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SIYE Time:22:46 on 28th March 2024
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Hollow Ash
By FloreatCastellum

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Category: Post-Hogwarts
Characters:Harry/Ginny, Neville Longbottom, Other
Genres: Drama
Warnings: Dark Fiction, Death, Disturbing Imagery, Extreme Language, Mild Language, Mild Sexual Situations, Sexual Situations, Spouse/Adult/Child Abuse, Violence, Violence/Physical Abuse
Story is Complete
Rating: R
Reviews: 131
Summary: When a mysterious woman comes to the Auror office claiming to be the victim of a terrible crime, Theia and Harry want to do everything they can to help her. The problem is, she has no memory of what has happened. As they piece together the sinister events, their own troubles and traumas rise to the surface, causing them to question who they really are. Sequel to The Aurors.
Hitcount: Story Total: 41491; Chapter Total: 1897
Awards: View Trophy Room






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It had started to spit with rain by the time she arrived at Ben’s, so she found herself hunched on his doorstep, slightly nervous that she had the wrong house, trying to keep as dry as possible. She pressed the doorbell and heard the trill, peering uneasily through the fogged glass. A shadow approached, and her heart thudded.

He opened it with a smile, and, as she had expected, she could hear soul music from further in.

‘I thought it would be Harry,’ he said. ‘But I’m glad it’s you.’

She smiled weakly at him and stepped through as he moved aside, rubbing her feet on the mat. ‘Sorry to come round unannounced, I just-’

‘Quite all right,’ he said excitedly. ‘I’m glad. I wanted to show you, look, come through - it’s to do with the case.’

He led her through to his living room, where on the coffee table was an old plastic shopping bag filled with video tapes, and the TV was flickering slightly on a black and white image.

‘Where is Harry?’ he called over his shoulder.

‘Up at the Loney, overseeing the rearrest of them all,’ she replied. ‘You know, because we let them return under house arrest. But he told me about your interview, and asked me to give you your hat back.’

‘Oh, yeah, just chuck it anywhere.’

She placed it on a side table, sitting cautiously on his squashy sofa.

Ben hurried over to the juke box, and Hit the Road Jack stopped with a screech at no more. Then he rushed back to the tv, crouching down at the video player. ‘I was thinking, about what little Simon said, and I remembered that sometimes I’ve seen some of the Loney lot down the bingo hall-’

‘Really?’ asked Theia, surprised.

‘Oh, yeah. That’s where Ornella met her bloke, I think. Anyway-’ Ben pushed a button, and the video player whirred. ‘It’s only round the corner so I went and got their CCTV tapes from the entrance. It’s not good quality or anything, but this is the day Simon said he lost his bike, and look-’

He hit play, and Theia approached. There they were. Grainy, juddering, but it was definitely them. Alma, Pauline, Ornella, and a heavily pregnant Marcy. ‘But not the men,’ she said quietly.

‘No, not the men,’ he repeated. ‘And I suppose they could have gone afterwards or something, but I don’t think you could play bingo in labour, could you?’

‘I suppose not,’ she said. ‘But what does that mean? Was Simon lying?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Ben. ‘But I was thinking about it and it was his mum who mentioned that date, and he looked all sheepish. I reckon he snuck out at night.’

She nodded slowly, thinking. ‘And couldn’t admit it in front of his mum?’

‘Exactly. And I know he said he was looking through branches, but I thought it was odd he couldn’t give us much of a description - it’s simple, he couldn’t see.’

‘Would he really have gone out on his bike in the middle of the night? He’s only little.’

‘That’s why I’m glad you turned up,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I thought we could go back and ask him.’

Her stomach plummeted. Harry had told her that he had closed that line of inquiry. ‘Maybe later.’

‘Why not now? Come on, I’ll grab a brolly as the weather’s starting to turn-’

‘There’s no rush,’ she said quickly. ‘Why don’t we have a drink first? We deserve a break.’

