The Alchemist's Cell
by SJR0301
Chapter Twenty-Two
The sun was rising in streaks of red and pink and orange and white, turning the sea below into a vast, restless cauldron of color. The thestral landed without a sound at the water's edge and dunked its nose into the incoming wave. Harry slipped off its back and stared at the house rising from the rocky cliff above. It looked quite old, almost as if it had grown there right from the rock itself. There was a steep path leading up the cliff to the house, but Harry had no intention of climbing the cliff. He kicked off his shoes and deposited them along with his jacket in a cranny away from the incoming tide.
He wished momentarily that he had brought his Invisibility cloak with him, but he thought it was better that he had left it in the tunnel leading out of the Castle, so that he didn't lose it if anything went wrong. He pulled out a piece of the gillyweed he had stolen from Snape's office before leaving the Castle and quickly chewed it down. In seconds, he felt as though he couldn't breathe, and he flung himself forward into the water and began the swim down deep to the underwater entrance that he had dreamed of.
The sea was full of currents that tugged him further down, and he let the current carry him, as he looked continually for the cavern entrance. The glitter of colored stones on the sea floor caught his eye, and he knew he was in the right place. A large fish swam lazily by, eyeing him incuriously. Perhaps he was too large and strange to look anything like dinner to it. Harry spied a narrow tunnel in the rock and swam toward it. He slid through and found himself inside the cave. A set of steps were carved into the rock and led up out of the water to a rocky wall into which was set an enormous iron lock. He pulled out his wand and whispered, "Alohomora," the unlocking spell and was gratified to hear the faint click of the lock releasing.
Harry gently pushed the stone door open, pausing to listen for any sound of human occupation. He heard nothing, which was almost more troubling than if he had heard voices, and he crept up the next set of stairs as soundlessly as he could. There was a landing, and another tunnel leading away from the main stair. Harry hesitated. He couldn't recall the landing from his dreams, so he continued on up to the next landing and along the smooth stone path that led to another door. This one was also made of stone, but instead of a lock, it had a huge ring set into it. He pulled on the ring and winced when the ancient hinges creaked.
Although he was probably quite far underground, the cavernous room was as bright as day, lit, as it was, by the brilliant red-white of the old man's fire. The fire crackled and roared, and in the chamber he could see an irregular-shaped object shimmering blood red. The old man saw Harry. His rheumy blue eyes widened in astonishment and his withered hand trembled as it grasped the long metal tongs meant for removing the hottest objects out of the fire. Harry placed a finger to his lips to signal the old man to be quiet. He had felt elation on entering the room, but now his heart sank as he took in the true condition of the ancient man before him. The old man had once been tall, perhaps, but his spine was now curved in a crooked hump and his face was so seamed with lines and cracks that the rest of his features seeemd to have sunk into it. His legs were bowed sticks, but his wrists were skeletal and his long fingered were bent and knotted with age. A warning look from the old man stopped Harry in his tracks, and quite suddenly his scar began to burn.
"Well, old man?" an icy voice inquired - Voldemort's voice - "is it done?"
"Aye," whispered the old man. "Nearly. It must still cool completely before it can be used, as I have told you before." Harry felt as though he were locked in the icy vacuum of space, but his scar burned with a fire as hot as the one that roared in the furnace nearby. He drew in a great soundless breath and concentrated very hard on building the wall in his mind. It wouldn't do for Voldemort to realize he was there before he could do what he must. He added another layer of covering over the wall in his mind and the burning lessened to a hot ache.
One more breath and he leapt out into the room using all the speed he could muster from years of quidditch practice. He raised his wand and aimed it, not at Voldemort, but at the fire, and he whipped the fire to an even higher pitch as he had learned in his alchemy class. With a loud, discordant note, the blood red stone in the furnace cracked into pieces and began to melt. Voldemort screamed in fury and the green light of the killing curse just missed Harry, as he dove out of the way. The green light landed in the heart of the fire, and the flames exploded outward and upward, melting the rock and leaping toward the wooden shelves that held the many instruments of the alchemist's trade.
Flames leaped further outward and Voldemort screamed again as a spark caught his robe, and he retreated away from the fire, pausing to douse the flames at his feet. Harry grabbed the old man's arm and tugged him toward the cave door. Another streak of light shot from Voldemort's wand; a red one, this time, aimed at the old man. The spell missed the old man, but Harry could feel the sizzle of it burn across his arm. He whipped his wand one more time and the fire shot upward and outward again as he pulled the old man through the now hot stone door and slammed it shut behind him.
