01237 The Realization

"Of course! That's it! It was Malfoy, it was Malfoy all along!"

Ron's roar rang off the rafters of the common room and shook the dust from the old banners.

He grabbed Harry's hand in both of his own and pumped it up and down like a man working a stiff water-pump, his freckled face was blazing, and Harry, whose own green eyes were shining like lamps behind his glasses, also nodded.

Ron's shout drew the attention of nearly every young wizard in the common room, and students began casting curious looks their way.

"What's happened? What's going on, you two?"

Neville had been fiddling with his wand off to one side, and he glanced over twice, uncertainly, before he finally set it down and crossed the room to them, with his arms hanging awkwardly at his sides.

But neither Harry nor Ron had a thought to spare for Neville. They moved without a word, closing in from either side of the small boy until he stood hemmed between their shoulders like a hare between two hounds, and Ron bent low, his voice trembled with the strain of sounding casual.

"Now, listen. Think hard, will you? You're certain you heard me say I'd hand that Fanged Frisbee back to you? That was last Saturday, wasn't it?"

"I don't want the Frisbee any more! Keep it, I don't want it!"

Chazel's face had gone chalk-white. He hunched his shoulders up around his ears and began wriggling helplessly, to get out from between the two big boys.

"Steady on, steady on. Nobody's angry with you."

Ron laid a hand on the boy's thin shoulder, patting it with the heavy, world-weary kindness of a veteran soothing a raw recruit.

"Just answer one thing. You saw me that Saturday, didn't you? After I'd taken your Frisbee off you?"

Harry had not taken his eyes off Chazel's face either. He was watching the boy as keenly as he would have watched a Snitch.

"That's right—you and your girlfriend, in the common room—"

Chazel gave a small, nervous nod and edged back as far as the tight corner would let him.

"I wanted to ask you to give my Fanged Frisbee back to me then… You—you were acting a bit strange. You seemed really impatient, and said you didn't have time right now, that I'd have to wait a few days… I thought you meant to keep it and play with it yourself for a few days…"

Ron rolled his eyes up to the ceiling for a moment and then turned to Harry.

"There it is, Harry. No doubt about it at all. Who did this kid see? Malfoy and Parkinson, of course!"

Harry nodded eagerly, too, as though he could barely keep his head on his neck.

"And what happened afterwards?"

He asked it very low, in a voice pulled tight as a bowstring, hardly louder than a breath.

"Mal— I mean, what did Ron and his girlfriend do next?"

"Well, you just parted ways in the common room, and each went off up to your own dormitory."

What a peculiar thing to ask, Chazel thought. But the two older boys were looking at him with such naked, burning hope that he answered truthfully all the same, for fear of what they might do if he did not.

"After that I went out with my friends. Er… can I go now, please?"

He gave Ron a wary, sidelong look.

"Oh. Right. Yes, go on."

Ron's hand dropped from the boy's shoulder, and the whole bright flame in his face guttered and sank into disappointment. He flapped a limp hand toward the door, and Chazel was off like a Snitch from an open jar, tearing across the common room to the safety of his friends.

"So that doesn't prove a thing, does it?"

Neville had stood frowning beside them through the last of this, following it step by step, and now, at last, he had more or less caught up. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

"All that poor boy saw was a pretend you and a pretend Lavender. And he can't possibly say who was underneath, can he?"

"Blasted Malfoy!"

Ron had thought, for one shining minute, that they might finally have a thread to pull, and he kicked the leg of the nearest armchair in his bitterness.

"Crooked as a corkscrew, just like his father. There isn't a single flaw in it that we can get a fingernail under!"

Harry let out a long, listless sigh, sank down on the arm of the sofa, and began gathering his things.

A whole week had already gone by. For all they knew, Malfoy had long since spirited the thing out of Hogwarts by some route they would not have guessed in a hundred years.

"Funny, though…"

Neville's lips moved slowly as he looked from one gloomy face to the other. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the small boy that Harry and Ron had let go: Chazel had sunk onto the sofa by the chest of drawers, surrounded by a knot of friends, and they were all whispering and pointing across the room.

Neville smiled to himself and raised one eyebrow.

"That little chap's rather sharp, isn't he? Professor Watson keeps such a tight watch on dangerous items, and he still managed to get a Fanged Frisbee into the castle. When you took it off him, did you ask how he'd done it?"

"Oh, it's no great mystery, Neville."

Ron tipped his head to one side and answered with a shrug, still lost in his gloom.

"It only takes a bit of nerve. He used a charm to open Filch's office. That useless old stick is nowhere near as good as Professor Watson, so all you'd need is just one—"

"Filch's office!"

