CH 24: I Spy (Patreon)

Wizards were foolish enough to wear their robes around town.

He hadn’t had any luck in Woodbridge, although that only ruled out there being any magical person conspicuous enough to be spotted on grainy CCTV footage in the last two months, not there being no wizard at all. Once he started visiting the other towns that had hosted muggleborns however, wizards and witches started coming out of the woodwork in droves. Witches talking with enchanted pocket mirrors, wizards spelling their shoes clean after stepping in a puddle, there had even been a woman seemingly taking her owl for a morning walk upon their shoulder. 

David groaned the first time he saw a robe clad man sauntering down a side street. The wizard had been careful to confundus and obliviate any muggle that saw him between where he had arrived and where the cameras lost track of him, but not once did he look at up at any of the glass eyes peering out from corner shops and kebab spots; unblinking sentinels that almost certainly spelled the doom of the Wizarding World. What a wizard dressed in olive green robes and wearing a barrister’s wig was doing at six in the morning in Martleham, David couldn’t guess, but it had only taken him two hundred Quid in bribes to track him from the apparation point to the edge of town.

They were careful enough to do it in the morning hours or late in the evening where the chances of being seen were lower, but the sheer brazenness of it all horrified David. He imagined they must be halfbloods or less well-to-do purebloods. The sort of invisible class that made up the meat of wizarding society; not the department heads or the business owners, but clerks and employees on Diagon. Steeped enough in the wizarding world to reach for magic as a solution first, second, and third, yet just barely familiar enough with muggle society to know how to not get immediately exposed. 

David had to give them some credit. If he hadn’t been trawling through truly a mountainous quantity of surveillance footage he wouldn’t have caught on to his fellow magicals. One instance of a man dressed in what would look like bathrobes to the outside observer, or of a woman waving around a stick like a school yard wand could easily be dismissed. Something to be tut-tutted about over tea. An example to point at and bemoan the impact of drugs in rural England or decry the state of the NHS. If you knew what you were looking for? Embarrassingly obvious. 

David popped out the current tape and stood with a stretch, before reaching for another one from Colchester. Sticking it on in fast forward, he tried to get comfortable in his workshop chair. He had only made it through a quarter of the tapes he had collected and he still had another couple of towns to hit, but he had burned through the Pounds he had on had for bribes and would need to make another trip to the bank. It was a shame there wasn’t a faster way to go about this. He had been stuck in his workshop for two entire days, forced to watch the tape after monotonous tape in the glorified shed because it was the only place not soaked in magic enough to run a television and VHS player. Next time he would drag in his good chair.

He would have to put the tapes to the side after tonight. Christopher’s wardstone had been ready for the next carving since this morning and it was only by begging off sick that David had secured an extra day off. He felt a little bad abusing the fellow Hufflepuff’s trust but thought he would probably be forgiven if Abbott knew the true reason. Right before the man reported him to the aurors for the myriad crimes David had committed in the last month, of course. 

The recording flickered, grainy footage vanishing entirely for a handful of seconds before reappearing just as abruptly. 

David sat bolt upright and fumbled for the remote, managing to pause the tape only after a breathless struggle against gravity. On its face the artifacting shouldn’t be noteworthy. The CCTV cameras of the day and age weren’t amazing, and although duplicating the tapes had worked, it had degraded already questionable recordings further. 

Except.

Except David had already seen this type of corruption before. This exact interference. No gradual build up of errors, not partial destruction. Just a complete erasure of a handful of frames before the footage cut back in like nothing had happened. Like someone had reached into the camera and magically stolen the brief span of time. 

Carefully rewinding the tape to thirty seconds before the corruption began, David let it play at real speed. 

The time burned into the corner read 1423 and in frame he could see a bright, if cloudy, August day. People passed to and fro in front of the lense, running the sort of errands that kept British wives and husbands busy on a Tuesday afternoon. A pair of boys wearing the uniform of a local school—playing hooky by the looks of it—walked below the camera and into the shop.The device didn’t capture sound but David could imagine the diesel rumble as a lorry rolled across the frame, belching exhaust into the sky. 

And then black. 

Even the timestamp was missing. For roughly two minutes by David’s count, there was nothing before the streets of Colchester reappeared in all their grainy glory just as suddenly as they had vanished. New pedestrians had replaced the ones that had walked away in the intervening seconds; the lorry was gone, a handful of sedans having taken its place on the street; a minute later the boys emerged back into the daylight, one handing the other what could have been a pack of smokes but really just looked like a blob on the footage. No one was panicking, there was no pointing at some disaster just off camera, there wasn’t even the pointed avoidance of a British public determined not to notice something.

