Chapter 3: Courtroom Ten
Cassius Wren has always been a kind man to have in your corner. He took you on as a pupil when nobody else at Wigmore Court would look at a half-blood with a scholarship and a Muggle accent. He taught you to stand still when you speak, to never ask a witness a question you can't answer yourself, and to drink your tea black because milk makes you look like you have time to spare. He gave you the Riddle case. He sat behind you every day of it, and when the verdict came in, he squeezed your shoulder and said, "That's a career made, my dear."
He doesn't get up when you come in. He holds the satsuma peel up to the lamp as though it's something interesting.
"Your client has peculiar habits," he says.
"He's not a client you need to worry about."
"Oh, I do worry. I'm prosecuting the retrial myself. Couldn't trust it to anyone else." He sets the peel down very gently on your desk. "I came as a friend. You signed that custody log on the second of March. You'll have seen it by now. If Granger and that old fool in Diagon Alley persuade the Wizengamot the memory was altered, the very next question will be who altered it. And there's your name, right at the bottom."
You stay standing. Your coat is dripping on the floorboards.
"I don't remember signing it," you say.
"No," says Wren pleasantly. "You wouldn't."
It takes you a second. Then the room goes very cold, colder than the rain, and you understand that he has just told you everything and that he knows there's nothing you can do with it. A barrister's word against the Head of Magical Prosecutions, on a log with your own initials on it.
"Withdraw," he says. "Plead illness. Hand the Riddle boy to some junior who'll lose politely. He keeps his pardon, you keep your window, and in six months nobody remembers any of this." He rises, buttons his coat, and pauses at the door. "You were always my best, you know. Don't make me sorry I taught you."
When he's gone you sit down on the floor beside the map of Knockturn Alley, because your knees have decided it, and you stay there for a long time, looking at the red string.
You don't sleep. At four in the morning you write a letter to Hermione Granger, and at seven you write a second, shorter one to Mattheo, and at nine you walk into the Ministry with a small glass vial of your own in your pocket.
The retrial opens three weeks later in Courtroom Ten.
It's the same room. Dungeon-dark, the stone walls sweating, the benches rising in tiers on every side, the Wizengamot in their plum robes with the silver W stitched on the breast. The same chained chair in the middle of the floor, although the chains don't move when Mattheo sits in it. He's wearing the black coat, his hair as tidy as it gets, and before he sits he turns and looks for you, and you feel it on the back of your neck exactly the way you did four years ago.
It isn't hatred. You know that now. You suspect you knew it then.
Cassius Wren opens for the Ministry. He is good. He's always been good. He tells the Wizengamot that the defendant's own wand cast the Killing Curse, that a sworn witness watched him do it, and that the defence's case rests on the phase of the moon and the memory of a man of extreme age who sells sticks for a living. A few of the older members laugh. Wren lets them.
Then you stand up.
You call Garrick Ollivander first. He totters to the witness chair with his hands folded and spends twenty minutes describing the grain of blackthorn to a room that, by the end, would follow him anywhere. "This," he says, laying the evidence wand on the rail, "is not the wand I sold to Mr Riddle. I would stake my shop on it. I would stake my life on it, though I appreciate it is not worth what it was."
You call Theodore Nott, who is twenty-six and elegant and visibly furious to be there, and who confirms in a flat, bored drawl that he spent the night of the twenty-seventh of June 2001 losing at Exploding Snap to the defendant in the Hog's Head and that the defendant "cheats, actually, but not at murder."
You call Aberforth Dumbledore.
He stomps into the courtroom smelling of goat and sits in the witness chair without being asked. When Wren objects to his evidence on the grounds that the Hog's Head is not known for its accurate record-keeping, Aberforth turns his blue eyes on him and says, "I've had a Riddle in my pub before. Different one. Tall, polite, nasty. I know the difference. This lad tips well and he's never once been rude to my goats." He jabs a finger at Mattheo. "He was at my bar till two. I'd have said so four years ago if anyone had bothered to ask me, but they didn't, did they? Too busy wanting a villain."
The gallery murmurs. Someone at the back says something sharp and is shushed.
Then you show them the moon.
You do it with the Ministry's own almanac and the Ministry's own Auror report about a werewolf alert, and you do it slowly, the way Wren taught you. You let the Wizengamot look into the silver basin and see the thin crescent hanging over Knockturn Alley on a night when the sky over London was full and white. You watch them lift their faces out of the Pensieve one after another with the same expression you must have had in the library, as though the floor tilted.
It isn't enough. You can see it isn't. Wren rises for his reply and says, mildly, that a memory can be clumsy without being false, that Miss Marsh may have mixed two nights in her mind, and that the court will no doubt wish to know why defence counsel herself signed for this evidence on the morning before it was shown.