"Hurry," he said, trying to drag Flamel with him. He was altogether surprised then, when Flamel resisted.
"No," the old man whispered. "This is my home. My wife and I lived here for so many years. Centuries, you know. Centuries."
"But, if you stay," Harry protested, "he'll kill you. Voldemort will kill us both."
"I won't mind dying," Flamel said. "I want to. I've passed my time you see, and my wife is dead. He is the one who won't let me die."
"Voldemort?" Harry asked. And then he understood. "No, of course, not. He wanted you to make him a stone. A philospher's stone to make him immortal." Harry tugged again at Flamel and started down the steps. The rocky floor outside the door had begun to crack from the heat, and the longer they stayed there the more dangerous it would become.
"Who are you?" Flamel asked.
"Oh, sorry," Harry said. "I'm Harry Potter. Dumbledore sent me." Flamel stopped and his rheumy eyes looked at Harry with disconcerting knowledge and intelligence.
"That's not quite true, young Harry, now is it? Dumbledore could not have sent you. Would not have, as he is most anxious to protect you from that monster above." Harry gaped at Flamel.
"How do you know that?"
"Albus Dumbledore is my good friend," Flamel replied. "It was he who persuaded me that the time had come to destroy the original Philosopher's Stone. It was he who told me the story of a very young boy name Harry Potter who saved the stone from being stolen by that very monster who has occupied my house for nigh on a year now."
Flamel shook his head and said, "You must go. You must save yourself and live to fight another day. I will remain behind in case the monster finds a way to stop the fire and to get through the door." He smiled a small smile that creased his lined face into a thousand more wrinkles and said, "Albus has taught you well. Not many wizards could have made my fire grow even greater as you did."
"I'm not leaving without you," Harry said. "I can't leave you for Voldemort. I won't do that."
"Have you thought how an old, crippled man like myself is going to swim out of here?" Flamel said gently. "No, child, this is a welcome end for me. Had I not, in my pride, sought to extend my years beyond the normal gift of the good god, I would not have suffered this past year at that monster's hands. I would not have lived this one year of grief for my dead wife, a single year that has eclipsed all the six hundred and seventy years that went before in the darkness and shadow of knowing that I was chained to serve evil." Harry didn't know how to respond. He just knew he couldn't leave without the old man.
Finally, he said simply, "I think that life is still better than death. You might have suffered. I know you suffered. But you thwarted Voldemort. You made him weapons that would fail and you wasted his time and distracted him from other things. You didn't do evil. What he did to you was evil." Harry pulled out the other piece of gillyweed and handed it to Flamel.
"Come on. Dumbledore will want your advice, I think. He gets very tired, you see, carrying all of this, the whole fight against Voldemort, all on his own."
Flamel looked at Harry in surprise and said, "I see now why Dumbledore loves you so much."
He took the gillyweed in his hand and allowed Harry to help him down the remainder of the steps to the watery cave below. Flamel ate the gillyweed and slipped into the water. Harry slid back into the water with him, and he saw that the plant's magic had indeed given Flamel the agility he would need to swim to freedom above. He lifted his head back out of the water to listen to the roar of the flames above. A piece of rock cracked from the ceiling of the cave and struck him a glancing blow on the head. He felt slightly dizzy, but he ducked under the water quickly holding his breath and hoping he could make it back out of the cave and to the beach above. There hadn't been enough gillyweed in Snape's stores for the extra person back.
The water was freezing, far colder than he had realized when he had had the borrowed insulation of the magical plant to make him at one with the water. He struggled through the narrow tunnel and thought he was home free, but the surface was farther above than he realized. He saw, just as he had in his dream, a ruby red stone glowing from the sea floor, and he swam back down to scoop it up, and then pushed himself back off the sea floor toward safety above. The current was against him this time and his lungs felt as thought they would burst. He kept struggling against the current, and felt how odd it was that for all his unhappiness all year, now that it came down to it, he very badly wanted to live. He struggled free of the undercurrent, but too late, and his air-starved brain sank down into darkness.
~~***~~
Edgar shifted uncomfortably in the wooden barstool and exchanged a wary look with Fay. Their undercover stint had brought them far afield from London, to a chain of sorry looking pubs that had nothing to recommend them beside the sea air. Their ganglord quarry had moved his business to the countryside, taking over small seedy taverns in a variety of coastal towns all along the south-eastern and southwestern area.
