Chapter 11: Going down the bank

DISCLAIMER: Does everything Dumbledore say about the blood protections on Harry and on Number Four Privet Drive make sense as a coherent whole with no internal contradictions? If not, I don't own Harry Potter.

CHAPTER 11

The first week of the new year I get a call from Marge. Apparently there were other things going on in her life, and my harsh words - she calls it 'straight talking' - made her decide on a New Year's Resolution to quit drinking. And has attended her first AA meeting. I wish her good luck, and mean it.

-oOo-

Marge's phone call - I'm not pinning too much hope on it, most addiction recovery programs have a fairly high failure rate on the first attempt - comes after a week of intense calculation and back-and-forth with the reference books. I think I've got a grip on what the old spell Lily called on is, at least as to the general idea of it.

It's possible, apparently, to set up a great big magic in one of a number of ways that can then be called on with a lot less effort later. It's how a lot of defensive magics on homes and places of business are set up. For example, a buried runestone, often under the hearth for the extra symbolic oomph, can give you animated grotesques to defend your castle that come to life when you speak the right spell. The reference I've got doesn't say whether the incantation for the activation spell is 'piertotum locomotor', but I have to say, I kind of want to use that spell too. Although I'd go with shop-window mannequins with built-in guns so's I can have my own army of Autons.

Whatever. The spell Lily found and called on, it's big, it's powerful - actually off the chart in the appendices to volume 3 of Magic of Measurement - it's powered by blood sacrifice and actual human sacrifice, and its purpose is defensive. Exactly how it defends is beyond my ability to figure out beyond the largest of generalities, but I can see how Dumbledore got to the conclusion that it had to do with whatever saved Harry that night. Lily had a hand in that, and who else would have created defences for this house? He clearly didn't do enough analytical charm work to notice that the dates didn't match at all.

I'm guessing that whatever's on Harry is quite potent stuff too, and powered by the death of at least one of his parents it would read very similar to blood magic unless you took time and trouble like I did. There's a whole monograph on it in Magic of Measurement: blood magic, willing martyrdom and unwilling human sacrifice can all be used to lay and seal powerful magics, and in the context of decommissioning ancient tombs (Egypt is, apparently, lifting with the bloody things and the cleanup effort is projected to finish sometime in the late third millennium) it's vitally important to know which you're trying to break. The similarity in signatures has apparently undone more than a few curse-breakers who've picked the wrong method of attack.

Dumbledore's assumptions - reasonable ones, in the circumstances, however wrong they turned out to be - leave open the question of why he added more spells, along apparently with something that will knacker the whole arrangement on the day of Harry's seventeenth birthday. So I assume: they took pains to evacuate everyone in the last book, which they wouldn't have done if this absolute monster of a defensive spell was going to stay up. There's that old quote - Mark Twain? I forget - about no editor liking the taste of a story until he's peed in it himself, and I suspect something like that may have informed Dumbledore's decision-making here.

What he cast was a whole suite of spells meant to link other spells one to another that stitched together the protection on Harry with the protection on Number Four. Along with those, he set up something that is clearly an owl-post preventer, and a collection of spells designed to interfere in decision-making. I hope they're to reinforce the instructions in his letter about keeping Harry's presence on the down-low. Mostly because I could see the likes of Dumbledore assuming that stupid muggles would need a bit of magical coercion to keep them on the straight and narrow.

I could also see him either not thinking through the consequences properly or not checking back to make sure everything was running properly. Which was pretty idiotic. People who were already on the ragged edge of their mental health, given shocking news and an unexpected responsibility? Sheer common sense would tell you not to add mind-control magic to the mix. A high-handed wizard who on his best day merely doesn't give a shit about muggles, with less than 24 hours' study time working with magic he has unknowingly misidentified? We're lucky the Dursleys didn't keep Harry secret by burying him under the patio.

It's for that reason I'm confident there isn't a compulsion to abuse Harry in among this lot: the Dursleys behaviour was always going to be abusive to some extent, so a compulsion to escalate that abuse would have probably given us the likes of the Victoria Climbié case fifteen years early. Still, Dumbledore's meddling - attributing it, as one ought, to stupidity rather than malice - definitely made things worse. Being a horribly sat-on poor relation is bad enough: Harry got to be a horribly sat-on poor relation kept in solitary confinement most of the time and deprived of a year of primary education.

The other elephant in this particular room is the question of Telling Harry He's A Wizard. Finding that there are spells on this house that affect decision-making causes me to question my own thoughts on the matter; I'm not usually as given to pondering decisions as long as I have this one, which I notice when the existence of these spells prompts me to examine my own decision-making.