It was far too easy; so keen was he to spend time with her that all thoughts of leaving the flat flew from his head. ‘What do you fancy?’ he practically shouted, heading towards the kitchen. ‘Tea? Coffee? Something stronger? It’s just about gone two, I reckon that’s socially acceptable-’

‘Have you got any food?’ she blurted out. ‘Haven’t eaten all day.’

‘Erm... ‘ he paused, opening his fridge and frowning into it. ‘I have stuff left over from pancake day.’

‘Sounds great,’ she said distractedly, trying to swallow the ball of nerves that had suddenly swelled inside her.

He was unaware, chatty, delighted. He’d turned the music back on on and was sifting flour into a mixing bowl, peppering her with questions about the differences between wizard and muggle food. She joined in, feeling the crack of the egg against the rim of the bowl, feeling the cold gloop of its insides, smelling the sizzling butter in the pan.

She found herself giving in, enjoying herself, even laughing. They ate each pancake as it came out of the pan, drenching it in lemon juice, covering it with sugar and rolling them up to eat by hand, their fingers greasy with melted butter and lemon.

He made her laugh when he couldn’t flip the pancakes and he teased her when hers turned out more like scrambled eggs. It was childish, silly behaviour but there was something more to it. The jukebox played more modern music now, songs she hadn’t heard, a woman with a husky voice, and she giggled as she sucked the sugar off her fingers and he sang along, pleased that he, at last, knew something she didn’t, finding joy in introducing her to a world for once.

They were getting closer to one another; the kitchen was only small but that wasn’t the reason he placed his hands on her hips to gently move her out of the way. Suddenly the spring rain outside felt like sun, she felt herself soar…

His face was close to hers. She turned away.

‘What is it?’ he asked, looking crestfallen.

The sickness was returning - the bundle of nerves that rose in her throat. ‘You don’t know what you’re getting into,’ she said.

‘I don’t care that you’re magical, in fact, I think it’s-’

‘Don’t you dare say exciting,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘Don’t say exciting or interesting or sexy or anything like that. You have no idea, you’ve only been in this world a couple of weeks…’

He took her shoulders, and guided her into a chair, crouching next to her. ‘Look, I know, I know. I’m not a stupid man, I’ve picked up that you’re all skirting around something. I know that little boy was orphaned and I know your mum died, and I know there was some kind of war-’

‘You don’t-’

‘And I get that there was some kind of of conflict or-’

‘It was a war…’ She was crying now, her insides twisting.

‘Ok, fine, a war, and I understand that it’s not all sunshine and roses, and I know with people like me there’ll be a reason you’ve got to keep it all hush hush and put spells on us to make us forget and all that, but living with Harry and Ginny showed me that you can have a wonderful-’

She laughed now, she couldn’t help it - she rose from the chair and tangled her fingers in her hair. The smell of lemon and burnt sugar was still in the air. ‘Harry is not an example of a happy wizard.’

‘But-’

‘No, you don’t know. You don’t have a clue. This is Harry’s fault, I’ve no idea why he wasn’t just honest with you. You’re not allowed to know all this, we will have to wipe your memory-’

‘No you won’t,’ he said, unfazed. ‘Not if I can prove I won’t go round blabbing around it-’

She was suddenly angry. ‘Just stop! Just stop. Stop thinking we could be Harry and Ginny. We can’t, and you wouldn’t want to be. I don’t suppose either of them told you about what happened to Harry?’

‘They don’t have to, it doesn’t matter, I don’t care’ he said fiercely. ‘This isn’t about them, it’s about us, what we could be-’

‘His entire family murdered,’ she spat, ‘and he was in the centre of it all as a school child, tortured and watching people die, and coming back from the dead and then he became famous for it, you have no idea, he can never lead a normal life and he just pretends to be happy, he doesn’t talk about any of it, just bottles it up-’

‘But that’s him,’ he urged. ‘That’s not you. And even after all that, he’s-’

