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necessarian) wrote2019-05-28 08:54 pm
necessarian) wrote2019-05-28 08:54 pm
Entry tags:
[WIP amnesty] HP murder mystery fic, 1.8k
... as inspired by Riverdale, but don't laugh at me just yet. This was written in the middle of season 1 airing, and abandoned for the obvious reasons. The important part is that it's narrated by Zacharias and has footnotes, and I'll never finish it so you get to read it here.
It didn’t take long to choose a title for this exposé, and a subtitle too. Just in case the publishers decide to pick it up. The subtitle is: “A tell-all history of the summer that Draco Malfoy died and a small town tore itself apart, not necessarily in that order, as faithfully recorded by Zacharias Smith, who was there for it all1..”
And what publisher wouldn’t be interested? It was all over the news, Draco’s death. Usually when someone dies there’s an obit in the local paper, unless they weren’t important and cause of death was just old age, in which case there would be a death notice in the classifieds. But a rich person? A rich, important person? A rich, important, teenager? Murdered? That’s national news. It was national news. Soon as they found the body—
But I’m getting ahead of myself. They didn’t find the body until later.
Hogsmeade, the eponymous small town, was in the throes of an English summer—which is to say, it rained every day, and the temperature never made it above 25. The obscenely wealthy were away at their summer homes in the Maldives and their teenage children were left behind to have the run of the manors. All of this meant that it was weather for t-shirts and shorts, light skirts and blouses, and boats down the river. If you were particularly daring, you might dust off your grandmother’s binoculars and row towards the forest for a spot of twitching.
Pansy Parkinson was the daughter of some of Hogsmeade’s most obscenely wealthy, and as such she had the run of the manor for the summer, and had no cause to leave the house when her cellar was so well-supplied with alcohol and everyone knew she threw the most extravagant parties, if you were rich enough to be invited. She was also not a noted twitcher, but early on the morning of DATE she rose early and dusted off her grandmother’s binoculars. Dressed all in white—to mitigate the heat, you understand—she walked the short distance to the other wing of Malfoy Manor—uppercase, as it’s an institution—the wing owned by the side of the family actually called “Malfoy.” Everyone knew that the Parkinsons were on borrowed land from their cousins, but everyone was too kind2. to say anything about it, and kindest of all were the Malfoys, for allowing the Parkinsons to live in the smaller wing of the manor for so long. So while Pansy looked after the Parkinson manor—lowercase—the Malfoys themselves were home and keeping dry as the steady rain fell.
She had gone to Malfoy Manor in search of someone in particular. Due to a fortuitous marriage that really was the only socially viable option, a Parkinson and a Malfoy were first cousins, of an age, and had grown up very close indeed. Draco Malfoy was waiting for Pansy that morning, leaning louchely against the door to the boathouse.
“Downriver?” he asked her.
“I hear the birds are all about this time of year,” she said.
Draco Malfoy was dressed as the very picture of a boater that day—he wore well-pressed beige trousers and a tucked-in white shirt. He had been wearing tan boat shoes, too, Pansy said, but they were lost by the time the body was recovered.
“Look alive, Parkinson,” he said. “Today’s the day.”
They took a modest boat and two pairs of oars from the boathouse, with the help of the servant who maintained it, and launched the boat downriver towards the forest. NAME River ran directly through Malfoy property, which made it quite impossible for anyone to sail out of town without written permission from Lucius Malfoy himself, an allowance which was notoriously tricky to obtain. For the rich, though, it was fiendishly easy, and Pansy and Draco made a point of rowing the route which was hardest to get access to, out of town and towards the south-east corner of the forest. The river then ran through the forest, came out somewhere in the middle, and cut south into the town.
Of course, there were other ways to get to that part of the forest without rowing. It was no more than an hour’s hike from the forest conservancy offices on the northern border of the town. That morning, there had been other people in the forest—more than was usual for such a rainy morning. This gave the local constabulary quite the list of suspects for the murder.
