Chapter 1: Bring Your Manners
The memo arrived at eight minutes past nine, folded into a paper aeroplane that had clearly been charmed by someone with a grudge. It flew three laps of Harry's cubicle, clipped the Chudley Cannons calendar Ron had left behind when he quit, and nose-dived into his tea.
Harry fished it out with two fingers. The ink had run, but not enough to save him.
POTTER. MY OFFICE. BRING YOUR MANNERS. G.R.
"Bring my manners," Harry said to the empty cubicle. "Brilliant. That's never good."
Gawain Robards had been Head of the Auror Office for ten years and had spent most of them looking like a man waiting for a Floo bill. His office was at the end of the corridor on Level Two, past the Misuse of Magic noticeboard and the coat stand nobody used because it bit. Harry knocked, heard a grunt, and went in.
Robards was behind his desk. In the chair opposite, one leg crossed over the other, sat Draco Malfoy.
He was wearing Auror robes. They were the right scarlet and the right cut, and someone had clearly taken them to a tailor, because nobody's standard-issue robes sat on the shoulders like that. His hair was shorter than Harry remembered, pale and neat at the sides, longer on top, the sort of haircut that cost money and pretended it hadn't. He looked up at Harry with the expression of a cat who has been told the dog is staying.
"Potter," he said.
"Malfoy," Harry said, and then, because his brain had stalled somewhere around the robes, "You're wearing that."
"I am. It came with the job. Most things do."
"Sit down, Potter," said Robards.
Harry sat. The second chair was close enough to Malfoy's that their elbows nearly touched, and he spent a moment arranging himself so that they didn't, which Malfoy noticed, because Malfoy had always noticed everything that could later be used as ammunition.
"Auror Malfoy," Robards said, with the flat emphasis of a man laying down a card he knew would start a fight, "passed his final assessment on Friday. Top marks in Concealment and Disguise, top marks in Wards and Countercurses, adequate marks in Stealth and Tracking, and a note from the duelling instructor that I'm choosing not to read aloud."
"It was a compliment," said Malfoy.
"It was not."
"It was a compliment in tone."
Robards ignored him. "He's twenty-eight, he's the oldest recruit we've taken since the war, and the Wizengamot review panel has signed off on him twice. Which means somebody in this office has to partner him. Which means you."
Harry had been expecting it from the moment he saw the robes, and it still landed like a Bludger. "Why me?"
"Because nobody can say you're going easy on him," Robards said. "And nobody can say he's being set up to fail. You're the one partner in this building the Prophet won't write a conspiracy about."
"The Prophet will absolutely write a conspiracy about it," said Harry.
"Then it'll be a boring one." Robards pushed three thick folders across the desk. They were the old buff kind, from before the office switched to self-filing parchment, and the top one had a ring on it where someone had once put down a mug and never apologised. "Cold cases. The new ones always start on cold cases. Nobody gets killed reading."
Harry opened the first folder. Ignatius Fenwick, curse-breaker, Gringotts contract staff, reported missing in the spring of 1999. Last seen buying a pasty in Knockturn Alley. No body, no wand, no ransom.
The second: a Hand of Glory and a set of Goblin-wrought shackles, stolen from a private collection in Wiltshire in 2003. Never recovered.
The third was thinner. A witch called Mabel Orr, found dead at the bottom of her own cellar stairs in 2006. Ruled an accident. Someone had written a question mark in the margin of the coroner's report and then, apparently, gone to lunch for two years.
"These aren't connected," Harry said.
"They're all in Knockturn Alley," said Malfoy, before Robards could answer. He hadn't opened his folders. He'd clearly read them already. "Fenwick's pasty was from the stall outside number nine. The Wiltshire collector sold the shackles to a dealer whose office was above number nine. Mabel Orr owned number nine. She rented it out as a shop."
Harry looked at him.
"I had a weekend," said Malfoy. "Some of us read."
"Number nine has been shut up since Orr died," Robards said. "The building's in probate hell. Three cousins, one of them in Azkaban, none of them talking. There's a vacant flat directly across the alley. The office has taken a six-month lease under a cover name. You two are going to live in it."
There was a pause long enough for the coat stand outside to bite someone. Somebody yelped.
"Live in it," said Harry.
"Both of us," said Malfoy, and for the first time his voice lost its polish.
"Knockturn Alley notices Aurors who come and go," Robards said. "It doesn't notice two blokes renting a flat over a shut-down tobacconist. You're flatmates. One of you works nights at the Leaky, one of you's between jobs. Sort out which. Keep a log. Watch number nine. Find me something I can take to the Wizengamot and I'll let you have real cases with actual living suspects."
"And if we kill each other?" Harry asked.
"Then I'll have two cold cases and a staffing problem," said Robards. "Get out."