‘Damaged,’ she said harshly. ‘Don’t let him convince you otherwise. I’m sure you had a lovely lunch at the Burrow, I’m sure they told you all the lovely charming stories about trolls in the bathroom and flying cars and Quidditch, but they’ll have skipped all the other stuff, all the stuff that actually matters. And I’m damaged too. Nearly everyone in our community is, there’s still so much fallout from that fucking war-’

Now Ben looked angry, his jaw tense. ‘You think I haven’t worked out that there are bad people in your world? You think I’ve helped you on this case and listened to you talk about dark magic and not clocked that there’s some horrible stuff out there? You think I’ve just not noticed all that? You must think I’m stupid. And more to the point, you think everything is great in the normal world? I watched my mum slowly die from cancer, it took so long that by the end I could barely remember what she had looked like before it all. You have no idea what it’s like to have your mum crying because she’s so humiliated you have to help her get to the toilet. And my dad’s so damaged from it we barely talk at all anymore. Suffering isn’t unique to you and your lot, it’s just part of being human.’

She leant against the table, the tears falling freely, her shoulders shaking as she tried to keep in the sobs. He continued.

‘And you know what, through all that, no matter how bad it was I just kept getting surprised that I kept going. I felt like I wanted to die, but eventually I learnt to cope. It never got easier but I learnt to be happy. And I think that’s what hurts, you won’t even give yourself the chance. You’re too wrapped up in punishing yourself and keeping yourself in misery.’

‘You don’t understand. It was all my fault,’ she said. ‘After the war, after all the horrible things I saw at school… I thought once it was all over I could be happy, help fix things. But I trusted the wrong person. I was so stupid. Just a silly, lovestruck little girl. And…’ her voice was now so high and distressed she was faintly surprised he could still understand her. ‘And what’s so horrible is that part of me still loves him. It’s hard to turn that off despite what he did. He murdered her, Ben. Murdered her and I just have to think about it all the time. And since I met you it’s been better, I haven’t thought about him as much. But there’s still work to do… I still need to talk to him, I need to carry on working that case, finding out who else he might have been working with, whether they’re still a threat.’ She took a great, shuddering breath, and stared into his blue eyes. ‘In another time, I would have tried. I really would. But now I know what this world is… I won’t bring someone into it who can’t defend themselves. Because I know I can’t protect you. I couldn’t protect my mum, and I can’t protect you.’

His eyes were watering now, but his face was still set in determination. ‘I don’t care. I really don’t. The day I met you… I just saw you and thought you were the sweetest thing. And then you laughed, and it was like music.’

‘Don’t,’ she whispered.

‘And then I’ve been able to talk to you and work with you, and you’re so intelligent and sharp-’

‘Please don’t,’ she cried, but he took his hands and cupped her face.

‘I can’t explain it, but we just click, and I think I have fallen in love with you, Theia, I can’t stop thinking about you-’

It was agony. Her brain swirled with the sound of the soul music and the smell of lemon and sugar, and the feel of his hands nestled against her jaw - he leant down and kissed her, and she kissed him back, sinking into the moment, but the bliss of it was so painful.

They broke apart, and she reached into her pocket as he gazed into her eyes with the intensity of a storm, his thumbs stroking gently across her cheeks.

She touched the tip of her wand against him. He felt it and glanced down, and then back at her, his face covered with betrayal. ‘No! Plea-’

‘Obliviate,’ she whispered, and his eyes seemed to change. The hands slid off her face, he stepped back, and looked as content and cheerful as the day she met him.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ he asked vaguely.

‘No thank you,’ she said, swallowing to keep her voice steady. ‘I must be off.’

‘All right,’ he said. He turned away, and turned the tap on, ready to wash up the dishes covered in lemon and sugar.

The sound of the jukebox carried on playing, I died a thousand times... following her as she left.

***

There was shouting in custody when she arrived, the chaos of bringing back Alma and Pauline and all the others meant that she could walk through quite unnoticed.

She slipped through the Aurors wrestling people into holding cells until she came to Harry, who had leant parchment against the wall and was scribbling on it furiously.

‘Harry-’

‘Ah, you’re back early. Give this to Susan would you? When everything’s calmed down we can begin the next set of interviews.’

