Chapter Six: The Trophy Room Betrayal

The thing about tipping off Argus Filch, Electra discovered, was that one had to actually locate Argus Filch.

This was considerably harder than the plan had assumed. The plan had assumed that the caretaker existed in a sort of permanent availability, hovering somewhere in the corridors like weather, ready to be informed. The reality was that at twenty past eleven on a Thursday night the castle was enormous and dark and entirely empty of caretakers, and that Electra Lucia Malfoy had been walking around it in her dressing gown for eighteen minutes with a candle and a rising sense that the entire operation had been poorly scoped.

She found him eventually on the third floor, by following the cat.

The cat found her first, in fact. It came round a corner with its lamp-like eyes and stopped and looked at her, and Electra, who had spent her entire life around creatures that were much larger and much worse tempered than Mrs Norris and who had never once been frightened of an animal, said, "Oh, go away," and the cat continued to look at her, and after about four seconds Electra said, "I am going to tell you something and I should be grateful if you would convey it," which was, she reflected afterwards, the single most undignified sentence of her first term.

"Who's there?"

"It is Electra Malfoy, Mr Filch, and I have information."

Filch came up the corridor with a lamp and a face like a bag of knuckles, and he listened to the information, and the information was that two Gryffindor first years were going to be in the trophy room at midnight, and that she had this on excellent authority, and that she would prefer not to be mentioned.

"Who?" said Filch, with a terrible kind of greed.

"Potter," said Electra. "And a Weasley."

And she heard herself say the name out loud in a dark corridor to a man who was going to catch him with it, and something at the bottom of her stomach did a slow and nasty turn, and she said, before she could prevent it, "They will not be in any real trouble, will they?"

Filch's lamp came up.

"Trouble," he said, in the tone of a man savouring a word he had not been allowed to use properly in some years.

"Points," said Electra. "Points, and a letter home, and that is the end of it. That is what I am arranging. I am arranging a loss of points."

"There was a time," said Argus Filch dreamily, "when we were allowed to hang them by the wrists from the ceiling. I've still got the chains. I keep them oiled. Just in case..."

Electra Lucia Malfoy, aged eleven, stood in a dark corridor in her dressing gown and discovered that there were people in this castle who were quite scary than she was and that she did not enjoy their company at all.

"Goodnight, Mr Filch," she said, and went.

Also… She did not go back to the dungeons.

She went to an alcove on the second floor at the top of a staircase that gave a view down three corridors and across to the trophy room door, which she had scouted at six o'clock in the evening under the guise of looking for a bathroom, and she sat down on the cold stone with her knees up and her candle out and her dressing gown pulled round her ankles, and she waited.

This was, she was aware, not part of the plan.

The plan ended with the tip-off. The plan was elegant and economical and concluded at the moment the information was handed over, and any subsequent activity was superfluous and faintly embarrassing, and Electra understood all of this perfectly and continued to sit in an alcove in the dark for forty minutes with her arms round her knees.

They came at about five to twelve.

She heard them before she saw them, because there were four of them and because at least one of them was arguing in a whisper that carried the length of two corridors. She leaned out as far as she dared and saw them crossing the moonlit landing below, and she took an inventory with great speed, the way her father took an inventory of a room when he came into it.

The Weasley, as expected. Potter, as expected, with his hair standing up and his wand out and an expression of grim determination that she could see from thirty feet up and that made her stomach turn over for the second time that night.

And Granger. In a dressing gown, with her hair enormous, hissing at both of them continuously.

And, bringing up the rear at a shuffle, in pyjamas, looking as though he had been dropped out of a window, Neville Longbottom.

Electra stared.

Longbottom. Longbottom, who had been in the hospital wing that morning with a broken wrist and a jar of something for the swelling, who had come down to dinner with his arm in a sling and had been given his Remembrall back and had gone scarlet about it. Longbottom was walking into a trap at midnight behind two boys who had not invited him, and he was doing it on no legs whatsoever, and he had come anyway.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," said Electra, to the stonework.

They went into the trophy room.

She waited, with her nails in her palms, and she counted, and at eight minutes past twelve she heard Filch's voice go up like a hound, and then there was a great deal of noise, and then four children came out of the trophy room at a speed that suggested the floor had caught fire and went past underneath her alcove in a solid block of flapping dressing gowns.

They went left.

