
According to their owners, they never venture outside the common room. It’s too cozy for them here. Apparently they get quite cross when their owners try to put them in their travel cages, to take them home for the holidays.
Yours, E McM’
The final missive read:
‘Dear Mione,
Have asked all Ravenclaw cat owners, but none are aware of their beloved pets going AWOL during the night. The problem wouldn’t be sneaking out, but getting back in. Not great at solving riddles, you know.
Yours truly, Terry B.’
Hermione would not have ruled out that cats could not solve riddles, but she was inclined to agree that it was highly unlikely that any of the pets would go walk-about after dark. Her own pet, was probably the most adventurous one in the Castle and even Crookshanks preferred to snuggle up with her during the night. An unregistered Animagus? Not very likely. McGonagall had clamped down on that after discovering that Gryffindor had harboured three of them right under her nose.
‘Note that none of them sign off with an X,’ the Fat Lady said, ‘and Hermione, dear, you should really do something about those nicknames, they are dreadful. You were given a perfectly lovely name by your parents and should insist that they use that.'
‘So, what should I call you then,’ Hermione said, seeing an opportunity to extract the Fat Lady’s real name.
‘Never you mind,’ she replied.
Sir Cadogan laughed and then turned serious again.
‘So, what now?’ he asked Hermione.
‘Where were you again, when you first saw this mystery cat?’
‘Near the portrait of Violet,’ Sir Cadogan said, with a nervous glance at the Fat Lady.
‘Oh, well that explains a lot,’ the Fat Lady said, only slightly put out by the fact that the roguish knight was hanging out with her best friend behind her back.
‘This clearly isn’t a case of a mysterious cat in the dark, but more likely the mysterious case of what you drank that night that made you dream up this cat. Trust Violet to slip you a little extra in your wine to add to her amusement. I must ask her what exactly she served you the next time I see her’, and with that she disappeared out of view, leaving a stunned Knight in the picture frame and an annoyed Prefect standing in front of it.
‘How am I going to get back into Gryffindor Tower now, Lady Macbeth,’ she shouted after the Fat Lady.
‘I can let you in,’ Sir Cadogan said, pleased that he could at least do that.