‘Can I talk to you?’ She jerked her head towards their office, and he seemed to read something on her face and nodded.

‘Sure.’

They went to their office, where there was silence except for the cat’s purring as he lounged on the windowsill.

Harry threw his paperwork onto the desk and sat down with a weary look. ‘Everything all right? I wasn’t expecting you back for a while.’

‘Yes,’ she said stiffly, choosing not to sit. ‘Well… Ben checked the CCTV of the bingo hall, the day Simon said it all happened, and all the Loney women were there, including Marcy. He thinks Simon was too scared to say in front of his mum, but the incident probably occurred at night, and that’s why he couldn’t really give us any description.’

Harry nodded. ‘Yeah, that makes sense. That’s really useful. I’ll have to thank him for that and maybe look at the tapes myself.’ He looked at her carefully. ‘What else?’

She found she was breathing deeply, and couldn’t look him in the face. ‘I have closed that line of inquiry,’ she said stoically.

He stared at her. She could tell he was trying to hide his horror. ‘Why would you do that?’ he asked, his voice level.

She paused for a few moments. ‘I know… I know that you thought you were doing the right thing. You thought you were helping me move on. But you had… no right. You had no right to do that. We could have kept him at arm’s length. It would have been easier for everyone.’

‘I didn’t do anything-’

‘You did,’ she said firmly. ‘You… “give him back his hat”, I mean fucking hell…’ Theia blinked back tears, and Harry continued to stare at her, looking disturbed.

‘You were always trying to give us time and space to get to know one another and you kept him around far longer than was necessary,’ she said. ‘There was no need to do that. You should have wiped his memory the day we found Marcy’s baby.’

‘We never would have been able to speak to Simon if I’d done that,’ he said calmly.

‘You couldn’t have known that then,’ she said. ‘And anyway, this morning when you did Simon and his mum. You should have done Ben too. Or called the Muggle Liaison office to do it. It wasn’t fair to leave it to me.’

‘I wasn’t… I didn’t think you would do that.’

‘Yes, well, I take the statute of secrecy seriously,’ she snapped. ‘I take my job seriously. It’s lovely that you and Ginny are living in smug married bliss, but you had no right to try and manufacture that between me and someone involved in a case.’

‘I did it because I could see the way you looked at each other,’ said Harry harshly, his chair scraping against the wooden floor as he stood. ‘And you finally stopped trying to press forward with your plan to get information out of Dennis, you were finally focusing on something else-’

‘I was dealing with it in my own way, trying to fix what I could! I’m not like you, I can’t just pack it all away in the back of my mind and move on into domestic life-’

‘You think that’s what my life is?’ he said, raising his voice. ‘You think I just don’t think about any of it and everything’s happy as larry?’

‘No, I know you don’t,’ she snapped. ‘But that’s the impression you like to give everyone. That you’re all calm and collected and resilient.’

Something very strange happened. They both said, ‘well I wish I was more like you’ at the same time. The shock of it made them pause, and stare at each other in silence for almost a full minute.

‘I wish I could be more open with it all,’ Harry said at last.

‘I wish I could let go,’ she replied.

Harry sat back down, rubbing his jaw. ‘Everyone’s different,’ he said. ‘And everyone thinks they’re not doing grief properly and they should be dealing with it in a different way. They always say there’s no right way to deal with it, but I think what they should really say is that every way is wrong, no one gets it right, it’s impossible. Something like that, losing someone, trauma, whatever… You never come out of it healthy, that’s the point.’ He looked at her. ‘I’m sorry I overstepped boundaries.’

‘Thank you,’ she said hoarsely.

‘But you will regret what you did today,’ he said.

She expected him to apologise, or at least offer words of comfort, but now he couldn’t look at her.

‘The rest of your life, you’ll regret that,’ he said again. ‘You can’t reverse that charm.’

‘I don’t believe in soul mates,’ she said coldly, though she suspected he was right. ‘I’ll move on one day, but it will be on my own terms.’

