LAST TANGO IN PARIS
Chapter Thirty-Six

It was nearly midnight when Severus Apparated into the cabin’s small back yard, carrying with him one of Martina Granger’s photograph albums and a plateful of leftover macaroons. All the windows were dark, and the moon was half-clouded over; lacking a free hand with which to reach for his wand, he fumbled in the gloom for the door handle and hissed under his breath, startled, when something furry and Dalmation-sized brushed the backs of his knees.

He yelped, almost dropped the plate of biscuits, and righted himself hastily against the door frame. Another nudge and a plaintive yowl – "oh," he said, nonplussed and relieved in the same breath, "it’s you."

Cleo regarded him steadily for a moment with those unsettling grey-blue eyes, then produced a complicated rumbling sound from the depths of her creamy throat and swiped meaningfully at the closed door. Severus frowned.

"What are you doing outside?" he wondered aloud. "Doesn’t she usually let you in, nights?"

Having lived familiar-free for nearly as long as he could remember – being a Death-Eater with a pet made you a walking target for unnecessary emotional distress, and after that he hadn’t bothered, it being easier to just use the school’s owls when he needed something posted – having Hermione’s caracal as a houseguest had taken some getting used to. Not only could that long sleek body spin from zero to sixty in a nanosecond, in any direction it chose, but the brain attached to it was crafty and quick and so self-serving it bordered on evil. Cleo opened cabinet doors, raided the refrigerator until Sal, in frustration, warded it, and wasn’t above twisting the faucet handle in the bathtub with one of those deftly taloned paws to get herself a drink, if she felt the water in her bowl wasn’t sufficiently fresh. She was not, however, capable of working the latch on the back door – and after the second afternoon, when she’d clawed a pillow to bits and strewn the wreckage of it all over the dining room, merely out of boredom, Hermione had taken to letting her outside in the morning, and calling her in at night.

This seemed to be a satisfactory arrangement, though Severus had noticed that the birds were – understandably – more cautious of the feeders than they’d been previously, and that the woodchuck who lived under the porch hadn’t poked his head out for a while. Cleo herself spent most of her time stalking rabbits, out in the woods, but showed up unfailingly at dusk for food and brushing. The fact that she was still outside wasn’t a good sign; uneasy, Severus opened the door and let both of them into the quiet house.

The door to the master bedroom stood ajar. Severus peered inside: empty. The kitchen, too, was deserted; opening the refrigerator, he saw an untouched layer cake, lavishly studded with cream-cheese frosting and candied nuts, and a covered dish with condensation still pearled inside its glass lid. He didn’t bother to find out what was inside it.

No one had touched Sal’s masterpiece of a dessert, and that wasn’t a good sign either; he’d had that carrot cake before, and even if you weren’t a closet hedonist (thank you very much, Sybil) it was hard to pass up. He couldn’t imagine they’d waited to eat just because he wasn’t there – especially not this long. Macaroon plate still in hand, he stalked down the hall, nearly tripping over Cleo in the process, and flung open the door to his deserted study.

"Lumos!"

His desk was clear, except for a neatly closed black binder in the very center. There was a note on top of the binder. He pounced on it.

**

Severus, it read:

If you’ve already read the second binder, then you’ll know exactly where I am, and exactly why I’m there. If not, I’ll save you guessing; I’ve gone to Paris to talk to Neville.

If I’m back before dawn, it means I couldn’t get him to believe me. If I’m not, it means we’ll be at St. Mungo’s the moment it opens tomorrow morning. And if this is the case, as I hope it will be, what I have in mind to do will require that my way be smoothed with Draco Malfoy, as I imagine he won’t have the faintest idea who I am. Could you meet us there?

Don’t worry about me. I feel fine; better than I have in months. And Sal’s with me.

--Hermione

**

How? was his first thought, then – Of course. She must have found a sample. The binder fell open to the back page: three slim white-and-purple boxes, one empty sleeve. Severus cursed automatically, then grinned; if her first thought was to go Apparating off to Paris in search of a mystery, it was a pretty fair bet that her little memory-potion had served its intended purpose. He couldn’t think of a single more characteristic thing she could have done.

He set down the plate he was holding, sank into his chair, and started to read from the beginning. Twenty minutes later, he was still stuck on Draco’s final letter, reading and rereading and polishing off the biscuits without realising exactly how many he was eating.

This was all beginning to make a frightening amount of sense.

Trust Lockhart, he thought savagely, to give away a secret that wasn’t even his – and in the most tasteless, appalling, self-serving way he possibly could have. I shouldn’t have settled for Expelliarmus – I should have killed him when I had the chance.

Pity there were so many witnesses at the time. Not to mention that Minerva would probably have gutted him on the spot, if he’d dared to use the Avada Kedavra in front of her precious Gryffindor guppies. Slightly amused by his own turn of thought, he shook himself and turned back to the matter at hand.