There's definitely something going on. The Dursleys certainly would have, had I not intervened, put a lot of effort into denying the existence of magic altogether and punishing Harry for expressing any interest in anything even vaguely related, and that's far beyond anything that could be explained by Petunia's jealousy of Lily or any offence James Potter could have inadvertently given Vernon. Arabella Figg is under orders not to tell Harry - she admits as much in the books - but Dumbledore's letter only mentions not letting Harry know about his fame in the wizarding world. So it's probable that there's something to reinforce that 'don't tell him about his fame (reasonable) that however unintentionally nudged them in the 'no such thing as magic' direction (which is batshit crazy and if Obscurials are a thing, dangerous). There may even be an actual 'don't tell anyone about magic' spell in there as well: the Statute of Secrecy being what it is, it's probably a fairly standard spell for the likes of muggleborns' parents or places near areas of high magical activity. It'd save the obliviators a lot of work, judiciously applied.

Once I've carried the reasoning that far, I can at least deal with the possibility that there's something affecting my thought processes. Which I'm probably better-equipped to deal with than most wizards, quite frankly. Cognitive behavioural therapy didn't work so well for me when I was working through my issues, it took a course of psychodynamic psychotherapy to start getting a handle on things. What CBT is good for is reflection and self-examination when it comes to how you react to things and make decisions. And, frankly, I'm pretty sure now I examine the matter that I'm being affected, at least during such times as I've been inside human heads.

Mind-affecting spells aren't a sure-fire thing, fortunately. The Imperius curse is so feared because it works damn near perfectly on damn near everyone and is versatile enough to run the gamut from making your victim a total puppet to making your victim a near-undetectable Manchurian Candidate-style sleeper agent. Compulsions can't do much more than shape a general trend of behaviour, don't always work, and never work on aware targets with enough wit to resist. Even Vernon second-helpings-of-pie-don't-mind-if-I-do Dursley would have enough willpower if he was made aware of the problem.

Solution: get started. It would be easy to spend time on devising a program of managed release of information and lose months to procrastination, it's how magic like this works. Taking an immediate first step would immediately break the compulsion, so I get Petunia to take Dudley out for the day to go do something educational with a wad of Tom Riddle's cash.

As soon as they're out of the car at the station to get the train into London - Dudley wants to go see London Zoo - I turn to Harry. "You're wondering why you don't get to go to London Zoo?"

He nods. He's looked a bit sad about it all morning, actually. He was probably hoping to go talk to some snakes.

"Well," I say, pulling out of the station car-park, "you will one day. After all, you got to see Alton Towers before Dudley did, remember?"

He nods, brightening up a bit.

"We've got a bit of an adventure of our own, today. Remember me telling you that magic was real? We're going to do some today, when we get home. Not very exciting magic, but it's still going to be really cool."

"Am I going to be doing magic? I don't know how." Harry looks worried: he's had a few experiences at school of not knowing stuff the other kids did and has had to be reassured.

"Well, you don't have to know anything for this magic, what you have to do is mostly just sit still while I do the hard parts."

"Will I be able to learn magic when I'm older?"

"You might, especially if you learn all your lessons at school and eat your greens." Telling him he's definitely a wizard now will stop me from using the prospect to motivate him. At least that better be the reasoning, I'm getting a little paranoid about mind-altering magic if I'm honest with myself.

"Will Dudley?" Actually a good question.

"Probably not. Dudley's not really all about the clever stuff, is he? Nothing wrong with that, of course, be a funny old world if we were all the same, but can you imagine him doing extra work at school and reading books if we didn't make him?"

Harry giggles a bit. Dudley has improved out of all recognition over the last few months, but he's clearly not destined for the rarefied heights of academia any more than his father was. "No," Harry says, "He's still reading Peter and Jane books. I can nearly read silently already, Miss Coonan says I'm really good at it."

"Well, keep it up. Get good marks on all your tests and good reports at the end of term, and when you're old enough you can learn magic."

"How old is old enough?"

"Old enough to read magic books, which might take a while. Most of them are in really small writing with no pictures, after all." To a five-and-half-year-old this is about the same level of challenge as hieroglyphics. "So work hard on your reading. I'll make sure we've got some easy magic books in the house so you can try when your reading's a bit better." I'll also sort out a shelf of kids books beyond Harry's current level so he can challenge himself on the regular. I have fond memories of the Chronicles of Prydain from about his age which - I catch myself on. There's an actual horcrux in those books. Or, at least, a for-the-kiddies depiction of a bad guy that makes use of one. Lloyd Alexander didn't confine himself to welsh legends when writing them, he drew on the russian folk-tale of Koschei the Deathless among others. Snap decision: let Harry read them. He's not going to be confronted with his own inevitable death, and getting to the right conclusion from Dumbledore's damnable game of hints and suggestions a lot faster can only be a good thing.

However, focus. I can't let myself be distracted into not doing what I mean to today. "There's an important thing to remember, though. Remember me telling you about good secrets and bad secrets and how to tell the difference? Magic is a good secret, one we can't tell anyone at school. Can you think of why it might be a good secret?"

Harry takes time to think, a habit I've been encouraging. "Is it because people might be frightened?"