David rewound the tape again and let it play, this time pausing it the second the screen went dark. Carefully, one frame at a time, he rewound. Despite freezing Colchester in amber, there was nothing to be seen. Scanning to where the footage resumed refused to reveal any hints either. Luckily this wasn’t the only footage on the street he had collected. 

David tracked the anomaly across town, both forwards and backwards in time. It had first appeared somewhere around the Priory and worked its way up towards the primary school. He lost it on a few turns and it vanished for good shortly before classes let out for the day. He was about to give it up as a lost cause when he discovered an angle the person or persons responsible for the trail of blacked out footage had missed.

It was from a restaurant across the way from the main path of the witch or wizard—because it could be nothing else—had walked. David had almost missed it entirely so little of the street in question did it catch, and he could understand how this camera had slipped the net. It was only because he knew exactly when and where to look that he spotted anything at all. 

For a brief moment, less than ten seconds by the reckoning of the camera’s clock, a pair of oddly dressed strangers passed into view. 

To give the two credit, they almost could pass for a muggle. They both wore dark suits instead of robes and they had no visible affectations of wizardry, but to a suspicious eye they screamed magical. For one, the two men were wearing what David would expect from a 1920’s gangster, hat and all. Not wrong, per se—the outfits were coherent, with none of the odd mish-mash of styles and eras that well-meaning but ignorant wizards tended towards—just out of place. Coupled with their visible distaste for their surroundings it was clear to David that the men were wizards.

Trained well, but out of date? Traveling as a pair in what might as well have been a uniform? Equipped with a bespoke spell to deal with magic caught on camera? David would bet every bronze Knut he had that the men were from the Ministry. The only question was which Department? 

David supposed it was possible it could be the aurors. Logic dictated that they must have the capability and training to go out into the muggle world to arrest suspects. It would be embarrassing if all a magical criminal had to do was not show their face in Diagon or Hogsmeade until the heat died down. He didn’t think that was the case though. While difficult to tell in the few seconds the pair had been on camera, one had been visibly fat and the other tall and stringy. Not the physique of seasoned hunters.

It seemed more likely that they had been from the other department that frequented the mundane side of the Statute: the obliviators. 

His understanding of the witches and wizards tasked with erasing the presence of magic from muggle society was shallow at best. The job title gave away the game a bit when it came to the magic they used most often and he knew they had a fairly broad remit when it came to when to use memory charms, but that was about it. He had no idea how many there were nor how they knew how to respond to instances of exposure. Before this past month David would’ve assumed it had to be some sort of ward but experience had taught him better.

Still, this was a new angle to pursue. It might even be a genuine break in the case. David leaned back in triumph, hands interwoven behind his head as the chair groaned in protest beneath him. He still had hundreds of hours of footage to search through, but now that he was on the lookout for missing chunks of time it should be a much quicker process. 

David swapped out the Colchester recording for the first he had collected from Witham, kicking his feet up onto the table as the VCR began to wind. In grainy detail, another British town resolved onto the boxy screen. Morgana, investigative work was dull. Thank Merlin he had gone into warding.

A quiet pop deposited David onto the lawn of Abbott manor, the family head shifting from foot to foot as he waited for David to recover his balance.

“You feeling better, David?” Christopher asked politely, escorting him into the timber-beamed manor. 

David shot a questioning look at the man’s poorly-concealed impatience. “Yes, it was just a little cold. Nothing a bit of pepper-up and an early night couldn’t fix.”

“Good, good,” Christopher nodded. His strides ate up the distance to the ward chamber, leaving David struggling to keep pace. “So there’s nothing preventing you from finishing the anti-apparation wards then?”

“Just time,” David said. “It’ll be two or three days to carve them, and then another week for the network to be fully powered since you’re relying on the ley lines. You’ll need to manually key signatures in from the wardstone itself since the control link will be the last thing I construct.” He panted in exertion as he followed at Christopher’s heels—-his preferred method of combat relied on very little cardio and he was admittedly a bit of a lazybones the rest of the time; in shape he was not. “Christopher, slow down for Merlin’s sake!” he huffed. “What could possibly be the rush?”

Abbott slowed down sheepishly. “I’m just looking forward to sleeping in my own bed,” he said. Seeing David’s unimpressed glare he elaborated further, “It’s Augusta, alright? I respect the woman, don’t get me wrong, but I cannot live with her one moment longer than I must.”

David barked in laughter and the man groaned.