Was Hermione on the right track? He thought it was a good possibility. No one cared, after all, whether or not Golden Boy Gilderoy had his memory or not, save for a handful of deluded, starry-eyed spinsters with too many cats who still believed, against all evidence to the contrary, that he’d ever known the first thing about Doxy exterminations. No – though that ridiculous interview had most assuredly put the Knights of the Golden Wand on Hermione’s track, something else entirely – something much more crucial than the welfare of one egomaniac popinjay – had signed her death warrant.

Whether that ‘something’ had anything to do with Frank and Alice Longbottom or not was another matter. Severus finished the last macaroon and drew out his wand, tapping it thoughtfully against the polished surface of his desk; he needed to confirm a suspicion, and wasn’t sure how to go about it.

Floo, he decided finally; it’s faster. "Hogwarts staffroom," he said to the hearth, tossing in a pinch of green dust, and poked his head through the smoky, sulfurous flames onto another continent.

Six a.m. here – or thereabouts – and he half-expected the room to be empty; hard telling how much she’d slowed down, since he’d been away. But no, there she was – a lone straight-backed figure in green, grading essays and sipping tea at her accustomed corner table. From this angle, she might have been a young woman still, and he her half-admiring, half-intimidated student.

Some things never change.

"Minerva," he said, and the straight back went a shade stiffer.

One moment of surprise – that’s all she ever would allow herself – then she turned, her lips thinly pressed together, and shattered his Time-Turner illusion. "Severus. What an unexpected pleasure. Shall I summon the Headmaster?"

"No, you’ll do," he said, smirking as her eyes narrowed. "Before Draco Malfoy took over St. Mungo’s, Minerva – who owned it?"

If the question struck her as odd, she didn’t betray it. "He bought it from the Ministry, I believe," she said guardedly. "His fiancée – the little Delacour girl; she’s apparently quite good with numbers – brokered the deal."

"Oh?"

She warmed to her theme. "You must remember, Severus – or were you already gone by then? The Daily Prophet ran all those editorials on the evils of privatisation; made it into a bit of a scandal, or tried to, anyway. Not that it did much good. The Ministry had never been able to run it at a profit; they were glad to be rid of it. They gave old Maxim Hustlethwaite the choice of moving into the Transportation department or retiring, and he chose retirement. He paid for a celebratory round at the Leaky Cauldron; I remember Hagrid talking about it." She cocked her head to one side. "Why?"

Severus had already ducked back into his study and was shaking ashes from his hair, fired with new purpose. "No reason," he said aloud, pulling Draco’s letter from its protective plastic sleeve. "Used to belong to the Ministry, did it? Glad to get rid of it, were they?" The letterhead was still crisp in his fingers; she’d used photocopies for some of their correspondence, but this one was an original. Good. "Let’s just see," he murmured, picking up his wand again, "how many copies of this are floating around loose. Priori Replicatem!"

The letter twitched in his fingers, then glowed bone-white. A moment later, one silver-gray, shadowy replica detached itself from the original and rose to hover, shimmering, in the air above it. Grimly triumphant, Severus ended the spell and sat back heavily in his chair, thoughts racing.

No mechanical means of reproduction would have tripped the Priori – there might be a hundred photocopies of it, somewhere in the Consortium’s vaults, and he wouldn’t know about them. But then, the Consortium had embraced Muggle technological conveniences in a way that most wizard-run businesses didn’t; he was willing to bet that no-one in the St. Mungo’s administrative office used anything but Replicate.

And he was willing to wager every future minute of his happy retirement on the chance that someone in that very office had made a clandestine Replica of Draco’s letter – and to no good end.

These, then, were the pressing questions that remained. Who was the Ministry’s mole at St. Mungo’s? Who was the mole’s employer – the former Death-Eater/Golden Knight/pureblood supremacist arsepucker, presumably in the Ministry of Magic, who’d yet to be unveiled at trial?

And what did Frank and Alice Longbottom know, that made their continued insanity a point worthy of murder?

At least as troubled as he was intrigued, he pushed the open binder away to the far side of the desk and reached again for Hermione’s note. Here, at least, was good news unalloyed – the girl he remembered, all determined forward motion and righteous fervor, as if the miracle potion in the little white box had stripped her of hesitancy at the same time it restored her memory. Impossible to tell whether she’d been struck again by her old grief, or if the new development in the mystery had focussed her energies solely into vengeance. Impossible, as well, to tell what she was thinking, or what she felt – or even if he had a hold on her still, now that she knew once more exactly who he was, what he’d done.

Time enough for that later, he decided, and extinguished his lamp. Sleep first. Then murder and mystery.

Love could wait. After all, hadn’t it always?

He went to claim his own bed, for the first time in weeks, and found Cleo sprawled atop it, spread-eagled and purring. When he tried to shoo her off, she opened one chilly grey eye and hissed at him.

Women, he thought, and retreated to his study.

**