Chapter 233: Little Hangleton

"We are going north." Edward found Kreacher in the hall. "A Muggle village called Little Hangleton. I think it is where he came back, and if I am right there may still be somebody sitting on it."

The great eyes went round and something went across them that was unmistakably fear. It lasted about a second and a half.

"Kreacher knows Little Hangleton." He drew himself up. "There were Prewetts married into a family two valleys over, and the mistress made Kreacher carry letters there twice. Kreacher can put us down outside the village."

"Outside it. Not near the house and not near the graveyard - I want to walk in and see what is there before anything knows we have arrived."

They came down in a wood on the shoulder above the village with a fine rain coming through the leaves and the light already going, though it was barely four in the afternoon. Below them Little Hangleton sat in its valley and did nothing at all. No smoke worth speaking of. Nobody on the road.

Edward put a Disillusionment Charm over both of them and then a second working on top of it, a heavier one out of the family books that muffled the fact of a person being present rather than merely the sight of them, and they went down through the trees on foot.

The house showed itself first, standing on the hill above the village where a house like that would stand: big, and built to be admired, and derelict for fifty years. The slates had gone in patches and the gardens had gone entirely.

He did not go closer than the boundary wall, and did not need to. The residue came off the place in a thin cold thread that he felt across his teeth first. Somebody had made a competent attempt at clearing it and it had not been enough, because what had been done there was heavier than whatever they had washed it with. Along the front of the house the grass had died in a band twenty feet deep, and not of winter; the stems had gone black and stayed standing.

He turned away toward the graveyard.

It lay on the far side of the village, a public plot gone to weed with a yew at one corner. He found the Riddles inside four minutes: three stones, older and better cut than anything near them, one for the son and two for the parents, all carrying the same date.

The ground in front of the largest had been opened and refilled.

It had been done carefully. The turf had been lifted in a piece and put back and the edges pressed down, and if a person had not been looking for exactly this he would have walked past it. Edward crouched with his fingertips an inch above the seam and let his magic go down into it, and what came back was the same cold as the house and a great deal stronger.

He stayed there a moment longer than he needed to.

He had been standing perhaps twelve feet from this spot in the dark with his magic gone and a thing in a blanket screaming at him, and he had not looked at a single headstone. He looked now. Tom Riddle. Fifty years dead, put in the ground by whatever happened in that house, and dug up again in the spring by his own son to make a body out of.

Edward found that his opinion of the man had not improved.

He went up onto the low rise that overlooked both the graveyard and the back of the house, and lay along the top of it, and made himself take his time.

The house had not been simply abandoned after the night in question. Three of the ground-floor windows had boards over them that were newer than the frames, held in place by something that was not nails. There was a path worn through the weeds in the courtyard, from the back door out toward the wall, and it had been walked more than once or twice.

"They stayed," he said, so quietly that Kreacher had to lean in. "Not long. A week, at the outside. They came back here after the graveyard, and then they went somewhere else and left it standing."

"Young master." Kreacher had a fistful of Edward's sleeve. "Kreacher's skin hurts. It hurts everywhere here. That is not a thing Kreacher says for effect."

"One more minute."

He took a small crystal phial out of his robes, unstoppered it, and spoke the collecting charm with the mouth of it turned toward the graveyard and then toward the house. Two thin threads of something grey and almost invisible came off the air and went into the glass and settled at the bottom of it like silt.

He was pushing the stopper home when the back door of the house came open.

Edward went flat.

The figure that came out into the courtyard was short and hooded and moved badly - a quick, ducking walk with the shoulders up. It went round the inside of the wall once, looking at things: the boarded windows, the corner of the outbuilding, the gate. Checking, the way a man checks a house he has been left in charge of and does not enjoy being left in charge of.

Then it went back inside and pulled the door shut.

Nobody else came out. There were no other movements anywhere in that courtyard, and no lights in any window, and the whole hill was as silent as it had been for fifty years.

One. They had left one.

"Kreacher. Now."

The elf had his wrist before he had finished the word.

The drawing room of Grimmauld Place came up around them and the smell of the place - dust and old wood and lamp oil - arrived like a blanket. Both of them stood there for a moment breathing it.

Edward sat down and put the phial on the table and looked at it.

He had been right, which was satisfying for about four seconds and then stopped being useful. Little Hangleton was where it had happened and Little Hangleton was not where he was now. The house on the hill had one nervous man in it and no reason for anybody to come back to it.

Which left the only question worth asking, and he did not have an answer to it.

Not Albania, because he had spent thirteen years in a forest and would not go back to being a thing in a wood. Not Knockturn Alley, because there were eyes in every doorway of it and half of them belonged to the Ministry. He needed a building that could hold thirty or forty people, that could not be walked into, and that no department in the country had a record of.

"Kreacher." Edward looked up. "The old books here. Do any of them list properties - the sort of thing a family keeps and does not put on any register. Hunting lodges, islands, houses in places nobody goes. Particularly the families we both know took the mark."

Kreacher's ears came forward, and something that was almost enthusiasm crossed his face. This was the one subject in the world on which he considered himself the foremost authority alive.

"The Lestranges have an island in the North Sea, but the Ministry took it in eighty-two." He counted on his fingers. "The Notts have a lodge in the Highlands, taken and then given back, which the mistress had a great deal to say about. The Averys lost both of theirs. The Rosiers - "

"Anything that was never taken. Or anything that was taken on paper and is still being used."

The elf stopped counting.

His eyes came up and there was something in them that Edward had learned to watch for, which was the particular gleam of Kreacher remembering a conversation he had overheard forty years ago while being ignored by everybody in the room.

"The Dolohovs," he said. "The mistress told Master Regulus once that the Dolohov family have a house in the mountains in Wales, and that it is under a Fidelius Charm, and that it has been under one since before the last war. The Ministry has never had it because the Ministry has never known it is there." He paused, and added, with the air of a man being scrupulous, "And the Malfoys will have somewhere besides the manor, because the Malfoys always do. But they are careful, and Kreacher was never told."

Edward sat very still.

A house in the Welsh mountains, hidden by the one charm in the world that cannot be broken from outside, held by a family that had never given anybody up and had never been searched.

It was not proof. It was the first thing in three weeks that had the right shape.

He looked at the black window and the rain coming down it, and thought that Sirius and Kingsley and Moody had spent a month turning over London, and that the answer had been sitting in the memory of a house-elf that nobody in this family had spoken to properly in twenty years.