By far the largest group in the forest that morning was a band of local adventurers who had been camping overnight, led by Charles Weasley, better known to his friends as Charlie, and Nymphadora Tonks, better known to her friends as Tonks. There were never any scouts in Hogsmeade—nothing so twee and typical—but there was an amateur survivalist culture that had grown out of a historical tradition of drifters squatting on Malfoy land and trying not to get killed in the process. The latest inheritor of that tradition was Charlie Weasley, himself a supposed descendant of the first drifters in Hogsmeade. Whether or not this was true3., most people believed it to be so—otherwise, how would such a poor family end up in a town like this?—and so Charlie took his role very seriously indeed. The role might’ve passed to Charlie’s only older brother, William—better known as Bill—but Bill was not such a disappointment to his mother and had gone to university in Medway to become an accountant. He was home that summer and present that morning, but Charlie still wouldn’t let him lead the troupe. In fact, all the Weasley brothers and the singular Weasley sister were present that morning, with the exception of Percy Weasley, who was even less of a disappointment to his mother and had gone to Cambridge to read law, and as such point-blank refused to even set foot in the forest without knowing the exact boundaries of the Malfoy estate4.. As well as Charlie’s old school friend Tonks, the other guests of the Weasley siblings included Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Neville Longbottom, and Luna Lovegood, none of whom had been of any particular note in the past5..
While the Weasleys and their assorted hangers-on were busy being happy campers, another pair had taken to the forest by boat from the opposite direction to Pansy and Draco. In fact, they had spent most of their lives taking the opposite direction to the Parkinsons and the Malfoys. On the west side of town the landed gentry took a different form. The Macmillans were Scots who had uprooted in the late 19th century after making their fortune in trade, and were doing their very best to pretend that money ran in their blood. The Finch-Fletchleys, despite being old money like the Malfoys, possibly even older, had not been in Hogsmeade for as long; they had bought their manor from the destitute Gaunts in the 1920s, when they were best known for being quite bohemian indeed, making West Hogsmeade a veritable commune. These days, the Finch-Fletchleys were perfectly respectable posh sorts who kept good company, but as the Macmillans proved, it took much longer than a few decades for the establishment to forget these things. On the morning of DATE, the heirs of each family, Ernie Macmillan and Justin Finch-Fletchley, made their way into Hogsmeade Forest. They were not meant to go to the forest so early—rather, they had made a last-minute decision to “borrow” a boat and row that way, because the alternative meant meeting a friend at the Hogsmeade rowing sheds, and they had decided that this particular friend was not worth the embarrassment any longer.
It was not all teenagers in the forest that morning. Representing the adults of Hogwarts were the following: mover and shaker and notably undecorated prize-evading journalist, Rita Skeeter; local mystic and litigious nuisance Sybil Trelawney; a competitive survivalist staking out the Weasley camp, Alastor Moody; Sirius Black and Remus Lupin, walking half the town’s dogs as well as five of their own; and Xenophilius Lovegood, father of the aforementioned Luna, a twitcher.
The case ought to have been easy for the police assigned to it, DCI Kingsley Shacklebolt and DI Akansha Patil, given there were so many people in the area. Surely, they thought, there would’ve been at least one witness. But none of them saw, or heard, anything. They didn’t even see each other. Skeeter, Trelawney, and Lovegood had no alibis. Moody only had an alibi because Charlie Weasley had spotted him staking out their camp and shooed him away—away, he had not gone, according to his report, but at least he had left the amateur survivalists alone to their own techniques.
Helpfully6., none of the witnesses had found the body. But they had found Pansy. Several of them. First it was Ernie and Justin, still rowing in from the opposite direction. First, they saw a boat upturned in the rushes up ahead. This, they thought, was curious, because the weather really was quite mild and there was no wind to cause such a thing to happen. They rowed on, and soon the patter of light rain on the boat’s hull was joined by a cry—“Please, help me!” Ordinarily, Pansy Parkinson would not have deigned to talk to the likes of them, being from the west side of town as they were, but on this case it seemed she had made an exception.
