Chapter 2: Prior Incantato
You take the case on three conditions, which you write on the back of a hippogriff brief and slide across the library table at half past eleven that night.
One: he tells you the truth, all of it, including the parts that make him look bad.
Two: he stops arriving by fireplace.
Three: he stops calling you counsel in that voice.
Mattheo reads the list, picks up your quill without asking, and puts a neat tick beside the first two. Beside the third he writes, in small, slanted letters, What voice?
"That one," you say. "The one you're doing right now without saying anything."
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're doing it with your eyebrows."
He touches the scarred one, as if checking it's still there. "Two out of three," he says, and pockets the list, and that is how you end up representing the son of Lord Voldemort.
By the end of the first week your room at Wigmore Court looks like a crime scene. There are copies of the Auror reports pinned to the shelves. There is a map of Knockturn Alley spread across the floor with the stationer's marked in red ink, and a second map of Hogsmeade with the Hog's Head marked in green, and string between them, because you think better with string. There is a tin of biscuits that Pennyfeather started leaving outside your door on the third day, without comment, after he worked out that Mattheo Riddle was going to keep walking past his desk at eight every morning and saying "Morning, Mr Pennyfeather" as though they were old friends.
"He's warming to me," Mattheo says, eating the biscuits.
"He's sleeping with a Sneakoscope under his pillow."
"That's a kind of warmth."
He eats like someone who has been hungry for a long time and has decided never to be again. Biscuits, toast, an entire paper bag of satsumas you bring in on Wednesday because you see him look at the fruit stall on Fleet Street the way other men look at racing brooms. He peels each one in a single unbroken strip and lines the peels up along your windowsill, a row of small orange spirals drying in the cold.
"Four years," he says, when he catches you watching. "They give you porridge and a vitamin potion that tastes like a drain. You forget there are colours you can eat."
You don't know what to say to that, so you hand him another file.
He works harder than any client you have ever had, which is not saying much, since most of your clients are wizards suing their neighbours over boundary hedges. But he reads every page you give him. He reads the Auror reports twice. He reads the trial transcript, all six hundred pages of it, sitting cross-legged on your floor with his back to the radiator, and doesn't say a word until he gets to your closing speech, at which point he laughs out loud.
"What?"
"'The defendant has his father's eyes,'" he reads. "'And, members of the Wizengamot, I put it to you that he has his father's—'"
"I know what I said."
"My father had red eyes. Slit pupils. Mine are brown." He looks up at you over the transcript. "Did you not notice, or did you think nobody would check?"
"It was a metaphor."
"It was a cheap shot."
"It was a cheap shot," you agree, and it comes out more quietly than you intended. He watches you for a moment and then goes back to reading, and doesn't bring it up again, which is somehow worse.
On Thursday you go to the Ministry.
You've arranged it through the one person in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement who you think will hear the words "tampered evidence" and feel curious rather than defensive. Hermione Granger meets you at the security desk in the Atrium, beside the new fountain, which replaced the golden statues after the war and is now just water and light and a plaque with too many names on it. She is twenty-six, the same age as your client, and has the brisk, slightly harried look of someone who runs half a department and is technically in charge of none of it. Her hair is pinned up with what appears to be a quill.
She shakes your hand. Then she looks at Mattheo.
"Riddle."
"Granger."
"You look well."
"You look like you haven't slept since 1997."
"I haven't, much." She considers him for a long moment, unsmiling. "I read your petition. If you've wasted my afternoon I'll have you back on that ferry by teatime, pardon or no pardon."
"Fair," says Mattheo, and to your surprise he sounds like he means it.
The evidence vault is on Level Two, past the Improper Use of Magic Office, behind a door that recognises Granger's wand and nobody else's. Inside, it's cold and very orderly. She pulls two boxes from a shelf: a small sealed crate holding the original memory vial, and a long narrow one holding a wand.
You've seen the wand before. You held it up in court. Blackthorn, eleven and a half inches, dragon heartstring, according to the Ministry's registry. Dark wood, almost black, with a plain handle worn smooth.
Mattheo looks at it and goes very still.
"Go on," says Granger. "Prior Incantato."
You lift your own wand and touch its tip to the blackthorn. "Prior Incantato."