The taverns were holding places, warehouses for the imported drugs, arms and ingots of silver and gold that they smuggled in from places as far away as Afghanistan, India, and South America. The present tavern dated well back to the seventeenth centruy, and Edgar had a suspicion it had been used to smuggle in brandy and wind during the wars against Napoleon. He and Fay were hopeful that they were closing in on the leader. They had been in progressively more secret shipments, and the two gangmembers who were running the present operation were supposedly in direct contact with the headman. Fay had commented dryly that they must be relatives, because she couldn't imagine how the two blundering men could have impressed such a nasty and efficient master criminal as their quarry.
Edgar, on the other hand, found the hair on his neck rising each time the two came near. They might not be too bright, but he had a feeling that they more than made up for that in sheer evil.
They were scheduled to move a large shipment up to the seaside house that had served as the headquarters in this area. Edgar and Fay had never been allowed near the house, but they had followed the shipment there one night after they had been dismissed, and Edgar had the local police observing the house for weeks. The canny leader, however, was never seen to come or go, and Edgar had begun to wonder if the house wasn't a blind, and if there weren't other headquarters out of which the leader actually operated. He had asked Graves to join the locals in watching the house the moment he'd been given instructions for this next shipment, and he was hoping they could go in and catch the lot of them in one go. There were five other men in the tavern waiting for the word. They were some of the roughest men he'd seen, and Edgar thought it likely there was more than one illegal in the bunch.
He saw Fay stifle a yawn, and tried to hide his own. They'd been up most of the night waiting for the instructions and it was nearly nine in the morning already. The larger of the two "sergeants" as Edgar thought of them came in and whispered something urgently to the other. They both walked out without a word of when the shipment was going, but Edgar was relieved, because his pager was vibrating and he needed to check on things immediately. He signaled to Fay with a surreptitious nod and they snuck out the back of the tavern into the small weedy garden to the side.
"It's Graves," he said. Edgar checked to make sure none of the gang were watching and he cut back through the weedy garden and out through an alley into the car park. He rang Graves on his mobile phone and ducked into the elderly anonymous Ford they had checked out of the undercover pool for the assignment.
"What's happened?" he asked Graves tensely, before the other detective could say hello.
"Something big's gone down," Graves answered. "That house you had us watching, it's gone up in flames. Practically exploded a few moments ago."
"Did anyone come out of it?" Edgar asked.
"No one," Graves answered.
"Well, watch the surrounding area in case they had some other exit we don't know about. We're on our way," he answered.
He switched the car on and said to Fay, "You can take off that wig now, this gig is up, I think."
He waited until she had bent over to pull her wig off and shake out her hair and with only the most minimal concentration turned his hair back to its normal silver-blond.
“Got sick of the dye?" she asked.
"Yeah," he lied. "It was too damn messy, and the roots looked weird. Wigs are easier."
It took less than ten minutes to drive down the coast to the seaside house, but they could see the smoke rising and the flames far sooner. The house had once seemed a part of the cliff, as solid and eternal as the rock itself. Now, flames licked through the missing windows and the house appeared to be melting, consuming itself with the fury of a volcano about to implode.
"Did they do that on purpose?" Graves asked.
"It could be an accident," Fay said, "considering the arms they were bringing in. I wouldn't be surprised if they plastiques like Semtex."
Edgar, however, had another fear. To his sight, the flames looked unnatural, tinged with a faint phosphorescent green. His stomach did a flip-flop. He was reminded sharply of his parents' house exploding in flames, after the Murderer had done. "Did you check the perimieter?" he asked Graves more sharply than he'd intended.
"Yeah, hotshot," Graves said sourly, "I've got the uniforms on it now."
Fay kicked his foot before he could snap back and said, "Let's take a look."
Edgar walked toward the house, but the heat from the flames drove him back. A shout came from far down the cliff. One of the constables was waving and shouting,
"I think we've got one." They ran toward the cliff's edge, perhaps a hundred meters from the house. The constable pointed down and Edgar could see the humped up form of a body resting on the beach, half in the water still. He spotted a steep path in the cliff and tore down it, disregarding any normal rules of safety. All he'd need now would be to have the fellow collect himself and make a run for it before they could take him. Fay was right behind him as he made the precipitous descent.
