Chapter 207: The Telephone Box

Draco had propped himself against the edge of the table with his arms folded, and for all that his hair was in its usual perfect order there was nothing composed about his eyebrows.

"The Ministry is run by clerks who have never done anything difficult in their lives, and Umbridge is the worst of them because she has made a career out of agreeing with Fudge." He had dropped his voice, and the pure-blood drawl was still there, and so was the worry underneath it. "So do not go at them straight. I wrote to my father last night. He will lean on everybody the family can reach, and if the whole thing turns, you use the mirror and I will have an elf at the Wizengamot inside the hour."

There was a knock at the stone door before Edward could answer, and it was the wrong kind of knock: measured, polite, three times and no more, which no Slytherin has ever knocked in the history of the house.

The seventh-year on the door frowned, opened it, and stopped frowning. The man outside wore light brown linen robes under a heavy grey wool cloak, with a stack of documents under one arm, and he had the look of somebody who had spent the previous evening reading rather than sleeping.

"Edward. Are you ready?" Lupin nodded courteously to the boy on the door before he said it. "Professor Dumbledore has already spoken to Magical Law Enforcement. I would rather we were finished before noon, because the afternoon brings the crowds and it brings the press."

Slytherin as a house does not warm to staff from outside it. They made room for him anyway, because his reputation as a teacher had outlived his year, and because every one of them understood exactly what he was here to be.

Draco moved across so that he stood at Edward's shoulder, and looked Lupin over with the frank appraisal of a family that has been assessing people for eight hundred years.

"Professor. The chance that the Ministry intends to make this difficult is close to certain. I want your word that they will not handle him like something rare they have been allowed to take out of a case."

Lupin took no visible offence. He drew out a letter carrying Dumbledore's own signature and the school crest, the gilt writing turning slowly over the parchment, and handed it across.

"You have my word, Malfoy. I have been through every regulation governing Animagus registration, and I have brought the three separate purity findings the Hospital Wing has issued on him in the last month." His voice did not rise anywhere. "I will not leave his side from the door to the street, and nothing will be done to him that the law does not permit."

Edward closed his satchel and put a hand briefly on Draco's shoulder.

"I will hold the line and I will be back tonight. Stop arranging my rescue."

"Wear the gloves. The whole time." Draco stepped aside without looking any happier about it. "If anything moves that should not, put your magic into them first and ask questions afterwards."

The corridors were still nearly empty. First and second years were drifting toward the Great Hall in twos and threes, and their boots made a soft irregular noise on the flags, and nobody looked twice at a champion and a former professor going the other way.

Lupin waited until the stair had taken them out of earshot.

"I went through the revised procedure again last night. Umbridge has spent a fortnight talking into Fudge's ear about the risk of an Animagus form that appears in no record, and she has been talking loudly. She will very likely handle you herself. She may also have arranged for the Department of Mysteries to be in the room, which would not be an accident."

"The three findings, and Madam Pomfrey's record of the antidote after the lake, are copied, duplicated and sealed under the school's authority. Between them they establish that there is nothing dark anywhere in you." He stopped on the landing and took a silver crystal the size of a thumbnail out of the outer pocket of his bag. "And this goes on the strap of your satchel. It keeps a record of everything said and done in front of you. If they step outside the law today, the Wizengamot will not have to take our word for what happened."

"I will do the statutory transformation and nothing else." Edward's voice had no particular heat in it, which was what made it sound settled. "No blood. No demonstration of what I can do in a fight. No samples of anything kept."

"That is precisely the line." Something like approval went through Lupin's face. "Hold it and say nothing further. Every argument that follows is mine."

At the oak front doors the winter came in at them with fine snow riding on it, and the cold went straight through to the cheekbones. Lupin fastened the ties of Edward's cloak himself, went through the satchel one more time, counted the files and the two small phials against a list he had evidently made, and only then set off down toward the village.