"That's a very good answer. Magic is cool and fun and useful, but to people who can't do it, it can be quite scary and they might try and bully you because they're scared." I'm pretty sure the witch-hunt stories in the magical history books I've bought are complete cobblers, as it happens - The Wonderful Discouerie of Witches In The County of Lancashire is exactly the same text I remember from my own universe, and they were hanged, not burned, for murder and destruction of livestock, not magic. (You can argue about the harshness of the penalty and whether or not their convictions were sound, but that such things ought to be punished is pretty unarguable.) The version being taught to wizard kids is very different and paints the muggle authorities in a much worse light. Still, people can get awfully twitchy around things they don't understand: to quote Agent K: 'A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky animals.'

The main motivation, though, is not getting Harry done under the Statute of Secrecy before he even gets to Hogwarts. "The rule, Harry, is that we don't say anything about magic to anyone unless we're really, really sure they already know. Which means you can only talk about magic that's not in a story-book with me or your Aunt Petunia. You can't tell Dudley because he might forget and tell someone he shouldn't, even if he doesn't mean to. That includes talking to snakes, by the way. That's a magic thing that you shouldn't talk about with anyone, even if they know about other magic, because people are really scared of snakes, even snakes that aren't complete gits like Bronson."

Harry nods his assent and we arrive back at Privet Drive.

Running the magic survey on a person (or an object, the techniques are similar) rather than a plot of land is a lot less fuss and bother. It takes us about an hour to get everything set up - much of that being the heavy, sweaty business of horsing the plywood in from the garage and getting it onto the dining table without breaking anything and Harry is hugely impressed with my ability to make the smaller bits of apparatus float into position with just a wave of my hand. "Just like Luke Skywalker!"

Harry gets to sit cross-legged on the table amid the figures I've drawn with chalk ahead of time while I write a simple runic spell around the circle he's sitting in.

"Right, all you have to do is hold still for a little while with your hand on this prism here while the light shines through it. It'll make a pattern appear on the wall over there which will tell us about the magic on you."

"There's magic on me?"

"Yep. Your mum and dad could do magic. Remember Tom?"

Harry frowns. He's still cross about Tom, even if he's no longer having nightmares about the fucker. "He was magic, you told me. You got his magic when you gobbled him up. Will I have to gobble someone up?"

"No, magic's like your hair colour, or what colour your eyes are. You can sometimes have it because your mummy or daddy had it, so if you've got it, that's where it'll come from."

"Both of them?"

"Yes."

"But Aunt Petunia doesn't have magic, does she?" Well done, Harry. Spotting the connection and following up the implications, we'll make a boffin out of you yet!

"If she does, it's not as much as your mum did. She's very good at gardening, though, so we think she might be helping the plants grow by magic. It's very small magic that you can hardly tell is there, though. Your mum had a lot more magic."

"If Aunt Petunia has magic, will Dudley?"

"Probably not. Uncle Vernon," and damn me if it still doesn't feel strange to be talking about a man out of his own mouth like that, "has only ordinary person magic, enough to be alive but no more, so Dudley will probably be the same. It's like if you had a short mummy and daddy, you'd probably grow up to be short too. It's the same with magic. Your mummy and daddy had very tall magic, so we think yours at least won't be very short. That's just a guess, though. Sometimes tall people have short children, and short people have tall children. All of my children were taller than me, for example."

"Tall like how tall they were, not tall like having a lot of magic?"

I chuckle at that. It's been so long since my kids were this age that I sometimes forget that you have to be careful with metaphors until they're quite a bit older. "Just as you say, Harry. I'm talking about tall and short kids because that's easy to understand, you see it every day. That helps you to understand kids who have a little or lots of magic even though you can't see it."

"Cor."

"Now, see how there's a pattern on the wall?"

"It looks like a rainbow! With all marks on it!"

"It does. One of my magic books says what all of these marks and colours mean, but I don't need to look it up, because I know this one. It's a special magic to help keep you safe from bad people like Tom. Bad magic people, I should say, because it wouldn't stop someone like Piers Polkiss from pushing you over in the playground." Harry's got Dudley for that sort of thing now, the little chunk was vibrating with pride when I told him that sticking up for the littler kids was the sort of thing that a Good Knight Bold And True would do. Arise, Sir Dudley, and all that.

"How does it keep me safe?"

"It's a magic made up from how much your mummy and daddy loved you." I would sooner stick my essentials in a mincer and turn the crank than tell Harry it was powered by their willing deaths. I don't need any kind of compulsion magic to keep that from him until he's a lot older, "and, well, one way it might do it is make a magic ghost come along and gobble someone up if they were being a baddy at you."