‘You have to be brave enough to love,’ he said. ‘It’s not about soulmates. Love is a choice, and it takes bravery.’

She swallowed. ‘Yes, well. I am not a Gryffindor.’

They looked at each other, him sitting slightly defeated in his chair, her standing in the middle of the room resolute in her anguish. The cat had stopped purring, and so the silence swelled and ached between them.

The door knocked, and though Theia did not turn in case anyone saw her tear stained face, she heard Proudfoot’s voice.

‘Everyone’s locked up and settled, we can start interviews when you’re ready.’

‘Right,’ said Harry. ‘Be there in a minute.’

She heard the door click closed again, and she waved her wand over her face. There was a cooling sensation; her face was now clean but she expected that her eyes were still red and puffy.

‘Take a moment,’ said Harry firmly.

‘No.’

‘I can do the first interview on my own.’

‘I don’t want to miss anything.’

‘Your choice,’ he said, walking past her.

She knew that part of it was that Harry liked Ben too. That he had made a friend that didn’t know the details of his tragic past and just took him at face value. But there were plenty of other Muggles Harry could ignore the statute of secrecy with, and maybe next time he wouldn’t drag her into trying to create his white picket fence fantasy.

They went to Osman first, who had come far more quietly than the others. He looked afraid, his hands trembling.

‘It’s time to tell us, Ralf,’ said Harry. ‘It’s time to be completely honest.’

Osman nodded. ‘Yes. I know.’ He sighed. ‘Where should I start?’

Theia set up her quotes quill and stared coolly into the old man’s face. ‘Where do you think you should start?’

He pressed his lips together and looked down at the table. After a low, long exhale of breath, he said, ‘I think… I think you have to understand the role of the Swindlehurst family.’

‘In the Loney?’

‘Yes. They... ‘ He sighed again. ‘You think the wizarding community is isolated, but that’s nothing to the Loney. That’s nothing to the Swindlehursts. We’ve always been separate. Didn’t go to Hogwarts. Except Ornella but she was a spoilt little madam who got what she wanted. Before all the dragon pox came in the sixties and seventies, we were… well, I wouldn’t say thriving, but there were more than just the Swindlehursts and me.’

‘All those abandoned houses,’ said Harry.

‘Yeah. You’re both too young, you won’t remember. You don’t know how much that decimated the wizarding population, and I think sometimes that’s what done it, that’s what prompted everyone to have a panic about Muggleborns and what not, that’s what helped You-Know-Who get followers.’

Theia thought of all the empty classrooms at Hogwarts, the vastness of the castle; she had sometimes wondered why it was so big for just a few hundred students, but had always shrugged it off as another whimsical part of the world.

‘Well, everyone was getting it, everyone was dying from it. But the Swindlehursts couldn’t hide from the fact that they was all doing all right. You know, they tried to pass it off as luck at first, and then just being naturally resistant… But then all them Aurors came crawling all over the place looking for that young witch.’

He paused, his eyes were watering. ‘We didn’t think it was them. We thought she’d just passed through, and the Aurors were no good in them days, they just accepted that. Then there were a few rumours that Oeric had been seen with us, and we all wondered, but… It was easy to put out of our minds.

‘But then, Marcy’s mum, Ellen… well she lived closer to the Swindlehursts than anyone else, didn’t she? I don’t know what happened, I don’t know what she saw, but she started telling everyone that old Alma was doing dark magic, an’ that was how they were all healthy.

‘It didn’t seem too wild of a story, to be honest - we’d always gone to Alma for ailments and bumps and what not, and she always had old style potions and remedies. Not like the ones you get in books now, ones we’d never heard of. More primitive. But they always worked.’

‘Why didn’t anyone go to St Mungo’s?’ asked Harry.

‘It was the Loney,’ said Osman, as if that was answer enough. ‘Well, we all wondered but nothing happened until she started saying Alma had used that young girl in a dark magic ritual. The Swindlehursts all took offence to that, and then no more than a day later Marcy gets the pox. It could have been a coincidence. Half the village had it at that point, and Marcy and Ornella had been running round the Loney with all the other kids, so it shouldn’t have been unexpected. But it was just the timing of it that scared everyone.

