Chapter 1: The Wrong Moon
The worst thing about being right is that people stop checking your work.
You have been right for four years. You were right in the spring of 2002, when you stood up in Courtroom Ten at twenty-three, the youngest counsel the Ministry had ever let lead a capital prosecution, and told the Wizengamot that Mattheo Riddle had killed a clerk named Bartholomew Pyke on the steps of a Knockturn Alley stationer's with a curse his father made famous. You were right when the Priori Incantatem came back green. You were right when the witness's memory swam silver in the Pensieve and forty-nine witches and wizards watched a dark-haired young man in a black coat raise his wand and say the words.
You were so right that Wigmore Court gave you a room with a window.
The window looks out over the hidden end of Fleet Street, where the wizarding Inn of Court has stood since the Statute of Secrecy, squeezed between a Muggle bank and a sandwich shop that pretends not to see it. It is raining. It is always raining in November, and you are eating a cold pasty over a brief about a disputed hippogriff when the fire in your grate turns green and someone steps out of it without knocking.
"You've moved," says Mattheo Riddle, brushing soot from his sleeve. "Your old office had a damp patch shaped like Wales. I used to think about it."
You do not drop the pasty. You would like that noted.
He is taller than he was in the dock. Or he is standing up straight, which Azkaban did not encourage. His hair is the same dark mess of curls, longer now, pushed back from a face that has lost the last of its softness and gained a fine white scar through the left eyebrow. The coat is new, black wool, Muggle-cut, the kind of thing a person buys on their first afternoon of freedom with Galleons they have not counted. His eyes are brown. You remember being surprised by that at the trial. Everyone expected red.
"Mr Riddle." Your wand is already in your hand, under the desk, where he can't see it. "This is a private room. The Floo is keyed."
"It's keyed to Ministry fireplaces. I came from one." He looks around: the shelves, the robes on the hook, the framed copy of the Wizengamot's verdict that your head of chambers hung there and you have never had the nerve to take down. His mouth does something complicated when he sees it. "Kingsley let me borrow his. He's very accommodating this week. I think he feels guilty."
"The Minister doesn't feel guilty. He signs clemency orders when the Dementors are gone and the cells are full and the Prophet needs a story about mercy."
"You read about it, then."
You read about it on Tuesday, standing in the queue at the Ministry café with a cup of tea going cold in your hand. RIDDLE HEIR FREED UNDER POST-WAR AMNESTY. Below the headline, a photograph of him walking out of the ferry house on the North Sea, squinting at a white sky like it had insulted him. You had read the article twice and then thrown the cup away full.
"I read that you were pardoned," you say. "Congratulations. You'll want to leave by the door. The Floo will charge you for the return."
He doesn't move. He pulls your client chair out from the desk, turns it around, and sits with his arms folded across the back of it, like a man settling in at a pub. His knuckles are chapped. There's a thin band of paler skin around his left wrist where the cuff sat for four years.
"I don't want a pardon," he says.
"You've got one."
"A pardon says I did it and the Ministry has decided to be nice about it." He tilts his head. "I've had four years to think about the difference between forgiven and innocent, counsel. Turns out it's the whole thing. I petitioned the Wizengamot for a retrial on Monday. Kingsley's pardon doesn't stop me asking. The Chief Warlock granted it this morning."
You put the pasty down. "On what grounds?"
"New evidence."
"There is no new evidence. I had every scrap of evidence. I had your wand, your movements, a witness who watched you do it."
"You had a memory," he says. "Somebody else's memory, which you poured into a basin and showed to a room full of people who wanted very badly for me to be my father." He says it lightly. It is not light. "And now I want you to defend me."
There is a gap where your next sentence should be.
"No," you say, when it arrives.
"You haven't heard the fee."
"I prosecuted you. I'm the reason you spent four years on a rock. There are two hundred barristers in this Inn and every one of them would take your Galleons and your headlines. Go and knock on one of their fireplaces."
"I don't want two hundred barristers. I want the one who knows the case better than anybody alive." He leans forward. "You built it. You'll know where it's weak."
"It isn't weak."
"Then you'll lose, and you can tell everyone at the Christmas party that you put me away twice." There it is, a quick, crooked smirk, gone before you can decide whether it was charming or obnoxious. "Come on. That's a good story."
You look at him for a long moment. Four years ago he did not speak at his own trial except to say his name and that he was not guilty. He sat in the chained chair in the centre of Courtroom Ten and watched you. Not the Wizengamot, not the gallery full of reporters and widows and people who had lost someone at Hogwarts and wanted a Riddle to answer for it. You. Every time you stood, you felt his eyes land on you like a hand on the back of your neck. You had told yourself it was hatred. You had built your closing around it.