"Not left," said Electra, out loud, with enormous feeling, because left was the Charms corridor and the Charms corridor was being patrolled by Peeves on Thursdays, which everybody in Slytherin knew because Peeves had been dropping things on them from it all week.

They went left.

There was, some seconds later, an explosion of cackling and the sound of Peeves announcing at the top of his voice that students were out of bed in the Charms corridor, and then the noise moved, and then it moved again, and it moved in a direction that made Electra get up off the floor.

Because the only thing at that end of that corridor was the door on the right-hand side of the third floor.

The door on the right-hand side of the third floor had been mentioned once, at the start of term feast, by Albus Dumbledore, in a sentence containing the words a most painful death, and Electra had written home about it, and her father had written back a short letter containing the phrase do not under any circumstances, which was the only piece of parental advice she had received all term that she had intended to follow.

She stood at the top of the staircase with her heart going.

She was aware of about four things simultaneously. 

The first was that she could go down there. 

The second was that if she went down there she would be found out of bed on the third floor at midnight by a caretaker who kept oiled chains, and would be in exactly as much trouble as the people she had arranged this for. 

The third was that she had arranged this. And the fourth, which arrived last and which she disliked most, was that she had arranged it on the assumption that a trap was a thing with points in it, and that the castle appeared to have supplied a different sort.

She got three steps down the staircase.

And then a door slammed somewhere below, and there was a long moment of nothing, and then she heard, quite distinctly, at a considerable distance, four people screaming.

Then feet. A great many feet, going fast, away.

Electra sat down on the staircase.

She sat there for a while with her chin on her knees. In due course, from somewhere below, she heard Filch going up the other way, muttering, and the cat went past at the bottom of the stairs and did not look up, and the castle settled back into itself.

They had got out. That was clear from the direction of the feet. They had got out and gone up and they were almost certainly in a tower somewhere at this exact moment telling each other about it with their faces shining, which Electra could picture with such complete and infuriating accuracy that she had to put her forehead on her knees.

"I am going to bed," she announced, to the staircase.

She got back to the dungeons at twenty to one by a route that took eleven minutes longer than necessary because she got turned around on the ground floor, and she got into bed with cold feet, and she lay there.

"Well?" said Pansy Parkinson, from three beds along, wide awake.

"Well what?”

"Did it work?"

"Obviously it worked," said Electra. "It worked perfectly. The entire thing went exactly as designed and I expect they will have lost a substantial quantity of points by breakfast, and I do not propose to discuss it further. Because I am above such things, hmph."

There was a pause of about fifteen seconds.

"You were gone an hour and a half," said Pansy.

"The castle is large."

"You went to watch."

"I went to confirm the outcome."

"You went to watch," said Pansy Parkinson, "because you wanted to see his face when he realised you hadn't come, and I bet you didn't even see his face, did you?"

Electra lay in the dark with her eyes open.

"Goodnight, Pansy," she said.

In the morning, Gryffindor had not lost a single point.

Electra established this before she had sat down, by the straightforward method of looking at the hourglasses in the entrance hall, which she did at a brisk walk without breaking stride and which she subsequently described to Crabbe as having been an accident of eyeline.

The hourglasses said Gryffindor forty-two. They had said forty-two on Wednesday.

"That is not possible," she said at breakfast.

"What isn't?" said Theodore Nott.

"Uh, eh… nothing."

She watched the doors. At a quarter past eight the doors admitted the usual Gryffindor flood, in the middle of which were three people walking very close together with their heads down, talking in a huddle, and that was new, because on Wednesday there had been two of them and the Granger girl had been eating at the other end of the table behind a book with the specific posture of somebody who had not been invited anywhere.

Now there were three, and the Granger girl was in the middle of it, and she was saying something and the Weasley was contradicting her and Potter was listening to both of them.

Electra Lucia Malfoy watched this across sixty feet of Great Hall and experienced an emotion of such hot and undifferentiated misery that she had to eat a piece of toast to cover it.

"I have decided," she announced, "that I do not care for Granger."

"Nobody cares for Granger," said Pansy. "She corrected Flitwick."

"She corrected him on a point of fact and she was right," said Electra, with a venom that caused two people to look up, "which is considerably worse, and I have no further comment."

She intercepted them at half past eleven in the corridor outside Transfiguration, because she had to, because the uncertainty had become a physical condition located somewhere behind her sternum and she had never in her life been able to leave a thing alone.

"Enjoy your night, Potter?"

He stopped.