"Be careful," she said. "He could be armed." But when they reached the bottom of the cliff, the still form did not stir, even though the waves were rolling up to his waist and threatening to drag him back out to sea again. Edgar grabbed the fellow's wrist and felt for a pulse, but the thin wrist was slippery and cold from the water and he couldn't feel anything. He dragged the man all the way out of the water and turned him over. He saw with surprise that it was a boy. He couldn't have been out of his teens, maybe fifteen to eighteen, and the thin face had no real beard even yet.
"Is he dead?" Fay asked.
Graves knelt down beside them and said, "Not yet. He's still bleeding." Edgar looked closely and saw that there was a shallow burn on the boy's arm that was indeed bleeding sluggishly.
"Is he breathing?" he asked, not seeing the normal rise and fall of breath on the lean body.
"Move over, laddie," Graves said sharply. He turned the boy on his side and gave him a sharp blow on his back, and then pulled hard on his arms.
"For god's sake," Fay protested, "what if he's hurt?" But the thin body spasmed abruptly and the boy suddenly coughed up a fair quantity of water. The thin body shuddered again and the boy hunched over drawing in air in heaving gasps. Greatly relieved, Edar noted that the boy's sodden hair was a real true black, and the thin frame was that of the teen in the midst of a major growth spurt. The boy sat up and shoved his wet hair off his face, revealing an odd jagged scar and brilliant green eyes that looked vaguely at them beneath a faint frown.
"Damn," he said, "I haven't gone and lost my glasses, have I?" Coming after the fire and the momentary fear that they had another corpse on their hands, the boy's tone of pure annoyance was so jarring that Fay actually laughed.
The boy glared at them all impartially and said, "You can laugh, but they're the only ones I've got and I don't see very well without them."
He squinted at the rock around them looking for them, and flushed with relief when Edgar spotted the glint of them a few feet away and handed them to him.
"Thank you," he said quite politely and asked, not quite so politely, "Who are you, anyway?"
Edgar stared down at the boy's bright green eyes and said, "Scotland Yard. And you, son, are going to help us with our inquiries."
He watched for and saw regretfully, the very faint flare of panic as the boy responded, "Police?"
Then the young face closed up, as if a shutter had been brought down over a window, and he uttered the classic denial of misunderstood youth and hardened criminals, "But I haven't done anything."
"What were you doing here, then?" Graves asked. "You were in that house, weren't you? Got the burn on your arm to prove it, don't you?"
The thin face remained still as a stone and the green eyes were coolly defiant. More tellingly, he made no answer at all. Graves caught him by the arm and pulled him up and the boy pulled away. Graves tightened his grip and said, "Now, you don't want resisting an officer in the performance of his duty along with any other charges, do you?"
"Charges?" the boy said. He swallowed and suddenly looked quite frightened. "But what for?"
Edgar watched his face carefully and said, "Arson, perhaps. Running drugs, smuggling illegal weapons, conspiracy..." Fay added, "Murder."
"You must be joking," the boy said. He had quite lost his cool and was gawping at them in astonishment. It had to be the best acting job Edgar had ever seen. "This isn't real," he stammered, "Drugs? What on earth would V..."
The kid shut up again and looked for a moment as though he would run, but Graves had a firm grip on the thin arm and quickly, with the precise experience of thirty years in the force, he caught the other hand and cuffed the kid before the thought of really running had even translated itself into the first step.
Edgar waited an instant to let things sink in, and then he said softly, "It won't go so hard on you, son, if you talk and tell us everything you know about what your boss is up to."
"I haven't got a boss," the boy replied, but the tension in his face added nothing to his credit.
"Oh, I think you have," Edgar said. "You were about to say his name a second ago, weren't you?" He stared at the boy and added, "You're a bit on the young side to be working for such a major villain. How'd you get involved in this?"
And when he received no answer he asked, "What's your name? We'd better give your parents a call. Perhaps they can get you a lawyer to tell you you're best off telling us everything."
Edgar waited for the young face to crumple, as they so often did when they were caught, for the weeping cry, I want my Mum, or Dad, but none came. The shutter had come down again and he answered only, "My parents are dead."
They climbed back up the steep path, and Graves had to help the boy as the path was more difficult going up than going down. Edgar noticed that the boy had no shoes and wore only a thin sweater. He must have left the jacket in the burning house, Edgar assumed, and kicked the shoes off when he went in the water. They sat him in the back seat of the Ford and between the cuffs and the seat belt, Edgar felt pretty certain the boy could give them no trouble.
"Where are you taking me?" the boy finally asked.
"London. Scotland Yard," Edgar answered. "You are going to answer some questions." He stopped and said, "The first of which is, what is your name? You haven't even answered that."