They walked back up the corridor in a silence that had teeth.
At the lifts, Malfoy pressed the button with one gloved finger. He wore dragonhide gloves, thin, black, stitched in grey. Harry remembered that he'd always worn gloves when he could, even in Potions. He'd thought it was vanity. He realised now, with a small uncomfortable jolt, that it probably still was, but it might also be the left forearm, and the habit of covering things.
"You could have said no," Harry said.
"To Robards? I've seen him make a trainee cry by breathing."
"I meant to joining at all. You don't need the money."
Malfoy turned his head. His eyes were the same grey they'd always been, the colour of a pewter tankard, and they did the same thing they'd always done when he was about to be cruel and had decided, at the last second, to be honest instead, which was apparently something he did now.
"No," he said. "I don't need the money."
The lift arrived. It was full of interdepartmental memos and one wizard from Magical Games and Sports who took one look at the two of them, went pale, and got out on the wrong floor.
"He's going to tell everyone," Harry said.
"Good. Saves us the press release."
The flat was above a tobacconist's that had stopped selling tobacco around the time Harry was born. The stairs smelled of old pipe smoke and something chemical underneath it, like burnt sugar. There were two locks, one Muggle, one magical, and a third that Malfoy discovered by touching the doorframe and hissing.
"Somebody's left a Sneakoscope in the lintel," he said. "Buried. Charmed to stay quiet unless whoever lives here starts lying."
"Is that bad?"
"It's Knockturn Alley, Potter. Everything's bad. It's a question of how." He drew his wand, hawthorn and unicorn hair, and Harry felt an odd pang at the sight of it, because he'd won that wand from him once in a manor drawing room and given it back years later without ceremony, posted to Wiltshire in brown paper. Malfoy had never written back. Harry had told himself he hadn't expected him to.
Malfoy tapped the lintel twice and muttered a counter-charm Harry didn't know. Something inside the wood whined, very faintly, and went still.
"Show-off," said Harry.
"You're welcome."
The flat opened onto a kitchen the size of a broom cupboard, a sitting room with one window facing the alley, and a short corridor with two doors.
The first door opened on a bathroom with a claw-footed tub and a mirror that said, in a bored voice, "Oh, wonderful. Men."
The second door opened on a bedroom with one bed.
It was not a big bed. It was the sort of bed that existed in landlords' imaginations as a double and in reality as a single with ambitions. There was a wardrobe, a chair with a broken leg, and a window that looked out over a row of chimney pots.
Harry looked at the bed. Malfoy looked at the bed. The bed, which was clearly enchanted against damp and nothing else, looked back at them both.
"The lease said two bedrooms," Malfoy said.
"Maybe it's counting the bath."
"I'm not sleeping in the bath."
"I didn't ask you to sleep in the bath. I'll take the sofa."
Malfoy narrowed his eyes. "That's suspiciously gallant."
"It's not gallant. I've slept in a tent in a forest for a year. A sofa's luxury." Harry went back to the sitting room and dropped onto it to prove the point. The sofa sagged under him with a groan like a dying Hippogriff, and a spring went off somewhere near his left kidney. He refused to react.
Malfoy watched from the doorway with his arms folded.
"You're in pain," he said.
"I'm comfortable."
"Your eye's watering."
"It's the pipe smoke."
"There's no pipe smoke. The pipe smoke left in 1979." Malfoy considered him for a long moment, and then something in his face loosened, just a little. It wasn't a smile. It was the place a smile would go, if he let it. "Fine. We'll rotate. Odd nights you get the sofa. Even nights I do. I'm not having the Chosen One file a workplace injury claim in our first week. Robards would put it on my record."
"That's very generous of you."
"I know. It's my new thing. Generosity. I'm told it's good for the soul." He crossed to the window and drew the curtain an inch. "Come and look at this, Potter."
Harry got up, the spring making a noise of protest, and went to stand next to him. The alley below was dark and narrow, all crooked shopfronts and lamps that burned green. Directly across from them stood number nine: three storeys of blackened brick, windows boarded over, a faded sign that read ORR & SONS — FINE CURIOS AND RARE APPOINTMENTS. Ivy had grown over the door. Nobody had been in or out in nine years. It said so in the file, in three different hands.
Behind the boards on the second floor, a light was moving.
It was small and steady, the bluish glow of a Lumos held low, and it crossed from one end of the window to the other the way a person walks when they know exactly where they're going.
Harry felt Malfoy go very still beside him. He could smell his cologne, something sharp and expensive, vetiver and smoke. He could feel the warmth coming off his shoulder through two layers of scarlet wool.
"Well," Malfoy said softly. "So much for nobody getting killed reading."
The light stopped. It hung there for a moment, in the middle of the boarded window, as if whoever held it had turned to look across the alley.
Then it went out.