The Three Broomsticks was warm and smelled of butterbeer and woodsmoke, and Madam Rosmerta was fully occupied at the far end of the bar. The two of them did not stop for anything. They went straight through to the Floo grate behind the counter.

Edward pulled his robes closer. Lupin checked the scrolls one final time, and for a moment the mildness went out of him entirely and what was left underneath was somebody who had read the statute book properly.

"Fudge is frightened of any magic he cannot put in a drawer, and Umbridge has built a career on feeding that. Today will not be pleasant. You give them the basic verification and nothing more, and you leave every obstruction to me."

He took a pinch of powder and threw it, and the fire went emerald and roared up the flue. They stepped in one after the other and said where they were going, and the green took them.

They came out in a red telephone box on a London street with Muggle traffic going past four feet away. Lupin lifted the receiver and dialled six two four four two, and the box sank into the pavement without anybody outside it appearing to notice, down through a long cold passage in the stone, and opened at last into the Ministry's hall.

The floor was polished dark to a mirror and the ceiling carried gilded chandeliers, and the whole place smelled of ink and old parchment. Wizards crossed it in dark identical robes at a pace that suggested none of them was going anywhere they wanted to be, and the cold of the building had nothing to do with the weather.

The trouble began before they were properly off the marble.

Two men in Ministry security uniform came in from either side and closed on them, and neither would meet anybody's eye, and both of them were plainly working from instructions. The detectors in their hands went over Edward from collar to boot and then went over him again, and showed no sign of stopping.

"Secondary confirmation of identity. Declare every magical item on your person, itemised, no omissions." The one with the narrow chin said it in the flat voice of a man reciting, and his eyes had fixed on Edward's cuffs and stayed there. "That accessory on the wrist. Remove it now for full examination."

Lupin stepped across in front of Edward before Edward had moved at all.

"Those are private protective items and they fall squarely under Article Twenty-Three of the Privacy Act. They are not within the scope of a security check for an Animagus registration, and you know that, because it is written on the form you were given this morning." He turned his wand over and a scroll carrying the Wizengamot's seal unrolled itself in the air between them, the legal text standing out in gold. "Your search has already gone past your authority. Continue and I will lodge a complaint with Magical Law Enforcement before we leave this floor, with your names on it."

The colour went out of both faces and something worse arrived in its place. The detectors came down. Under the sideways attention of every clerk crossing the hall, the two of them stood back and let them through, and did it very slowly to preserve what they could.

They had not gone three paces when Lupin's head turned.

There had been the smallest disturbance in the air beside one of the columns, no more than a seam in the light, and his wrist moved before Edward had registered it.

The Revealing Charm went out clean and a pale blue ring broke around the column, and Rita Skeeter came out of nothing with her camera already falling. It hit the marble and the plate box sprang open, and everything she had taken that morning went white in the daylight.

She was in the fluorescent green again, with the paste jewels all down the front of it and her powder cracking along the lines of her face, and she was frightened and covering it with volume.

 

"How dare you. I hold a licence, I write for the Daily Prophet, and I have every right to photograph a public figure of the wizarding world -"

"You have a right to request an interview and to be refused." Lupin's voice had gone completely flat. He flicked his wand and what was left in the camera turned to silver ash and drifted down onto the marble. A pale gold mark settled on her shoulder for a moment and faded. "Photographing a minor under a Disillusionment Charm is not journalism, it is an offence, and it is one I will report. Do this again inside this building and I will apply to have your card withdrawn and put a suit for defamation in front of the Wizengamot on the same afternoon."

Rita's mouth worked and nothing came out of it. She gathered up the wreck of the camera without any of her usual composure, gave Edward one long poisonous look, and went into the crowd.

A clerk in pale grey who had been standing a little too near her for a little too long discovered urgent business in a side corridor and was gone before Lupin's eyes found him. That, Edward thought, was how the paper always seemed to know things a day before anybody else did.