Harry giggles at that characterisation of protective magic. Thing is, it might be true. Magic works in some decidedly - to my muggle-educated mind - screwy ways. A common theme of protective magic, in all the theory books that deal with it, is 'misfortune and confusion to our foes' which suggests that it influences probability and decision making, giving an attacker a run of bad luck and a tendency to make sub-optimal decisions. Just like what got the scar-instance of Tom Riddle turned into a lightsaber shish-kebab. If the Big Spell works that way then tying Harry to it wouldn't be quite such a bad idea, now I think about it. It'd explain a lot about the Death Eaters' performance in the books. Not least the kind of rushes of shit to the brains they suffered in Deathly Hallows, which let Harry & Co win it quite against the merits of the matter. The whole story should have ended in blood and tragedy at Malfoy Manor, but apparently strip-searching prisoners is muggle nonsense or something.

A bit of book-work with the spectrum image tells me that the most I'm going to know about the magic on Harry is 'powerful, non-standard, lethal defence with unusual trigger conditions', which may or may not have subtler effects on potential enemies. Literally nothing about it is listed in any of the 'things you can expect to encounter' and I'd be completely in the dark if I hadn't read a detailed description of it burning Quirinus Quirrell's face clean off in six and a bit years' time. An event which I'd like to prevent, since giving the fucker information about the booby trap installed on Harry before I can get all his horcruxes strikes me as a poor tactical move, and I can't guarantee to have got all of them by then.

We spend the rest of the day going through all the cool stuff in the magic books I've bought with Tom's money (stored in a lockbox with undetectable extension, shrink-on-command and featherweight charms on it, a steal at two hundred galleons and proof against curious five-year-olds). Harry agrees that he will have to do a lot of work at school before he can read these, but now he's seen that there are books with actual moving pictures I can see his motivation kicking up a notch or three.

What he doesn't get to see is my wand. Preciousssssss. Being tempted to read above his current level is one thing - a good thing, and keeping books beyond my official reading level about the house was one of the few things my parents actually got right in raising me - but being tempted to pick up a wand and try and do magic at his age? The potential for disaster is sufficiently great that I don't want him to know it exists until he's old enough to reliably follow rules.

-oOo-

"Hello, Special Circumstances, Huw Rhys speaking, how can I help you?" After getting bounced around a whole lot of cut-glass RP telephone voices, a proper from-the-valleys welsh voice on the line is quite the breath of fresh air. Look you, boyo, fancy a leek?

"Yes, hello, I'd like to come in and talk to someone about opening an account." It's taken me nearly an hour of getting passed around department after department at the bank, most of it spent trying to find someone who'd even heard of the Special Circumstances Customer Department. After finishing up collecting the last of Tom's easily-accessible stashes of gold and cash - all the ones on mainland Britain, that is - I've got nearly a quarter million sat in the lockbox in the escritoire cabinet. Even after all I've spent. Tom was a hoarder. Anti-theft charms only provide peace of mind up to a point, this money should be earning interest damn it.

"Are you sure you're through to the right department? We don't actually do much business via the telephone, you see…"

"I'd expect not. Ah, I'm not sure how much I'm actually allowed to say over the phone, what with the secrecy laws and all."

"Well, tell me as much as you feel comfortable with. If you are eligible for this particular Coutts service, you know what you can and can't say." I can hear the bleeder grinning at the other end of the line. Thing is, until I know he's a wizard, squib, or certified Knowledgeable Muggle (which is apparently a thing, the Ministry does literature for the parents of muggleborns, available at Flourish and Blotts with a commentary booklet, a sickle and thirteen knuts, and it's surprisingly informative and non-patronising) I can't blow the gaff on magic. So I have to find a way of showing mine without actually dropping trou and waving it about before he shows me his. The fact that I know how to use a telephone is probably counting against me. It also wouldn't even slightly surprise me to learn that there are people who try and entrap wizards working in the muggle economy into breaching the Statute. A lot of wizards are really snotty about muggle contact of any kind and will grass at the drop of a (pointy) hat.

"The long and the short of it," I say, mustering my skills of obfuscatory bullshit, "is that you have a partner institution that deals exclusively with people who are eligible, but their financial management consists, in a very real sense, of stuffing their customers' money in a hole in the ground. If they have interest-bearing accounts, they don't advertise them, and there are more convenient options for safe-deposit storage. A sad thing to say about an institution that calls itself a bank, but there you go. Fortunately, one of their tellers happened to let me know that there's an element of common ownership between that institution and your own, and that there are some advantages to banking with you - for eligible customers such as myself - that would satisfy the relevant treaty between the jurisdiction they do business in and what I like to think of as the real world while also letting me have my money actually work for me. Rather than, as I say - "

"Having your money in a hole in the ground, yes. I do rather take your point." He sounds amused. I may have had something of a waspish tone to my voice toward the end, there.

"Have I said enough to at least make an appointment where we don't have to double-talk our way around the problem? Not the least of which, I might add, is that there's a treaty-mandated fixed exchange rate between sterling and the currency they do business in that gives even my limited economic nouse a serious case of the willies."

"I rather think so, yes." There's a moment of hand-over-the-mouthpiece talking, "I should have the appointment book in front of me momentarily, If I could have a name?"