“What sort of prank is she pulling now?” Ernie asked Justin.
“I don’t know,” Justin said, “but I don’t think we should bare it any notice.”
They turned and rowed back the way they came.
The next to find Pansy was Rita Skeeter who, by her own admission, did not make herself known to Pansy, just took a stealthy photo and continued on her way. Skeeter was able to present the photo as evidence, along with a timestamp, which made the fact that she showed up almost immediately at the crime scene slightly less suspicious. Xenophilius Lovegood reported hearing cries that were not at all like any bird’s he’d ever heard, which were later determined to be Pansy’s. Fred and George Weasley were also passing the area, and said they’d seen someone, but they were on their way somewhere else and didn’t pause.
In the end, it was Sybil Trelawney who reported it to the police.
“A girl is in grave danger,” she said7.. “Grave, grave, danger. Alone in the forest. Scared.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, could you give me any more details than that?”
“Alone,” Trelawney said again. “So scared.”
“Have you seen her?” the exasperated desk staffer asked.
“I have not seen her, but I know her,” Trelawney said. “Pansy Parkinson.”
And the Parkinson name was enough to get even the laziest policeman on the case8..
-
1 —or, was there for most of it, and learnt about the rest of it from reliable sources. To make this very clear: I was not present for the murder. ↑
2 Or too scared. ↑
3 It was not true. An afternoon with genealogical records in the public library easily told me as much. ↑
4 Also, he confided in me that he would sooner die than spend a night sleeping in a tent. ↑
5 An exaggeration, because Harry Potter threatened me with an injunction if I published any details of his personal life, whatever that means. Also, I’ve never liked the fellow. For the curious, you can read the story of how Potter narrowly escaped death as an infant in “The Boy Who Lived.” (Skeeter, 1982) ↑
6 This is sarcasm. ↑
7 From an exact transcript of the phone call, provided to me by ____ ↑
8 Not that I am implying the Hogsmeade constabulary are lazy. In fact, they are rather the opposite. ↑
It didn’t take long to choose a title for this exposé, and a subtitle too. Just in case the publishers decide to pick it up. The subtitle is: “A tell-all history of the summer that Draco Malfoy died and a small town tore itself apart, not necessarily in that order, as faithfully recorded by Zacharias Smith, who was there for it all1..”
And what publisher wouldn’t be interested? It was all over the news, Draco’s death. Usually when someone dies there’s an obit in the local paper, unless they weren’t important and cause of death was just old age, in which case there would be a death notice in the classifieds. But a rich person? A rich, important person? A rich, important, teenager? Murdered? That’s national news. It was national news. Soon as they found the body—
But I’m getting ahead of myself. They didn’t find the body until later.
Hogsmeade, the eponymous small town, was in the throes of an English summer—which is to say, it rained every day, and the temperature never made it above 25. The obscenely wealthy were away at their summer homes in the Maldives and their teenage children were left behind to have the run of the manors. All of this meant that it was weather for t-shirts and shorts, light skirts and blouses, and boats down the river. If you were particularly daring, you might dust off your grandmother’s binoculars and row towards the forest for a spot of twitching.
Pansy Parkinson was the daughter of some of Hogsmeade’s most obscenely wealthy, and as such she had the run of the manor for the summer, and had no cause to leave the house when her cellar was so well-supplied with alcohol and everyone knew she threw the most extravagant parties, if you were rich enough to be invited. She was also not a noted twitcher, but early on the morning of DATE she rose early and dusted off her grandmother’s binoculars. Dressed all in white—to mitigate the heat, you understand—she walked the short distance to the other wing of Malfoy Manor—uppercase, as it’s an institution—the wing owned by the side of the family actually called “Malfoy.” Everyone knew that the Parkinsons were on borrowed land from their cousins, but everyone was too kind2. to say anything about it, and kindest of all were the Malfoys, for allowing the Parkinsons to live in the smaller wing of the manor for so long. So while Pansy looked after the Parkinson manor—lowercase—the Malfoys themselves were home and keeping dry as the steady rain fell.
