CH 23: Thinking Like a Muggle (Patreon)

David sighed in relief as the butter-colored cream sank into his wrists and recapped his tin of acheaway solution. Four days straight of carving runes into stone was hell on the joints, magically softened stone or no. A layer of menthol cream and a cold lager completed the routine and David slumped into his chair, exhausted.

The Abbotts hadn’t taken his thinly veiled suggestion to charge their nascent wardstone with blood so he was in a brief hiatus as he waited for the first protections to be empowered. Unlike the job with the hags—who had both paid for lower quality wards and weren’t as concerned about the law—which could be completed quickly, David didn’t expect the Abbott Manor to be fully warded until Samhain. 

The muggle aversion network should be functional in the next day or two. Only then could he begin carving the anti-transport runes. Because of the scale he was working at, both in magical power and the desired lifespan of the wards, David couldn’t simply carve them all at the same time and bring them online as power allowed. Instead he needed to observe the magical resonance of each web—a phenomenon created by a confluence of wardstone selection, rune in-fill material, and the physical carvings themselves—and adjust the subsequent carvings appropriately.

Resonance wasn’t a problem for most wards or enchantments, but for the most powerful and long lived it was the difference between a ward crumbling in a century or a millennium. 

David’s wrists had finally ceased throbbing—how muggle stone carvers could last more than a couple decades in the career he didn’t know—and one flick of his wand lit the hearth, while another turned on the radio. Much like the joint cream, ward resonances was a subject he first discovered when he apprenticed in the Guild. Like most complications in the field, it came back to heat generation. You had to really muck something up to have a wardstone resonate itself directly to death—it was actually a common task for masters to assign to first year apprentices to design a scheme that could—but poorly aligned runes generated more heat per amount of energy expended and thus decayed faster. He wasn’t willing to spend the time to do so, but David suspected that if he analyzed why all the purebloods’ protections failed so soon could be laid at the feet of poor resonance.

Once the anti-apparation and portkey net was up the Abbotts could comfortably move back into their manor. They would still be light on protections for another two or three weeks but could be confident that no one would appear in their bedroom in the middle of the night, an avada kedavra on their lips. David imagined that after another week and half sheltering under the aegis of the Longbottoms Christopher might consider the killing curse a lesser evil. 

Regardless, that still left David at loose ends for a couple of days. Just in time for the full moon to begin its waning. As the Radio 3 presenter introduced the next song, David laid out what he knew of the werewolf attacks. 

After his disastrous attempt at finding the Ministry leak, he had been forced to concede that he had been naively optimistic about how straightforward the case would be. He was not an auror or a seasoned private investigator. Both his successes and his failures came from his background in warding. 

The network of detection nodes he had strung across the countryside had worked, and was an approach he should double down on. Nearly a week of mindless carving—he had finished the arithmancy on the first day and Elder Futhark runes were incredibly straightforward to engrave—had allowed him to ruminate on some improvements to the design. They would burn through the Galleons he was making on the consulting jobs, but should be able to last for an entire fortnight. The first would go up in the town where he had killed the werewolf, just in case they decided to double back, but by the end of the month he should be able to monitor ten locations at a time.

As for where the leak was coming from, if his magical knowledge was insufficient for the task, he would turn to his muggle experience.

David was embarrassed that it had taken him this long to consider a technological solution to the question of how someone knew the location of muggleborns. It was so obvious that when it had occurred to him he had miscarved a raidho rune and had to spend an extra thirty minutes fixing his mistake: cameras. Specifically, CCTV surveillance cameras.

He could only plead that the panopticon that would come to entomb the world in the 21st century was just beginning to metastasize. For all the grand claims made after the IRA bombings in the City of London, the much vaunted ring of steel in 1994 was mostly man power and barricades. Still, to forget about closed-circuit cameras entirely left David feeling a little too much like a pureblood wizard destined to be left behind or put up against a wall when the Statute collapsed. 

That did make him wonder how obliviators erased evidence of magic from camera footage. They must do it somehow, otherwise the WIzarding World would have been exposed by now. Was there a spell that somehow targeted every camera that had a view of a certain point? That seemed impossible. Magic wasn’t some scientific system where each mote of mana could be accounted for, but generally speaking the larger or more undefined in scope a spell became the harder it was to cast. No wizard powerful enough to cast such a spell would waste their time working for the Ministry.

The alternative seemed to be that the witches and wizards tasked with ensuring the continued secrecy of magic must hunt down each camera to deal with the footage. That put a rather firm deadline on the fall of the Statute to someone familiar with the digitization and minimiztion of recording technology. David must be missing something. Surely the Statute wasn’t that threadbare?

However they may do it, David needed to canvas tens of miles of British neighborhoods and shopping centers, all in the blind hope they had seen something. It wasn’t an elegant plan, but as anyone who has attempted to wrought miracles from stone could tell you, sometimes there was no solution to work but to do it.

The car rattled to a stop in Woodbridge with a disgruntled sigh. The town was only a thirty minute drive from his house and David had done an uncomfortable amount of magic outside of his wards in the last few weeks. The Metro could handle the trip.