He looked at her, and he looked at her for a good deal longer than two seconds, and the look had something in it that she had not seen before and that she took home and turned over for several days.

"You didn't come," he said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You said midnight, trophy room, and you didn't come." He said it without any particular heat, which was the unbearable part. He said it in the tone of a person noting the weather. "Filch did, though. Straight there. Knew which room."

"I cannot be held responsible for the movements of the caretaker."

"No," agreed Harry Potter.

"I had a great deal on."

"Right."

"And it is hardly my fault," said Electra, with her voice going up, "if you are stupid enough to walk into a trophy room at midnight on the word of somebody you have known for a fortnight and who told you to your face that she was going to make your life difficult, and if you had the smallest particle of sense in your entire head you would have stayed in your bed, and anybody could have told you that, and I should have thought that was obvious to a child of six, and the fact that you went anyway is not a reflection on me, it is a reflection on you, and on your judgement, which is appalling."

There was a silence in the corridor.

"Did you just tell me off," said Harry Potter, "for falling for your trick?"

"No, I mean y-yes, no, uh, yes," said Electra.

The Weasley made a strangled noise.

"That's mental," he said. "That's actually mental! Harry, that's mental."

"You could have been eaten," said Electra.

And then she stopped, with her mouth still slightly open, because that sentence had arrived from nowhere and had gone out into a corridor full of people, and because it contained information.

Hermione Granger's head came round like a weathervane.

"Eaten?" said Hermione Granger.

"I said hated."

"You said eaten."

"I said that you would be hated, which you are, generally, as a group," said Electra Lucia Malfoy, "and I have Transfiguration."

She walked into the classroom and sat down at the front and did not turn round for fifty minutes, during which she transfigured a match into a needle on her third attempt and received two points and did not care about either of them, and at the end of the lesson she went out of the other door.

Behind her in the corridor, three Gryffindors stood in a huddle.

"She knows about the dog," said Hermione.

"She doesn't know about the dog," said Ron. "How would she know about the dog? She wasn't there."

"She said eaten."

"She says loads of things. She's horrible."

"She said eaten," said Hermione Granger, who had been in this castle for a fortnight and who was already, in a quiet and entirely unofficial way, the best thing in it, "which means she knew where we'd end up, which means she knew we'd run, which means she was somewhere she could see us run, which means she was there, which means she came."

Ron Weasley opened his mouth and then shut it again.

Harry Potter said nothing at all.

He said nothing at all for most of the afternoon, in fact, through Herbology and through dinner, and at about nine o'clock that evening, sitting in a squashy armchair in front of the fire in Gryffindor Tower with his knees up, he said, out of a clear sky, "Why would she bother?"

"Why would who bother with what?" said Ron, who was losing at chess to his own brother.

"Malfoy. If she just wanted us caught, she tells Filch and goes to bed." Harry turned his wand over in his fingers. "She wouldn't hang about in a corridor for an hour to watch. There's nothing in it for her."

"She's a Malfoy," said Ron, moving a knight and losing it. "They enjoy it. Great, I sound like a ra—”

"Yeah," said Harry.

But he did not think that was it, and he could not have said what he thought instead, because he was eleven years old and had spent a decade in a cupboard learning exactly one social skill, which was how to be invisible, and nobody had ever got around to teaching him the rest of it.

What he had instead was a collection of facts that would not sit still.

A girl in a robe shop who had gone red when he said he did not know what Quidditch was. A girl on a train with her hand out who had looked, for about a second, like somebody who had been hit. A girl in a dungeon saying that's not fair out loud in front of everyone and then taking it back so fast it left marks. A girl twenty feet over an oak tree telling him off for being good at flying. A girl in a corridor this morning, furious, telling him he should not have come, because he might have been eaten.

He put them all down next to each other in his head and looked at them, and they made a shape, and he did not recognise the shape, because he had never seen one before.

"Night," he said.

Down in the dungeons, under the lake, a girl with her hair lay on her back in the dark and composed a letter home.

Dear Father, she composed. There is a dog on the third floor and I believe it is guarding something, and I have worked this out entirely by myself, and I thought you would wish to know.

She looked at that for a while, in the dark, where it did not exist.

Then she discarded it, which required no effort at all, and composed a different one.

Dear Father. Potions continues to go extremely well.

And she rolled over and went to sleep, and did not write a single word of either of them, and that was the first time Electra Lucia Malfoy declined to tell her father something, and it was the fourth of October, and nobody in the world noticed except her.

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