‘So then Ellen suddenly started going round telling everyone that she had it wrong, and apologising for misleading them. I remember when she came to see me. She wasn’t right, I mean, no one would be when their kid’s at death’s door. I was only a young man, but I remember her saying to me she was wrong to say any of that, and how kind Alma was because she’d said she was going to try and save Marcy. But I remember when she said that she couldn’t stop crying.

‘Well, the next day, Marcy was completely fine. Barely a pox mark on her. She was back up running around. I found her with Ornella chasing one of my chickens, and I shouted at them and said to her, should you be ill in bed? And I remember she looked at me and said, no, mum’s got that now. I suppose she didn’t understand.’

‘Ellen died of the pox,’ said Harry. ‘How much later?’

‘Barely a week,’ said Osman. ‘Wilford, her dad, never said ought about it. People started going to Alma asking for them to cure their pox, but they all came away saying they decided the cure wasn’t for them. You couldn’t get it out of them though, what it was.’

‘They couldn’t remember?’ asked Theia. ‘Or they were too scared.’

‘Too scared, I think,’ said Osman. ‘Oeric had been in and out of prison by this point, and no one wanted him messing with their daughters or having Alma put a curse on their families. Everyone still alive after the pox moved away, not that there were many of them.’

‘But not you?’

‘No, I thought it was all just… I don’t know. Gossip. People running away with themselves. I keep myself to myself, you know.’ He scratched his nose. Theia thought he seemed to be growing more comfortable as he told the story - perhaps it was finally being able to speak openly about all the secrets.

‘Anyway, there was a weird set up after that. Marcy seemed to spend more time with the Swindlehursts than anyone else, and then all of a sudden there was all this talk of her being a squib. Now that never made sense to me because clear as day I had seen her as a wee lass turning the water in the creek different colours. I’d never seen Ornella do anything like that. But sure enough it was Ornella what stamped her feet and went to Hogwarts even though no one had in the Swindlehurst family, not for generations. She went off and Marcy stayed home.’

A cloud seemed to pass over his face. A sadness behind his eyes made them glint in the light. ‘One day I was out on the fells, and I got attacked by a manticore. Don’t know where it came from, don’t know what it was doing on the Loney, I only know I barely got away with my life. Wilford found me… I think he was the one that managed to get the beast away in the end… And he brought me to Alma. She did what she could with all her balms and potions, but then she said, he’s one for the tree. So they took me, on a stretcher, and took little Marcy with ‘em too.’

His expression was now haunted, his voice hollow. ‘Alma was chanting, I ain’t never heard words like it. She put one of my hands on the tree, and I remember thinking, christ, this is warm, because it really was, like it had blood in it. I had to keep my hand on it, and Marcy had to keep her hand on it too. And then Alma as chanting louder and louder and there was all this light. I felt it all drain from me. All the pain and the adrenaline and breaks and fractures I didn’t even know I had. It wasn’t pleasant… There was a relief but it still felt like something being pulled from me. Like the feeling you get when you vomit.

‘And all the while, Marcy was screaming. She couldn’t get her hand off the tree. Light was coming from her too. Everything from me was going into her. I could see her start to bleed, saw the scratches and bruises appear on her.’

‘How old was she at this point?’ asked Theia.

‘I don’t know. About fifteen.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘After it happened, I was horrified. I’m telling the god’s honest truth, I confronted her. I told Alma, that isn’t right, that’s not okay, not on a little girl. That’ll kill her, that will. But Alma said that she couldn’t kill Marcy. Marcy just abosrbed everything. Her bones will heal the muggle way now, she told me. All the magi stripped out.’ His voice wobbled. ‘And you know I remember talking to Wilford privately later about it. And he said that Marcy got put through the ringer with this kind of thing, but she was always ok in the end. That she might be a squib, but she was tough and nothing Alma did seemed to last. He’d take her to the Muggle hospital, from time to time, for the broken bones and things.’