The ghosts of spells come off it in reverse order, the way they did at the trial: a thin jet of green light first, then a Lumos, a Scouring Charm, a Summoning Charm. It's exactly what you showed the court. The last spell this wand ever cast was the Killing Curse.
"That's not mine," Mattheo says.
Granger frowns. "The registry—"
"It's blackthorn and dragon heartstring, I know. So was mine. Same length, too. Whoever got this was careful." He doesn't reach for it. His hands are in his coat pockets and you have the sense he's keeping them there on purpose. "Mine had a chip out of the handle, just below the grip. Right here." He touches the side of his own thumb. "Theo and I were playing Exploding Snap in the Hog's Head the spring after the war and I threw it across the room when he cheated. It hit the fireplace. Aberforth made me pay for the grate."
You look at the handle. Smooth. Unbroken.
"The trial record doesn't mention a chip," you say slowly.
"Nobody asked me."
"You didn't tell anybody."
"I was twenty-two and my surname was Riddle and I'd just found out how much everyone hated me," he says evenly. "I didn't think a chip in a bit of wood was going to save me."
Granger is already moving. She has the wand back in its box and the box under her arm. "There's one person in Britain who'd know," she says, "and he hasn't been to the Ministry since they let him go home. We'll go to him."
Ollivanders has been open again for three years, the window repainted, the dust allowed back in out of respect. The old man is thinner than you remember from your own first visit, when you were eleven and he told you rowan suited a person who disliked being lied to. He takes the blackthorn wand from Granger in both hands as if it might bruise.
"Ah," he says. "Yes."
He turns it over. He holds it up to the window and squints along its length.
"I sold this wand," he says. "Blackthorn and dragon heartstring. Eleven and a half inches. Unyielding. A difficult wand. Blackthorn chooses those who have been through something." His pale eyes slide to Mattheo. "I sold it in August of 1999. I remember because the young man who bought it paid in Galleons that were still warm from a Gringotts vault and would not give me his name."
"And mine?" Mattheo says.
"Yours I sold to you in 1991, Mr Riddle, on a very hot day. You were extremely rude about the chairs." Ollivander lays the wand on the counter between them. "Yours had a twin core. Yours would have fought me. This one is a stranger. I'm afraid someone has been playing dress-up with your wood."
Nobody says anything for a moment. Outside, a delivery owl lands on the sill, looks in at the four of you, and thinks better of it.
You find you're holding the edge of the counter.
"Can you swear to that?" you ask. "In front of the Wizengamot?"
"My dear," says Ollivander, "I remember every wand I have ever sold. I would be delighted to tell them so."
It's dark when you get back to Fleet Street. Granger has gone to file a sealed note with the Chief Warlock's office. Mattheo walks you to the gate of Wigmore Court with his collar up against the rain, and neither of you has said much since the wand shop.
At the gate he stops.
"You went quiet in there," he says.
"I was thinking."
"About what?"
"About the fact that I stood up in front of forty-nine people and held that wand over my head like it was a trophy." You watch the rain collect on the iron spikes. "I didn't check the handle. I didn't ask you a single question I didn't already know the answer to. I was so pleased with myself."
He's quiet for a while.
"Do you want to know what I did the night of the verdict?" he says.
You look at him.
"They took me straight to the boat. It was April, so it was still light at nine. I stood at the back the whole way across and watched the gulls follow us out. And I thought, she was really very good. I remember being almost proud of it. Like, if somebody had to do that to me, at least it was somebody brilliant." He shrugs, and rain slides off his shoulders. "I counted the days after that by the tide. One thousand four hundred and sixty-one. I had a whole speech worked out for you, by the end."
"What happened to it?"
"You were eating a pasty," he says. "It threw me."
You laugh, which you didn't expect to do, and he looks pleased about it in a way that makes something in your chest go tight and stupid. For a second neither of you moves. The rain is very loud.
"Goodnight, counsel," he says, in exactly that voice, and goes.
You stand at the gate until he's turned the corner. Then you climb the three flights to your room and find the lamp already lit and a man sitting in your client chair, turning one of Mattheo's dried satsuma peels between his fingers.
Cassius Wren, Head of Magical Prosecutions, who taught you everything you know, smiles at you kindly.
"I hear you've been to see Garrick Ollivander," he says. "Sit down. I think we should talk about that custody log."