Harry had been listlessly packing his bag. Now he leapt to his feet so suddenly that the bag overturned and everything in it spilled out with a clatter across the hearthrug.

"What's the matter, Harry?"

Ron asked, utterly lost, with his mouth still hanging open on the end of his sentence.

But Harry only stared at Ron with a startled, glittering, half-focused look, as if at some distant shore that had just come into view. One idea was turning over and over in his mind, faster and faster, until, with a click that he could almost hear, it dropped into place.

Without a word, he kicked the little table in front of him out of his way, so that a bottle of ink toppled and rolled, and he bolted for the Fat Lady's portrait, flinging two words over his shoulder behind him as he went:

"Follow me!"

Ron and Neville stood blinking at each other for a moment, and then, as one, they broke into a run after him and went tumbling out through the portrait hole into the dark.

The three of them pelted down through the hollow, sleeping castle.

"What on earth have you worked out, Harry?"

Even Neville was bewildered by this sudden wildness. He ran at Harry's side, gasping, watching the high flush of excitement on Harry's cheeks, bright as a fever, and kept pressing him for an answer.

"I could never figure it out!"

Harry cried out loud.

"How Malfoy and Parkinson made themselves look like you and Lavender, Ron!"

"But it can't have been Polyjuice, surely…?"

Neville began doubtfully, between breaths.

"Of course it was Polyjuice!"

Harry flung the words behind him as he took the corner almost on one foot.

"But where did he get it from? I don't believe for a moment he's got Hermione's brains, that he could brew something so tricky all by himself!

And that's not all. The night Professor Watson looked at his wand and Parkinson's, neither one of them had cast a Stunning Spell. Which means Malfoy's got at least two other wands stowed away somewhere.

So how did he get all that into Hogwarts? The potion, the wands, any of it. The school would have noticed!"

"Oh!"

Ron pushed the sweaty hair out of his eyes. They were bulging so wildly from his head that no one could have mistaken his shock and his excitement.

"I've got it! He did what that kid did! He bought the Polyjuice and the wands by post, and before Filch could send the parcels on to Professor Watson to be inspected, he went and pinched them out of Filch's office!"

The three of them tore through the winding staircase corridors like a gale, taking the steps two and three at a time, and the portraits in their rows of frames along the walls woke and grumbled after them one by one, shaking their fists and complaining bitterly about the hour.

"I think I know when he broke in!"

A memory flashed through Harry's eyes.

Once, Malfoy had inexplicably left his gang of cronies in the middle of a meal and gone off alone to the ground-floor corridor to the right of the entrance hall.

Curious, Harry had followed him there under his Invisibility Cloak, creeping along the cold flagstones to see what he was up to, and in that closed-off stretch of corridor he had lost Malfoy altogether.

Thinking back on it now, Malfoy must have been breaking into Filch's office then.

"That was the night!"

Harry vaulted up onto the third-floor landing and halted there, gasping, one hand pressed hard against the stitch in his side.

"The professors searched the whole castle and Malfoy's dormitory too, and never found a drop of Polyjuice or a single new wand.

"Unless Malfoy destroyed them, it all went back into Filch's office. Don't you see? No professor would ever think of looking in Filch's office. Least of all Filch himself!"

It was perfectly possible. Ron turned it over in his mind for a few seconds, and then his eyes lit up like lamps.

"So that means—!"

Neville had worked it out as well, and he looked every bit as keyed up as the others, with the colour rising in his cheeks.

"Professor Watson's lost—"

"Hush, Neville! Wait!"

Harry cut him off in a sudden, sharp whisper. He straightened from the banister, narrowing his eyes, and held up one hand as he listened hard into the dark.

Tap, tap, tap…

From somewhere far below on the spiral staircase, faint footsteps came drifting up, faded, and came again, steadily growing clearer.

"If it's a professor, just say you're keeping me company on my rounds!"

Ron's mind was racing, and he whispered the order hurriedly to Harry and Neville while all three of them pressed their backs flat against the wall.

But the figure that finally emerged from the stairs into the lamplight made all three of them frown at once.

"Crabbe?"

Ron narrowed his eyes suspiciously at the great hulking boy standing before them.

"What are you doing up here? On your own, too? Where's your good friend Goyle?"

Before their third year, Crabbe and Goyle might fairly have been called Malfoy's loyal bodyguards, always one step behind him and always one step too slow. But ever since Professor Watson had begun his physical education classes, Malfoy had gradually stopped bothering with the two big dolts, and they had been seen less and less about the castle.

Seeing Harry and the others made Crabbe's eyebrows shoot up, too, but within a split second he had calmed himself, and his heavy, lumpy face had gone slack and dull again.

He glared at the three of them and said, in a low, muffled drone:

"Mind your own business. Get out of my way."

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