Chapter 1: Dear Downstairs
The first note you leave him is polite. You want that on the record.
Dear Downstairs, it says, in your neatest handwriting, on a page torn from the back of your notebook. Hello! I'm the new tenant in the flat above the shop. I work from home and keep fairly regular hours. I wonder if you could possibly keep the noise down after midnight? There was a sort of howling last night, around two. Many thanks, Upstairs.
You fold it in half and push it under the shop door on your way to the Owl Post, and you feel very grown-up and neighbourly about it.
The reply is pinned to your door when you get back. It's on heavy cream paper, and the handwriting is narrow and slanted and extremely expensive-looking.
Upstairs. The howling was a first edition of Nigellus's Necromantic Miscellany, which does not respond to requests. I will, however, pass your concerns along. D. Malfoy.
You read it twice standing on the landing, holding your shopping. D. Malfoy. You look down the stairwell at the door into the back of the shop, which is shut, and has a brass plate on it you hadn't paid attention to until now. Then you go inside, put the kettle on, and sit down very slowly at your kitchen table.
You'd seen the sign over the shop when you came to view the flat. You'd thought nothing of it. There are a lot of signs on Diagon Alley, and you'd been turned down for four flats that month, and this one was clean and bright and cheap, with a big window that looks down on the street and a little fireplace connected to the Floo. The agent from Gringotts had been brisk and indifferent and hadn't once looked at you the way the other landlords had, the way people sometimes do when you say you're Muggle-born and they work out that your parents are dentists in Croydon. You'd signed the lease the same day.
D. Malfoy, Bookseller, the sign says. Secondhand and Rare.
You hadn't thought. Why would you? It's a common enough name if you've never had to think about it.
You've thought about it now.
You remember the photographs from the trials, years ago: a thin, pale young man in a grey robe, his mother's hand on his arm, flashbulbs going off in his face. You remember the headlines. You remember your own mum reading them over breakfast and asking, in her careful dentist's voice, whether those people were the reason you never talked about the war. You'd said no. It had been mostly true.
The second note is less polite.
Mr Malfoy, it says. It's 3am. Whatever you're doing down there sounds like someone strangling a Kneazle. I have a deadline. Please stop.
The reply: It's a Kneazle-skin grimoire. Very nearly the same thing. I'm being as quick as I can. D.M.
The third: It's been a week. How many cursed books can one man possibly own?
The reply: Four hundred and twelve, as of Thursday. I bought out the Flint estate. You're welcome to come and count them. D.M.
The fourth note, which you write at twenty to four on a Wednesday morning with your hair standing up and the Daily Prophet's Friday crossword still only two-thirds done, just says: I WILL HEX YOU.
There's no reply to that one. Instead, at two the next night, the howling starts again, louder than ever, a long rising wail like a banshee falling down a flight of stairs, and something inside you snaps.
You take your wand. You don't take off your dressing gown, which is an old tartan thing of your dad's with a burn mark on the sleeve, and you don't put on shoes. You go down the back stairs in your bed socks and bang on the brass-plated door with your fist.
It opens almost at once.
He's taller than you'd remembered from photographs in the Prophet, all those years ago, during the trials. He's in shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow and a waistcoat, unbuttoned, and his white-blond hair is falling into his eyes as if he's been running his hands through it for hours. He has a smear of ink along one sharp cheekbone. He's holding a large book wrapped in a tablecloth, and the book is thrashing and screaming like a cat in a sack.
"Ah," Draco Malfoy says, looking at your dressing gown, your bed socks and your wand, in that order. "Upstairs."
"It's two in the morning."
"I'm aware of the time." The book lunges in his arms and he gets an elbow over it without looking down. "I'd invite you in, but this one bites."
"I don't want to come in. I want to sleep."
"And I'd like to finish neutralising the Flint family's private library before one of these gets loose and eats somebody's cat. We all have dreams." He shifts his grip on the tablecloth. "You set the Prophet crossword."
You blink. "How do you know that?"
"You've got the Friday grid pinned to your door with your clues pencilled in the margins. I came up to pin a note on Tuesday and saw it." He says it the way someone else might say the weather's nice. "It's you, isn't it? Grindylow. The setter. Seven down last week, a dragon's breakfast, scrambled, was criminally good."
You have been setting the Daily Prophet cryptic crossword under the name Grindylow for three years. You have received, in that time, exactly four letters about it, all from the same elderly wizard in Ottery St Catchpole, who believes you're running a secret code for the Goblin Liberation Front. Nobody has ever said anything about seven down.
You are not going to let that soften you.
"If you know I set the crossword," you say, "then you know I need to think. At night. Which is when I think. Which I can't do over the sound of your Kneazle grimoire."
"Fair point." He doesn't move. Behind him, past his shoulder, you can see the shop in the low gold light of a few floating candles. It's bigger than you'd thought. Shelves floor to ceiling, packed tight, ladders on rails. Stacks of books on every flat surface. Crates along the far wall stamped with the Flint crest, rattling faintly, as if their contents are trying to get out. And by the front window, a low shelf with a hand-painted card above it that you can't read from here.
"I can put a Silencing Charm on the ceiling," he says. "I should have done it weeks ago. It never occurred to me there'd be anyone living up there who minded."
"Who was up there before?"
"No one. It's been empty since I took the place." A pause. The book in his arms has gone quiet, or perhaps just sulky. "People don't tend to queue up to live above my shop."
He says it lightly. Too lightly. You've said things in that exact tone about the four flats that turned you down.
"Well," you say. "Now somebody does. So." You point your wand, not at him, at the ceiling over his head. "Silencing Charm. Tonight."
"Tonight," he agrees. And then, with a sort of grave politeness that is somehow worse than rudeness, "Goodnight, Grindylow. Mind the third stair. It's loose."
He shuts the door.
You stand there for a long moment on the back landing in your dead father's dressing gown, which you've worn every night for two years, and it occurs to you that you've just been told off by Draco Malfoy about a stair. Then you go up, and get into bed, and lie there in the dark.
It's silent. Absolutely silent. He's done it already, the charm, from downstairs, without you even hearing the spell.
You don't sleep for another hour, which is entirely his fault.
You file the Friday crossword at nine the next morning by Floo to the Prophet's offices. Barnabas Cuffe, the editor, replies within the hour with a note that says only Clever, as usual. Who is 11 Across about?
You'd written 11 Across at four in the morning. You hadn't been entirely awake. You'd been cross, and tired, and you'd been thinking about a man in a waistcoat in a doorway, with ink on his face, saying people don't tend to queue up.
11 ACROSS: Pale shopkeeper's racket keeps neighbour up all night (6)
The answer is FERRET. It's not a very good clue, honestly. The wordplay's a bit loose. But you had liked the idea of him seeing it, if he does the crossword, which he clearly does. And you had thought, smugly, that he'd never know it was for him.
The paper comes out on Friday. Your copy is on your doormat at seven, as usual.
On top of it, folded in half, there's a sheet of heavy cream notepaper.
It says: 11 Across is unkind. It's also wrong. A racket would give you RACKET, not FERRET; your indicator's doing nothing at all. If you're going to insult me in national print, Grindylow, at least have the decency to do it properly. D.M.
And underneath, in smaller letters, as if added after some thought:
P.S. I've taken the liberty of writing you a better one.