She had gone to Malfoy Manor in search of someone in particular. Due to a fortuitous marriage that really was the only socially viable option, a Parkinson and a Malfoy were first cousins, of an age, and had grown up very close indeed. Draco Malfoy was waiting for Pansy that morning, leaning louchely against the door to the boathouse.
“Downriver?” he asked her.
“I hear the birds are all about this time of year,” she said.
Draco Malfoy was dressed as the very picture of a boater that day—he wore well-pressed beige trousers and a tucked-in white shirt. He had been wearing tan boat shoes, too, Pansy said, but they were lost by the time the body was recovered.
“Look alive, Parkinson,” he said. “Today’s the day.”
They took a modest boat and two pairs of oars from the boathouse, with the help of the servant who maintained it, and launched the boat downriver towards the forest. NAME River ran directly through Malfoy property, which made it quite impossible for anyone to sail out of town without written permission from Lucius Malfoy himself, an allowance which was notoriously tricky to obtain. For the rich, though, it was fiendishly easy, and Pansy and Draco made a point of rowing the route which was hardest to get access to, out of town and towards the south-east corner of the forest. The river then ran through the forest, came out somewhere in the middle, and cut south into the town.
Of course, there were other ways to get to that part of the forest without rowing. It was no more than an hour’s hike from the forest conservancy offices on the northern border of the town. That morning, there had been other people in the forest—more than was usual for such a rainy morning. This gave the local constabulary quite the list of suspects for the murder.
By far the largest group in the forest that morning was a band of local adventurers who had been camping overnight, led by Charles Weasley, better known to his friends as Charlie, and Nymphadora Tonks, better known to her friends as Tonks. There were never any scouts in Hogsmeade—nothing so twee and typical—but there was an amateur survivalist culture that had grown out of a historical tradition of drifters squatting on Malfoy land and trying not to get killed in the process. The latest inheritor of that tradition was Charlie Weasley, himself a supposed descendant of the first drifters in Hogsmeade. Whether or not this was true3., most people believed it to be so—otherwise, how would such a poor family end up in a town like this?—and so Charlie took his role very seriously indeed. The role might’ve passed to Charlie’s only older brother, William—better known as Bill—but Bill was not such a disappointment to his mother and had gone to university in Medway to become an accountant. He was home that summer and present that morning, but Charlie still wouldn’t let him lead the troupe. In fact, all the Weasley brothers and the singular Weasley sister were present that morning, with the exception of Percy Weasley, who was even less of a disappointment to his mother and had gone to Cambridge to read law, and as such point-blank refused to even set foot in the forest without knowing the exact boundaries of the Malfoy estate4.. As well as Charlie’s old school friend Tonks, the other guests of the Weasley siblings included Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Neville Longbottom, and Luna Lovegood, none of whom had been of any particular note in the past5..
While the Weasleys and their assorted hangers-on were busy being happy campers, another pair had taken to the forest by boat from the opposite direction to Pansy and Draco. In fact, they had spent most of their lives taking the opposite direction to the Parkinsons and the Malfoys. On the west side of town the landed gentry took a different form. The Macmillans were Scots who had uprooted in the late 19th century after making their fortune in trade, and were doing their very best to pretend that money ran in their blood. The Finch-Fletchleys, despite being old money like the Malfoys, possibly even older, had not been in Hogsmeade for as long; they had bought their manor from the destitute Gaunts in the 1920s, when they were best known for being quite bohemian indeed, making West Hogsmeade a veritable commune. These days, the Finch-Fletchleys were perfectly respectable posh sorts who kept good company, but as the Macmillans proved, it took much longer than a few decades for the establishment to forget these things. On the morning of DATE, the heirs of each family, Ernie Macmillan and Justin Finch-Fletchley, made their way into Hogsmeade Forest. They were not meant to go to the forest so early—rather, they had made a last-minute decision to “borrow” a boat and row that way, because the alternative meant meeting a friend at the Hogsmeade rowing sheds, and they had decided that this particular friend was not worth the embarrassment any longer.