"Why would I possibly do this?" you ask.
He reaches into his coat and sets a small glass vial on your desk. Inside, something silver turns over on itself like smoke in a jar.
"Because of the moon," he says.
You don't own a Pensieve. Wigmore Court has one, a heavy stone thing on a stand in the library, which members are meant to book through the porter. You don't book it. You take the vial and your wand down three flights of stairs with Mattheo Riddle walking half a step behind you, and when old Pennyfeather at the porter's desk sees who is following you he opens his mouth, shuts it again, and becomes very interested in his crossword.
"He knows who I am," Mattheo murmurs.
"Everyone knows who you are. Keep your hands where I can see them."
"You're the one with the wand."
"Yes," you say. "That's my point."
The library is empty at this hour, all green lamps and leather spines. You uncork the vial over the basin and the memory pours out in a thin, bright ribbon. You know before you lean in which one it is. You have watched it perhaps two hundred times. You watched it so often in the spring of 2002 that you started seeing it when you closed your eyes.
"This is a copy," you say. "The original is in the Ministry evidence vault."
"It's an exact copy. Theo's cousin works in the Department of Mysteries. He owed me." He stands at your shoulder, not quite touching. "Watch it again. Not me. The sky."
You put your face into the silver and fall.
Knockturn Alley at night. Wet cobbles. The witness, Delphine Marsh, a records clerk in a plum-coloured coat, is walking home with a bag of shopping, and you see what she saw: the stationer's lamp, the sign for Borgin and Burkes down the hill, Bartholomew Pyke standing on the steps fiddling with his keys. A man in black coming out of the dark between two buildings. The wand. The light. Pyke falling in a way that you have never once watched without your stomach turning.
You have always watched the man in black. Everyone has. This time you lift your eyes, the way he told you to, above the crooked roofline to the strip of sky over the alley.
There is a moon. It's a thin crescent, hanging low, bright as a fingernail clipping.
You come up out of the basin so fast you nearly lose your footing. Mattheo's hand closes on your elbow, steadies you, and lets go immediately.
"Pyke died on the twenty-seventh of June, 2001," you say.
"Yes."
"It was a full moon." You know it was a full moon. You know because the Auror report noted a werewolf alert in the Muggle borough next to Knockturn that same night, and you'd had to argue it was irrelevant. "The almanac. There'll be an almanac in here."
There is. It takes you four minutes to find the right year and your hands are not quite steady as you turn the pages. June 2001. A little drawn circle beside the date, inked solid silver.
Full.
You look up. He's leaning on the end of the stack, watching you with an expression you can't read, the lamp throwing half his face into shadow.
"Somebody put her in the wrong night," he says quietly. "Or they built that whole alley from scratch and couldn't be bothered to check the sky. Either way, it's not a memory. It's a drawing of one."
"A tampered memory leaves signs. The Ministry examiners would have found—"
"The Ministry examiners found what they were asked to find. You know that. You've cross-examined enough of them." He pushes away from the shelf. "I didn't kill Pyke. I've never killed anybody. I was in the Hog's Head that night drinking with Theo Nott, and three people saw me, and none of them were willing to say it in a courtroom with my surname being read out. I don't blame them. I wouldn't have either."
"Then why ask me? If you think I sent an innocent man to Azkaban—"
"I don't think you knew." His voice changes there, goes careful. "I watched you for six weeks. You believed every word you said. People who are lying look at the jury. You never did." He pauses. "You looked at me."
Heat climbs your neck and you turn back to the almanac so he won't see it.
"Your retrial," you say. "When?"
"Three weeks Friday."
"That's not enough time."
"I know." He doesn't sound sorry. "So you'll do it?"
You don't answer. You close the almanac, walk to the long table under the window where the evidence logs for old Wigmore Court cases are kept, and pull the box marked R v RIDDLE, 2002. You have not opened it since the verdict. Dust comes off the lid. Inside, under your trial notes, is the custody record for the memory vial: every person who handled it between Delphine Marsh's head and the Pensieve in Courtroom Ten, signed and dated.
You run your finger down the column.
D. Marsh, donor. C. Wren, Senior Counsel, received. A Ministry examiner's mark. And then, on the second of March 2002, the morning before the vial went to court, a set of initials in a hand you know better than your own.
Yours. You signed for it. You have no memory, none at all, of ever doing so.