The boy's mouth tightened, and for a moment Edgar thought he'd refuse even that, but then he shrugged and said, "Harry Potter."
"Very good, Mr. Potter," Edar said. "That's a start." He stared at the boy with the thin face and black hair and something, somewhere tugged at his memory, but then was gone. He got into the car and waited for Fay to strap herself in before pointing the car north to London.
Edgar waited a good twenty minutes before trying to ask the boy another question. Silence could be almost as powerful a tool in questioning a suspect as any question itself. Very few people could stand to stay silent for any length of time, and he'd often found a suspect would start to babble all by himself if he was let alone for any length of time. "So how old are you, Mr. Potter, and why aren't you in school?" he asked. When no response was forthcoming, he began to be even uneasier about his subject than he had before. The boy was way too young to be so sophisticated in resisting questioning.
Fay turned to look at the boy and said, "He's asleep. I wonder how he can possibly sleep with his hands cuffed like that?" Edgar stopped the car and pulled over to the shoulder of the road. He too turned to look at the boy and his unease grew, along with the nagging sense that there was something he was missing. The boy's thin face was icy pale and deep purple smudges of exhaustion shadowed his face.
Edgar cursed softly and said, "He's way too young to be involved in this, Fay, isn't he? None of the others we know of are anywhere near this young."
Fay looked from Edgar to the sleeping boy and said thoughtfully, "Yes. But he was there. And he didn't deny being in that house. He's got a burn on his arm, which means he probably was in that house. And so far as we know, he's the only one who got out of it. And he knows something."
She considered the boy carefully and said, "But maybe we can undo the cuffs, or at least change them to the front. We don't even know for sure that there's anything to charge him with...and he does not sound like your average runaway street juvenile at all." Edgar nodded. That had been bothering him. The boy did not talk like one of the gang; not like the bunch they'd been mixing with so far, anyway.
"Get your gun out just in case," he instructed and he went around the back to uncuff the boy's hands. He had intended to re-cuff him, hands in front, but the boy hardly woke. He opened his eyes briefly once, and made a faint sound of protest, and then sagged back again into a deeper sleep, his head lolling against the window. Edgar reached out to check his pulse, and was relieved to find a steady beat in the thin wrist.
He tossed the cuffs on the front seat and said, "Keep an eye on him in case he wakes."
Fay nodded and said softly, "Who is he really, do you think? How is he mixed up with such a lot of villains?"
"That, my dear, is what he is going to tell us," Edgar answered.
It was the cessation of movement that woke him. Harry opened his eyes reluctantly and wished immediately that he was still asleep. His head hurt where the piece of rock had struck him and his scar was a regular burn hotter than the ache of the one on his arm. His still damp clothes stuck to him and he was freezing.
"Awake, are you, Mr. Potter?" The tall detective with the silver eyes reminded him for a moment of Lucius Malfoy, although the sleek blond hair was a truer gold and the eyes were lacking that elemental evil that made the Death Eater so nasty.
Harry nodded and stuttered, "Where are we?"
"London," came the brief answer. "Out you go, then, and keep your hands in front of you and go slowly or we'll have to cuff you again."
Harry swallowed. He tried to think of a time when he'd been in worse trouble. Scotland Yard, he thought hopefully, couldn't be nearly as bad as fighting a basilisk or having Voldemort torture you and try to kill you. He squared his shoulders and got out of the car slowly. The last thing he wanted was to be handcuffed again so that he couldn't get at his wand. That was one thing to be thankful for, he thought. Not only had Voldemort not killed him again, he still had his wand. He followed the tall detective into the underground elevator that went from the car park into the tall building. They rode up fourteen floors before getting off into a corridor that looked more like business offices than a police station.
A receptionist in a lobby area said, "Hi, Edgar." She looked at Harry and added, "What is this, you're bringing in kids now?"
The tall detective, whose name it appeared was Edgar, answered, "Now, Maudie. He's helping us with our inquiries."
The receptionist muttered, "I never. They’re getting younger all the time." Harry thought gloomily that if the Dursleys could see him now, they'd be confirmed in all their fears.
The tall detective took his arm and led him down the corridor to an office at the end. He pointed to a chair in front of a battered wood desk and said, "Sit."