It was not all teenagers in the forest that morning. Representing the adults of Hogwarts were the following: mover and shaker and notably undecorated prize-evading journalist, Rita Skeeter; local mystic and litigious nuisance Sybil Trelawney; a competitive survivalist staking out the Weasley camp, Alastor Moody; Sirius Black and Remus Lupin, walking half the town’s dogs as well as five of their own; and Xenophilius Lovegood, father of the aforementioned Luna, a twitcher.
The case ought to have been easy for the police assigned to it, DCI Kingsley Shacklebolt and DI Akansha Patil, given there were so many people in the area. Surely, they thought, there would’ve been at least one witness. But none of them saw, or heard, anything. They didn’t even see each other. Skeeter, Trelawney, and Lovegood had no alibis. Moody only had an alibi because Charlie Weasley had spotted him staking out their camp and shooed him away—away, he had not gone, according to his report, but at least he had left the amateur survivalists alone to their own techniques.
Helpfully6., none of the witnesses had found the body. But they had found Pansy. Several of them. First it was Ernie and Justin, still rowing in from the opposite direction. First, they saw a boat upturned in the rushes up ahead. This, they thought, was curious, because the weather really was quite mild and there was no wind to cause such a thing to happen. They rowed on, and soon the patter of light rain on the boat’s hull was joined by a cry—“Please, help me!” Ordinarily, Pansy Parkinson would not have deigned to talk to the likes of them, being from the west side of town as they were, but on this case it seemed she had made an exception.
“What sort of prank is she pulling now?” Ernie asked Justin.
“I don’t know,” Justin said, “but I don’t think we should bare it any notice.”
They turned and rowed back the way they came.
The next to find Pansy was Rita Skeeter who, by her own admission, did not make herself known to Pansy, just took a stealthy photo and continued on her way. Skeeter was able to present the photo as evidence, along with a timestamp, which made the fact that she showed up almost immediately at the crime scene slightly less suspicious. Xenophilius Lovegood reported hearing cries that were not at all like any bird’s he’d ever heard, which were later determined to be Pansy’s. Fred and George Weasley were also passing the area, and said they’d seen someone, but they were on their way somewhere else and didn’t pause.
In the end, it was Sybil Trelawney who reported it to the police.
“A girl is in grave danger,” she said7.. “Grave, grave, danger. Alone in the forest. Scared.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, could you give me any more details than that?”
“Alone,” Trelawney said again. “So scared.”
“Have you seen her?” the exasperated desk staffer asked.
“I have not seen her, but I know her,” Trelawney said. “Pansy Parkinson.”
And the Parkinson name was enough to get even the laziest policeman on the case8..
-
1 —or, was there for most of it, and learnt about the rest of it from reliable sources. To make this very clear: I was not present for the murder. ↑
2 Or too scared. ↑
3 It was not true. An afternoon with genealogical records in the public library easily told me as much. ↑
4 Also, he confided in me that he would sooner die than spend a night sleeping in a tent. ↑
5 An exaggeration, because Harry Potter threatened me with an injunction if I published any details of his personal life, whatever that means. Also, I’ve never liked the fellow. For the curious, you can read the story of how Potter narrowly escaped death as an infant in “The Boy Who Lived.” (Skeeter, 1982) ↑
6 This is sarcasm. ↑
7 From an exact transcript of the phone call, provided to me by ____ ↑
8 Not that I am implying the Hogsmeade constabulary are lazy. In fact, they are rather the opposite. ↑
no subject
I love this so much. Everything about this is so delightful and Midsomer-esque and the footnotes are fantastic and askjdsahdasdhajsdahjkl. I cracked up at so many points but especially Ernie & Justin rowing down and going "is this a prank" and getting out post-haste (I also have questions, WHO is the friend at the boathouse they don't want to meet????).
no subject