"Reynolds, Malcolm Reynolds. No middle name," largely because I couldn't be arsed thinking one up: while I enjoyed Firefly I wasn't a big enough fan to actually memorise details like that, "and I should say up front that I'm quite possibly a little more special circumstances than you might be used to. Which is all I can say over the phone, I'm afraid, I should just like you to brace yourself for something a little out of the ordinary. Even by what I suspect your standards to be."

"I promise to keep an open mind, Mr. Reynolds, we really do deal with all sorts in this office. Now, if I could take the absolute bare minimum of details -"

The appointment is easy enough to set up, and I'm on the Strand three days later in good time for an 11am appointment. I've told Grunnings that there are some issues with Harry's trust fund: five-year-olds just don't straight up inherit in the real world, and while the Public Trustee will do, and often has to if the kid's parents died intestate, anyone with any sense sets up a proper trust that isn't quite as rule-bound as the government office. I'd mentioned that to explain taking a day's holiday on short notice, but Vernon's boss does the decent thing and tells him to take it as buckshee paid time off. This was the company Vernon was seething with resentment at?

Coutts looks very much like it will when my old self visited it ten years or so from now on professional business. Which is to say, nothing like a bank established in the seventeenth century. I've no idea when exactly the redevelopment was, but it looks like a set from Logan's Run, or possibly Thunderbirds, with an option on Joe 90. You can tell that it's an establishment that caters to Serious Money, though, the receptionists look like they're moonlighting from their jobs as dowager countesses. (You go a notch down the ladder, front-of-house is off-duty supermodels. No, I've no idea how this works either.)

Mr. Rhys is a fortyish standard-issue Cheerful Welshman. Which I'm glad of: the alternative is the Lugubrious Welshman and they're tiresome to converse with at any length. He's long, lean, mildly balding and looks like he was born to wear a three-piece pinstripe suit. The effect is of the more sympathetic sort of undertaker, sensitive but reminding you that your dear departed wouldn't want you to be too downhearted about it all, they've gone on to better things after all.

Once we're situated in a conference room with tea and biscuits and I'm done glossing over the pleasantries with ruminations on the man's character, Rhys gets to business.

"I have to admit I'm intrigued by the thought of a more-special-than-usual special services customer, Mr. Reynolds, but I think perhaps I might ask you for at least something to establish your bona fides? You understand we have to be careful, see?"

"I quite understand," I tell him, "and perhaps if I mention that I own a handsomely-carved stick, which I propose to show you?"

"A stick, you say? It's intrigued I am, look you." I've been playing up my Lancashire accent a bit, and he's responding in kind. When you get surrounded by plummy voices the temptation to haul off and give the buggers a mouthful of authentic provincial gibberish gets almost overwhelming at times and I suspect Mr. Rhys feels the same way.

I take my wand out between two fingers - the etiquette for this sort of thing is very similar to handling a loaded firearm in a tense situation - and lay it on the table in front of me. "Behold," I say, "my stick."

Rhys grins. "A handsome stick it is, too, a handsome stick. As it happens, I have one of my own of a similar character." He lays his wand on the table just like I did. From the looks it's alder - the orangey-gold tone of the wood is quite distinctive - and less, for want of a better word, chunky than mine.

"So," he says after we've returned our wands to our pockets, "I don't recall your name from Hogwarts -?"

"Never went," I tell him, "and when I say I'm out of the ordinary, it's because Hogwarts wasn't actually an option in the place and time of my mortal birth. I'm currently discorporate, you see, and borrowing young Vernon here when I need to do business in the material world."

Rhys is momentarily taken aback, and then frowns. "There's a more usual way of describing arrangements like that, Mr. Reynolds. We use words like possession."

"Vernon's wife consented in her capacity as next of kin." This is radically overselling Petunia's attitude to my presence, of course, but the real story is basically too lunatic to tell. "The story is quite a long and involved one, but essentially Vernon was in very poor health, mental and physical, when I happened along, and in consideration of me putting him sufficiently to rights that he can manage for himself, she agreed that my taking up residence in her husband was for the best. Not least because I was better able to look to the welfare of the two children they have care of." I give Rhys as speaking a look as I can manage out of Vernon's face, contriving to imply that the kids were being abused without saying so out loud.

"Am I to presume that Mr. Vernon's family would be magical themselves?"

I don't correct Rhys's assumption about Vernon's name: I was expecting at least some negative reaction to my being a possessing spirit and it could still be that I have to scarper, "They're not. The magical members of the family were Vernon's sister-in-law and her husband, and their orphaned son who is one of the children I mentioned. His parents were killed in the recent unpleasantness, and Mrs. Vernon's the only family the poor lad had left."

"And your own, how can I put this, discorporation, if it's not an indelicate question?"

"Unrelated, road traffic accident as it happens, and I'm working on a more satisfactory solution than borrowing Vernon. Difficult, the extant methods I know about are morally repugnant or unhygienic and usually both."