There it is. He doesn't look at you when he says it.
You stand.
"Members of the Wizengamot," you say. "I would like to give evidence."
Wren turns, finally. Mattheo's head comes up.
"I'm aware it's irregular. I'm aware that I'm counsel in this case. But my signature is on the custody record for the memory you've just seen, and I have no recollection of signing it. Three weeks ago I asked an Unspeakable from the Department of Mysteries to examine my own memories of the second of March 2002. I have her report. And I have this." You take the small glass vial out of your robes and hold it up, the way you once held up a wand. "I'm asking the court to look."
The Chief Warlock is silent for a long moment. Then she nods.
You pour your own memory into the basin. You don't watch them watch it. You've seen it already, in the Unspeakable's office, with Hermione Granger holding your hand so hard she left marks: the morning of the second of March, your old room with the damp patch shaped like Wales, Cassius Wren leaning over your desk with the custody log and a quill. "Just a formality, my dear, sign here." And then his wand, raised, and his kind voice saying Obliviate, and a grey, smudged hole where the rest of that morning should be. The Unspeakable said whoever did it was very skilled and very sure no one would ever look.
When the last member of the Wizengamot surfaces from the basin, the courtroom is so quiet you can hear the water drip down the walls.
Wren is on his feet. He's saying something about Legilimency and fabrication and the defendant's notorious family. He's still saying it when the doors at the back of Courtroom Ten open and Head Auror Harry Potter walks in with two of his people, looking tired and entirely unsurprised, and asks Cassius Wren very politely to hand over his wand.
The verdict takes eleven minutes.
Not guilty. Unanimous. The Chief Warlock adds, in a voice that carries to the top bench, that the court records its regret, and that the matter of how an innocent man came to spend one thousand four hundred and sixty-one days in Azkaban will be referred to the Minister for Magic in the strongest possible terms. The gallery explodes. Reporters run for the lifts. Theo Nott vaults a bench, which you would not have predicted. Aberforth Dumbledore leaves without speaking to anyone.
You don't see Mattheo stand up. One second he's in the chair and the next he's in front of you, and you're both just standing there in the middle of the floor while the room roars around you.
"You gave them your own memory," he says.
"Somebody had to."
"You could've lost your licence. They could've charged you."
"I know."
"Why would you—" He stops. He doesn't finish it.
You walk out together. You take the lift up to the Atrium in a crush of Wizengamot members who pretend not to stare, and you walk past the fountain and its plaque and the golden gates, and neither of you speaks. You keep walking. You go up through the visitors' entrance, the old red telephone box that rises out of the pavement onto a grubby side street in Whitehall, and it's raining, of course it's raining, and the box is too small for two people and you're both in it anyway, wet coats pressed together, the glass fogging.
"Welcome to London," says the cool voice of the telephone. "Thank you for visiting the Ministry of Magic."
Mattheo laughs. It's the first time you've heard him really laugh, unguarded, and it's a good sound, low and a bit rough from disuse.
"I didn't do the speech," he says.
"The speech you wrote on the rock."
"One thousand four hundred and sixty-one days of drafts." He's very close. You can see the white scar through his eyebrow and a few drops of rain caught in his curls. "It was mostly about how I was going to make you sorry. Then about halfway through it turned into something else and I couldn't work out how to stop it."
"Into what?"
He looks at you for a long time, and you think, distantly, that he has been looking at you like this since the first day of the first trial, across a dungeon full of people who wanted him dead, and that you have spent four years and three weeks pretending you didn't know what it meant.
"You looked at me," he says quietly. "The whole six weeks. You never looked at the jury once. I thought about that every single night."
"I was trying to work out if you'd done it."
"And?"
"And I got it wrong." Your voice catches. "I'm so sorry. I got it so wrong."
"You got it right in the end," he says. "That's the bit I care about."
You don't know who moves first. Probably you. You'd like to think it was you. His hand comes up to your jaw, cold from the rain, very careful, as though he's still not sure he's allowed to touch anything he wants, and you lean up and close the last bit of space and kiss him in a phone box in Whitehall with the rain hammering on the roof. He makes a small, startled sound against your mouth. Then he kisses you back like he's been rehearsing for four years, which, you suppose, he has.
When you break apart the glass is completely fogged. Somebody has written a backwards heart in it with one finger, and you're fairly sure it wasn't you.
"Counsel," he says, rough, in that voice.
"I told you to stop calling me that."
"I only agreed to two out of three," says Mattheo Riddle, and kisses you again.
Outside, on the wet pavement, an owl lands on the roof of the box with a scroll tied to its leg. It's sealed in black wax. It's addressed to both of you. And stamped across the front, in the Minister's own hand, are the words: URGENT. REGARDING MR RIDDLE'S MOTHER.