“She brought up the possibility of a marriage contract at dinner last night, David, between my baby girl and Frank’s boy. Slid it in right after the soup course! Who does that? I don’t think anyone other than the Blacks and the Malfoys have had an honest-to-Mordred contract since Dumbledore was a boy.” Christopher shot a silencing charm at David waspishly, who was now bent over in laughter. “It’s not funny! My wife looked like she could be convinced! She more than anyone ought to know that Hannah isn’t allowed to even kiss a boy before she’s thirty. How soon can I move back in?”

David finited himself, wiping the tears from his eyes as he answered. “The wards should be strong enough by next week. They’ll get stronger over time as the wardstone is saturated in magical energy, but as long as you don’t need to fend off a whole party of wizards you should be fine.” 

Having reached the ward chamber, he settled in front of the stone in question, pulling a binder full of notes out of a pocket and laying it on a conjured table. Taking a moment to appreciate the luster of the charged scheme, David circled the heart of the new Abbott family protections carefully firing off resonance measuring charms and recording the results in a small notebook. There were no surprises to be revealed. Some small imperfections had resulted in drift that would have to be accounted for in the next layer of wards, but it was within expectations and would only knock a year or two off the expected lifespan of the creation. 

Finishing his observations, he returned to the table, surprised to see Christopher was still there. Last time he had left the moment David had begun his work.

“Is this what arithmancy looks like after OWLs?” Christopher asked, peering over the calculations scrawled over the papers. “Makes me glad I dropped it. I don’t understand a tenth of what’s on here.”

“NEWTs and apprenticeship level mostly,” David explained, gently shouldering the man aside so he could plug in the results of his spell work and finish the design portion of the ward construction. “What are you doing Christopher? I recall you saying previously that you had ‘better things to do than watch me hammer at a rock like a troll.’”

The man in question grinned cheekily, pulling out his own notes from a pocket of his robes. “If anyone asks, supervising the construction of new ancestral wards; it would be a dereliction of my duty as family head to do otherwise. Between you and me? I have some case prep I would like to get done without Madam Longbottom pestering me about why I’m not as active in the Wizengamot as she would like.”

David shrugged. “As long as you’re quiet and stay out of the way of my carvings, do what you like. Far be it for me to kick a man out of his own house.” Taking the results of his calculations from the binder he walked over to the wardstone and began to chalk the path and order the runes would be carved in. 

Unfortunately for David, it turned out Christopher was not a quiet worker. He would constantly fidget in his chair, hum as he worked out a strategy for whatever case, or rap his quill against the edge of his table idly as he stared through the walls of his manor. Eventually David could take it no longer. “Christopher, I swear on my magic if you don’t stop I’m going to stun you. Must you work here?”

“Ah, sorry David,” Christopher said. “If it’s that much of a problem I’ll move up to my study.”

“I hate to be rude,” David lied, “it’s just a distraction that I really don’t need when I’m working on something with this much power.” As Christopher nodded in understanding and started packing up his things, David couldn’t help but ask in curiosity, “what case are you working on today?”

The Barrister paused his gathering to explain. “It’s a smuggling case. Some moron came over from France with undeclared nifflers.”

“Aren’t those rather harmless?” David asked. “I dropped Care before we could cover them but I know my classmates learned about them after that first Christmas.”

“In the Wizarding World, yes,” Christopher admitted, “they’re simple enough to deal with. The problem is if they get loose in muggle towns then they become an absolute nightmare. The man is lucky that wasn’t the case otherwise he would be looking at Azkaban time instead of a hefty fee.”

This was far too good of an opportunity to pass up, David realized. Of the few magicals he talked to regularly, Christopher was the most likely to have the information he needed. “The sort of nightmare that gets obliviators involved?” he questioned. At Christopher’s nod he continued, “How does that department work, anyway?”

Christopher shrugged. “Much like any other, really. There’s not many of them, I know that much. It’s always the same five or six that get called to testify on my cases.”

“How do they get alerted to magical activity?” At Christopher’s questioning look, David elaborated, “It’s a professional curiosity.”

“I don’t know,” the man admitted, “it doesn’t come up in their testimony and would likely be protected information even if a barrister tried to get at it. I’m afraid you’ll just have to speculate.”

“The curse of a warder,” David moaned theatrically. “Forever wondering how great works of the discipline were forged.” That drew a laugh from the other man as he finished packing, leaving David to carve in peace. As he slowly chipped away at the stone, drawing order from chaos, David wondered just how he could find answers to that question.

A/N: Rather pleased with this one. A longer chapter after a stretch of shorter ones and some significant plot development. Remember to vote in the poll for what the Patreon exclusive will be if you haven't already. I plan to start working on that in the next week or so.