"I'll take your word for that. Well, if it's any consolation, you're far from the only client we have who's currently incorporeal. Gringotts have to comply with treaty regulation as to who they do business with. Here on the non magical side of things we are in the happy position that the laws don't specifically exclude anyone other than children and lunatics from having legal capacity to do business with us. One of the simpler methods, of course, is to form a shell company to hold your assets for you. There are a number of jurisdictions that are suitably accommodating -"

It's like I'm back in the saddle of being a lawyer. I never actually practised as a company-commercial solicitor - I started out doing civil engineering and construction litigation and went from there into IT law and ended my career as a local government officer - but I did my articles of clerkship in a firm that had it as a primary specialty, so I know the tune and can dance the simpler steps.

Mr. Rhys (Hufflepuff, class of '61) knows not just the more complicated steps, but a large repertoire of flashy routines. He makes it sound simple - I know it's not, but I now have an expert on board - to set up a small constellation of companies in Jersey, Barbados and Aruba - the Aruba one is the real cut-out identity-wise, their incorporation laws are hilarious back here in the 80s - that will allow me to hold and manage real property while Coutts handles the cash and investments. They've got a lot of practise in concealing the fact that wealth is held by improbably long-lived individuals, vampires and alchemists being a particular specialty. When I mention that my initial deposit will involve liquidating a couple of hundred grand's worth of bullion I go from having his attention to having his interest. When I mention that there will be a considerable movement of other assets in the not-too-distant future he has to stop our planning session for a moment.

"Mr. Reynolds," he says, "can you assure me that what we're dealing with here is not the proceeds of crime?" There are money laundering regulations in 1985, but they're nowhere near as stringent as the ones I had to operate under in the mid-to-late 90s, and practically non-existent compared to the early twenty-first century version.

"I can," I say, smiling. "I've referred to the late unpleasantness on the magical side of things, yes? It was, bluntly, a war, and since there were muggle casualties the United Kingdom was technically a belligerent. I've taken all of the money and assets as prize of war from the enemy, since I've been able to track where it was all squirrelled away. Happily, the Prize Acts weren't passed on the magical side of things, so I don't need a formal condemnation order from a Prize Court. The enemy lost it, I took it, it's mine."

"Even personal property?"

"Not the case here. The other side had a distinctly monarchical command structure, so there was no distinction between the personal resources of their supreme command and their resources as a belligerent. There's no treaty formally ending the war, and despite popular belief he's a wholly inadequate amount of dead. So it's not even looting, and none of it is subject to probate or bona vacantia." This might pass the laugh test as an argument in Public International Law, but it's a very thin might. All I need for present purposes, however, is a figleaf to cover my outright pillaging: I'm not arguing before a court, I'm persuading a banker to take my money. A much lower standard of probative credibility is applied, to the annoyance of law enforcement agencies generally.

Rhys has gone pale. He's a clever chap and has caught the implication. "You mean -"

"Best not to voice that thought, chum," I tell him, "you've had my assurance pro-forma that this isn't the proceeds of serious or drug-related crime, which is all you need for the bank. On the magical side of things you're better off with your plausible deniability."

"You're not bloody wrong, boyo," he says, sitting back in his chair and grabbing the telephone. "We'll need more tea, I reckon. You say the bastard's not dead?"

"Not entirely," I say, "you've said you deal on the regular with people who didn't necessarily stop when their hearts did. I've first-hand evidence of my own senses that he took at least one measure to survive being discorporated back in '81."

"We all knew he was a monster, but -"

"Sticking around doesn't make him a monster. The method he chose requires monstrous acts, I'm sorry to say. You ever run into a ghost at Hogwarts named Myrtle?"

He nods. "A moment," he says, and calls through for another service of tea.

When he puts the phone back down I go on, "One of his early victims. Human sacrifice, although mercifully enough she can't remember the details."

"It would explain the poor thing's constant wailing," he says, "the girls all used to complain about her haunting the loo. Brazen of him to do it in school, mind."

We're interrupted briefly with a very speedy replacement tea-tray - Vernon agitates for more biscuits but I only unbend as far as one lump of sugar in my cup of tea, one more than I personally prefer - and I finish my spiel. "The point is that he's able to make a comeback, the Ministry didn't hang any of the buggers who followed him and didn't jail nearly enough for anyone to consider the matter properly settled. It was denazification all over again, I'm afraid, with even less excuse for letting the scum off scot-free. So when, not if, when he comes back I want him delayed by having to replace all of the resources I've taken out of his hands."

"Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics," Rhys says, nodding along. "Normally we'd be very keen to preserve confidentiality, but…"

"Well, I want confidentiality in so far as I'm the source," I tell him, taking his meaning, "but feel free to share the bad news, unattributed, with anyone you feel is sound. Obviously, we don't want any of his former minions heartened by the prospect of an imminent round two, do we?"