Woodbridge had been struck in the middle of August by one of the more violent perpetrators. Why some werewolves used so much force to abduct the children yet were cautious enough to not kill the parents, David did not understand. He could only assume they had grown to enjoy the wanton destruction. 

The plan was simple in concept, even if it was likely to be incredibly tedious in execution. David would trace a path around the house of the victim as well as other high traffic locations that he might expect a child to wander. Every time he saw a business with a surveillance camera David would bribe or charm whoever was working to let him view their tapes. He had almost a thousand quid in his wallet and fully expected to spend more before the task was done. 

It would certainly be cheaper to use magic but he had grown uneasy with how quick he was to use force or compulsion. Good cause it may be, David couldn’t help but wonder if he would have made the same choices if his seclusion wasn’t at risk. Ultimately he considered the expense worth it; Pounds were really only useful for food and taxes as a wizard. Even if money was an actual concern, the Christmas season was on the horizon and he could expect a month of robust sales in the lead up. 

David whistled tunelessly as he wandered down the narrow streets. The sky was threatening rain but so far the clouds had restrained themselves. Weak morning light had washed some of the color from the maple leaves that were already beginning to turn and a cool breeze sent detritus dancing at his feet. He watched the eddies whirl around his feet, whipped to life by one gust only to be smothered by another. Would his spiral of steel prove to be effective against the werewolf pack or would it be just as ephemeral?

The resumption of his hunt had forced the question to the forefront of his mind. He was confident he could take any of the subservient werewolves in a straight duel. The confrontation in Leiston had demonstrated that rather conclusively. He was even cautiously optimistic that he could stand up to Greyback himself. Much of the mass murder’s notoriety came from his actions taken in his werewolf form and his preferred victims. By all accounts, the monster was a powerful combatant and more than willing to throw around dark magic, but he was not known as a technical caster. David could handle a strong opponent, it was the thought of a tricky one that kept him on the training field. 

Confronting the whole pack was an altogether different and more intimidating prospect. Unless he was allowed as much time as he needed to set the field he didn’t think he could do it. If there were more than six or seven of the beasts present they could likely just rush him before he managed to put them down. Anyway he skinned it, David suspected he would need support.

Before he could settle on who he could ask, he arrived at the house of the abductee.

The physical scars remained. One of the windows was still boarded up and the door was conspicuously vibrant compared to the paint along the frame. In the garden there was a bare batch where rose bushes had been ripped out root and stem. David could only shake his head in disbelief; what could possibly have been the point? Taking one long glance at the shattered home he turned and began his search. He had already failed this family, their child was either turned or dead, the least he could do was put in the footwork to ensure he wouldn’t fail another.

In the end, he found five good candidates. The first two refused to allow him to view their security footage, but the third was promising: a fish and chip spot that straddled the path between the family home and the nearest park, under whose eaves hung a bulky camera.

“Pardon me,” he asked, after stepping into the greasy air of the chippy, “I was wondering if I could take a look at your surveillance footage? I’m trying to help a friend track down their lost dog.” A weak excuse to be sure, but the twenty-something behind the counter who was still trying to sweat out his hangover was unlikely to interrogate it closely.

“Uh, I don’t know, sir,” the man said. “I don’t think my manager would be ok with that.” Despite his protestations, David reckoned he had the look of a man who could be convinced.

He spread his hands apologetically. “I understand. I don’t need a copy or anything, just want to take a look and see if the mutt ran past. There’s a fifty in it for you if you let me,” he offered. The man’s eyes lit up and David suspected he could have bribed him with far less.

“Just looking?” the man asked.

“Just looking.”

The chip shop employee pushed his reedy frame upright off the counter he had been leaning on with a great heave. “Alright come on back. I need a smoke anyway.” 

He led David around the counter to a dingy office cluttered with files, receipts, and the assorted stuff a business collected over time. Stepping over a cardboard box filled with manila folders with practiced ease, the man soon had grainy footage pulled up on a flickering monitor. “How far back do you want to go?” he asked.

That was a good question. “How far does it go?”

The man shrugged. “Couple o’ months before it gets recorded over. The tape’s a bit naff but the owner is too cheap to replace it.” He offered David his seat, standing and patting his pockets in the process. “You got a light?”

“I’m afraid not,” David said. Two months was barely enough, but he supposed expecting more in this decade was wildly optimistic. He would have to hurry and collect as much surveillance footage as he could before it all got written over.

The employee groaned and began to lumber over to one of the burners in the kitchen. Apparently he was going to light his cigarette on the hob? Thank god David hadn’t ordered anything before asking to see the tapes. “I’ll be out back if you need me. Don’t need me.”

David waved the man off, already engrossed in the incredibly low resolution footage. Even at the fastest speed it would take ages to watch the full two months. He would have to hope the gemino charm worked on tapes. Worse, he wasn’t even sure what exactly he was looking for. It’s not like wizards would be foolish enough to wear their robes around town. 

A/N: Bit of a shorter chapter. Sadly my love of inserting period appropriate slang has to bow in the face of the word for cigarette in England.