The questioning began. Neither officer lifted a finger, they merely asked questions, sometimes over and over again in different variations. Harry tried, when he could, to answer truthfully, but mostly he refused to answer at all, or fell back on a simple, I don't know. The problem was quite simple. There was virtually nothing he could tell them that wouldn't reveal the secret world he belonged to, and after nearly being expelled last year for breaking the Statute of Secrecy, he wasn't about to be tricked into it now.
"How old are you, Mr. Potter?"
"Sixteen," he answered truthfully.
"And where do you live?"
A simple question. A not simple answer. Dare he mention the Dursleys? He thought not. And Hogwarts was out, too. "Nowhere, really," he lied. Or was that the truth after all?
"What do you mean, nowhere?" He shrugged.
"Have you any identification? Your national insurance card?"
"No," he answered. A truth. If he had a card, it was still at the Dursleys. He'd never even seen his yet.
"What school do you go to?"
"I left school," he answered. Both truth and lie. He had left, but intended, hoped devoutly he'd be able, to return.
"Where did you go to school?"
"A small place. Way up north. Nobody's ever heard of it."
"So you ran away and joined this gang then?"
"What gang?" he asked. Bad answer. They weren't liking that one.
"What do you know about the drugs that were stored in that house in Devon?"
"Nothing," he answered. "I don't know anything about drugs."
"No?" asked the tall lady officer. "What about the weapons, then? What do you know about those?"
"Nothing," he said. But the faintest hesitation had sharpened their gaze. Did they know about the swords he had seen in his dream? What weapons were they talking about? And why were police thinking there was some kind of drug gang at the house of Nicholas Flamel. He bit his lip, and tried to still the faint trembling in his hands, and to ignore the growing headache that tightened around his temples.
"What were you doing in that house, and was there anybody else with you?"
"What makes you think I was in the house?" Harry temporized. Bad tactic. A non-answer, telling them what they wanted to know anyway. A bald-faced lie would be better.
"What were you doing in that house, and was there anybody with you?" The same question now, sharper, more forceful. He swallowed.
"I was...looking for shelter. Somewhere to stay. I thought it was empty." Still not good enough, he thought, and wished he had said this from the beginning. Or denied being there altogether.
"Was it? Empty?" The detective named Edgar was watching him carefully. Waiting for the lie. Scenting it, like a hound after a stag. Harry tried to cudgel his tired brain into working. He'd faced down worse than this. Snape was far worse he thought. Harry closed his eyes and shivered and tried, painfully, to build up the wall in his mind, but he was awfully tired, and achingly hungry.
He opened his eyes and said, "I dunno. I never went in. I went down the path around the beach thinking I could get in and then I saw the fire. The house sort of exploded and I ducked into the water to get away from the flames and got sucked under. There's a terrible undertow. And then you found me."
The two detectives stared at him, silver eyes and blue eyes trying to find the lie. Knowing he had lied. "Why didn't you tell us this before?"
"I thought I'd get in trouble for trying to get in. I...dunno. I was afraid."
Almost true, he thought painfully. Harry's stomach rumbled embarassingly, and he wrapped his arms around him wishing he were back in his comfortable bed in Hogwarts. He hoped Flamel had escaped. He hoped Flamel had gone to Hogwarts. Maybe he'd have a chance of being rescued here if Dumbledore knew where he was. He looked out the window and saw that the afternoon sun was dropping into the west.
The two detectives were talking softly but he couldn't be bothered to listen. He was so tired again, he almost didn't care if they put him in jail. At least he'd have a place to lie down in, and maybe get to eat.
"When was the last time you ate?" the lady officer asked abruptly. Harry focused on her wearily.
"I dunno. Yesterday afternoon, maybe?" Yesterday now seemed like some far away place, and the Harry who'd inhabited that place was someone else. The two detectives exchanged glances, reminding Harry strangely of Ron and Hermione.
"Sandwiches, I think. And hot tea," said the one called Edgar. With another look at each other that spoke volumes, they both went toward the door.
"Stay there," the woman added, "you won't get far if you try to leave."
Harry nodded. He waited for them to leave and tried to think of a way out. Too bad he couldn't disapparate yet. He examined the room curiously and saw on the wall diplomas from the detective's schools. University of London. Edgar Allan Bones. How odd, Harry thought. I know that name from somewhere. He looked around again and noticed the neat files lined up on the desk. He peeked curiously at them and saw on the outside jackets, "Nancy Bell," "Margaret Miller," "The Gang Murders," and with an electric shock, "The Riddles." Heart hammering, Harry crept around the desk to the other side and opened the files one by one and began to read.