"Do we buggery, no," he agrees. "I notice you seemed to follow the lingo about the corporations fairly well, you've done this sort of thing before?"

"I was an admitted solicitor for a time while I was still mortal, while it wasn't my specialty I had to at least learn it to qualify. Anyway, if it helps your peace of mind, he didn't have an account here to the best of my knowledge. There's a password-locked vault at Gringotts that I mean to clean out, but I suspect it's not much more than walking-around money. The big one is the numbered account in Zurich where he's been dumping his ill-gotten gains since the late forties, which I should be able to clear out over the next few months. I don't have any exact numbers, but I suspect it's going to be a quite eye-watering amount."

"You have the codes? We can handle that for you."

"I do, and I'm a bit loath to let you do it, to be honest. If you do it from here it'll make a trail back to you and, possibly, me: while I don't doubt you have defences, he's a fairly potent threat. I was going to establish a throwaway identity and get a bank draft made out to cash."

Rhys's grin is entirely predatory. "You may have heard of our concierge service?"

"Famed in song and story, yes. I'm reluctant to expose them to risk, though. I'm assuming they're staffed by nonmagicals?"

"Most of them. The magical ones, who are a big part of the reputation of that department, are exactly the kind of people your man wanted done away with. I'm pretty sure they can cover their tracks well enough to fool a pureblood -"

I hold a hand up. "He isn't. A pureblood, that is. Halfblood, raised in a muggle orphanage in the late twenties, early thirties. Went to Hogwarts thinking he was muggleborn, got sorted into Slytherin."

Rhys winces. Even before all of the shit Tom stirred up it was not a recipe for a happy seven years to be a muggleborn in Slytherin. "And he took up their cause anyway?"

"A few of the deaths among the purebloods were revenge for games of 'bogwash the mudblood', I should imagine." I'd be very surprised if this wasn't the case. I've got his memories of swearing bloody vengeance, after all, even if I've not gone looking for the consummations thereof. "As to his motives, your guess is as good as anyone's. My point is that if we're going to ask your people to do this, it should be in full knowledge of the risks. Do I think a kid brought up on the parish between the wars is going to know finance like you or I do? No. But he's got a head start compared to most purebloods in that he knows there's more to money than shiny coins, so he might have educated himself."

"I know my colleagues, Mr. Reynolds. They'll relish the risk."

I snort. "Try an' restrain yourself from breaking into 'Men of Harlech' on their behalf, ey? Let me know what they say? With full knowledge of the risk."

There's laughter in his eyes as he looks me dead in the eye. "Welshmen do not yield," he says.

"Back to it, though. There's the cash right now, there's the swiss account, and there's a whole portfolio of assets I can get my hands on as sort-of prize of war, about which ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies. I could just take it, but with the bugger still in the wind I'm going to need to indulge in some sharp practise to cover my tracks." Which is to say twenty-first century standards of money-laundering augmented with mind-control magic and memory modification. Can't prevent Tom from knowing he's been robbed hollow, but I can leave him with no obvious target for revenge, apart from the disgrace to the legal profession who's been taking care of the estate for forty years without asking what should have been some fairly obvious questions.

"I quite understand. I'll make sure the paperwork shows that we've done proper due diligence and found nothing untoward. I'd suggest liquidating everything?" It's an obvious point, he's framing it as a question to avoid calling me a total idiot to my face.

"My plan exactly. There are a couple of assets I want to leave in place so he doesn't notice immediately, he's got a bolt-hole up north that I want him to use because I have tactical plans for it," although 'plans' is an overstatement of my mere desire to know where his bolt-hole is should he come back - "and I'm going to have to leave him enough productive assets to keep up the maintenance on it accordingly. The rest is going to become a series of bankers' drafts that will be making their way here over the next couple of years."

"Anything else? You mentioned Mr. Vernon having care of a young wizard? Anything we can do for him?"

I consider the matter for a moment. Of course Rhys is looking for extra business. Very much his job. The question is whether to let him in on the gag. The obvious marker for trusting this chap is how far out of the mainstream wizarding world he is: muggleborn, working in the muggle economy, and very definitely outwith the Death Eater recruitment pool. The clincher, though, is that he's City of London Financial Services. I may have moved away as my career progressed, but by original training he's part of my own personal professional tribe. He is, in short, People Like Me. And I have been quietly fuming over the arrant stupidity of leaving Harry's entire worldly wealth in a hole in the ground. Decision made, I say, "He's an interesting case. He's got a vault at Gringotts, contents unknown to me, that the individual who dumped him on his aunt and uncle didn't see fit to mention. The vault key is presumably in said individual's hands, we don't know what's been done with it or the money."

Rhys sucks air through his teeth. "Doesn't sound good."

"Especially not when you consider that we're talking about Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore."

"What."

"I don't know what story he's been giving out, but Dumbledore left the poor mite on his aunt's doorstep overnight with a note and no further explanation, it's a wonder he didn't get adopted by the milkman. I've been able to figure out a bit more because, well, disembodied spirit. I have an inbuilt advantage when it comes to finding things out, even if I can't always get everything."

"If you've got formal guardianship papers - I presume in Mr. Vernon's name - Gringotts will transfer the account to us on your instruction. We won't be able to do anything about any jiggery-pokery before the date of transfer, but it will shut any misfeasance right down." Rhys is frowning. It's pretty clear he's not saying everything he knows or suspects about this, and probably won't even if pushed.

Rhys's attitude to Dumbledore is interesting, to say the least. "I notice you don't immediately discount the idea that Dumbledore would do any such thing."

"I also don't immediately assume he would, either, look you. He's a man, same as any other. He's a good man relative to the rest of the wizarding world, but that's no high bar to be clearing, is it? He's a big man for the politics, and that costs money. Would he succumb to temptation? I don't know, but why risk it if we've an alternative?"

"Take your point. I've my own reasons for doubting his fitness for public office, but I've not seen anything to suggest he's a common thief either. Still, as you say, taking temptation out of his way is the right thing to do, and having that money earning interest is the right thing to do for Harry. There's not going to be any will or trust deed to cover it, I'm afraid. If the Potters had a will, it's on the wizarding side."

Rhys waves it off. "That's not such a problem. Our trustee department will take over seamlessly if you've got a court order covering the guardianship. Mention Coutts to pretty much any judge and they'll be happy with it."

"Well, the formal guardianship should go through shortly. We're just waiting for a court date and I can't see it not going through basically on the nod. If I could have a note of your trustee people's willingness to act I can instruct my solicitor to get the judge's sign-off as part of the final order."

"That should do nicely."

I've had a thought niggling at the back of my mind. "You mentioned having alchemists, plural, on your books?"

"I did. If you're asking what I think you're asking, the lead-into-gold thing is rather a myth, with most of them it's just centuries of compound interest." It doesn't surprise me that there are more alchemists around than the Flamels: it's a discipline with over two millennia of documented history and some decidedly famous names attached to it. That the utterly parochial wizarding world would assume that the one they knew about was the only one at all is of a piece with their overall character.

"Not what I was after. I mentioned trying to find a way to get a new body so I don't have to borrow Vernon here, and being able to consult an alchemist who's read in on modern biochemistry and genetics would be a great help. I'm after magical methods of growing clone bodies from DNA samples. Even if only to tell me that what I'm thinking is impossible, it'll help to rule it out. If you can effect an introduction?"

"It can't hurt to ask, and most of the alchemists I'm personally acquainted with have telephones. Obviously I can promise nothing and confidentiality forbids me reporting back, mind, but between ourselves most of them would take the bit right between their teeth at the prospect of an interesting problem to solve. If I mention it to more than one of them, why, there may even be a fight."

-oOo-

AUTHOR NOTES

The bit in the disclaimer: if you copy out everything Dumbledore says and does on those two subjects, as well as a few things he does in relation to them, you should, as I did, see that they don't actually all match up, and in a few places the things he says flatly contradict the things he does. We know the protection on Harry's own person is real and defeatable - it works against Voldemort until he counteracts it. The solution I've come up with here allows there to be real protections on Number Four that don't amount to just a great big bluff that Voldemort buys right up to Deathly Hallows even though he counteracted Harry's blood protection in Goblet of Fire. What that protection spell is is a matter for later in the story, of course.

The Wonderful Discouerie is a contemporary account, by one of the court clerks, of the trial of the Lancashire Witches in 1612. There's a few places where the tale is obvious embroidered but it's a primary source and considered reliable. Google 'Pendle Witches' or 'Lancashire witches' for the history.

The Chronicles of Prydain, by Lloyd Alexander. Based very loosely on welsh legend and myth (and a few bits of history), they're a brilliant read for kids. And, yes, there's a horcrux in them, which is as much of a spoiler as I'll give you.

All of the stuff about shell companies and money laundering? What I've alluded to wouldn't work nowadays. Wouldn't work even a few years later than depicted but it's accurate for the period and I'm not going to put genuine money-laundering methods in a fanfic. (I know how to do it because I was professionally required to be able to spot and report it. And in order to fight the dark arts, first you must know the dark arts...)

As for Coutts, if you think they're a bit on the accepting side as regards accepting fairly shady customers - as Mal undoubtedly is - they actually got fined for exactly that a few years ago. (They're nothing special in that regard, most of the major banks have been done for money laundering at one point or another) In any event "I'm ripping off the Dark Lord who considers you all blood traitors for working alongside muggles" would go a long way toward soothing any limited qualms they may have had, especially in the more 'relaxed' atmosphere of pre-90s financial services.

Fanfic recommendation: What's Her Name In Hufflepuff by ashez2ashes, only on FFN as far as I know. The tone of that story did a lot to influence this one.