‘And then Wilford died,’ said Harry.

‘Yes. That really was an accident, but Marcy didn’t run to get Alma. Perhaps if she had, Wilford might have been saved, but Marcy waited about half an hour before she told anyone.’

‘Why do you think that was?’ asked Theia. ‘Was she scared to go back to the tree?’

‘Yes I think so,’ he said. ‘We don’t ever talk about it.’

‘Why didn’t you tell anyone?’ asked Harry. ‘If you felt so uncomfortable with it all?’

‘I’m a selfish bastard,’ said Osman, and he sounded genuinely remorseful. ‘When I confronted Alma about it all, she told me she was the tree’s keeper, and she could tell it what to do. And then she stared at me, and my knee… There was a sharp pain and it began to bleed. Where the manticore had swiped me with one of it’s claws, she could bring the injury back and then take it away again with no effort. She still does it to this day,’ he told them fiercely. ‘She has her own injuries and problems you know - taking her cataracts and putting them in Marcy’s eyes, turning it on and off to suit her.’

‘So what happened with the baby?’ asked Theia.

‘We fell in love, me and Marcy. I didn’t plan it, I didn’t mean to. I know the age gap is… Well, it’s not ideal. But it happened. We made plans to move away,run away, even, but given that Marcy couldn’t do magic and I’m not so great at it myself, we needed to ask people for help and it ended up getting back to Alma and Pauline. They weren’t happy about it, didn’t want to let us go. It was hard for Marcy because, despite everything, she still loved them and Pauline told her they would all die without her. So then, we decided to try and end it. Not talk to each other. I sent her that postcard to say goodbye. But I couldn’t go. I couldn’t leave her there. I heard she was pregnant, but Pauline told me she wasn’t sure it was mine.’

‘You believed her?’

‘Not really, but I think I told myself I did. And then Ornella had her second bairn, and it turns out it was starting to show signs of Derwent’s disease. Suddenly everything changed. I don’t know why, but Pauline came to me and said she had a proposition she wanted me and Marcy to think about. We could leave the Loney together, if we left the baby to take Marcy’s place.

‘Well I said no at first, of course, said it was a fucked up idea. But then the more we thought about it, the more it made sense. We could have our life together, Marcy would get that break from the constant illnesses and injuries… And… You know, she did love them. And her dad had loved her. It wasn’t an easy life, and she hated the tree, but she had purpose and they looked after her, and I think she thought that it wasn’t such a bad life really and maybe Alma would die soon.’

‘You didn’t expect the baby to die?’ asked Harry.

‘I don’t think any of us did. I suppose Alma did something wrong. We thought the baby would end up another Marcy - just absorbing and suffering but always ending up recovering. So we agreed, in the end, we said when the baby was born, it would absorb Acelin’s disease, and we would care for it for a bit before going off and living on our own. We’d go back and visit the child now and then, maybe, make sure they were treating him right when he wasn’t needed for the rituals, but really it was a new generation taking up Marcy’s role.’

Now he began to cry, his hands trembling more than ever, clasped in front of him as though praying. ‘It sounds so callous looking back. I can’t believe the words coming out of my mouth. I will never forgive myself, never. I suppose it was the desperation to get out. And the years and years of just… Accepting it.’ He sniffed, and wiped at his eyes. ‘It was Marcy that noticed something had gone wrong first. When she’d gone into labour we’d taken her straight there, because Acelin’s disease was already quite advanced, even for such a little baby. So there was no time to waste. I took her straight there with Alma, Pauline and Ornella brought Acelin.

‘The moment the baby was born, Alma put him in the bough of the tree. Marcy wanted to hold him, but she just took him straight there, put him in the hollow of it. Then she was doing her ancient chanting, the usual stuff. Passing Acelin through the bough too, and then taking one of his little hands and putting it on the trunk. The light came, and at first our baby was crying… but then he... Then he wasn’t. Then it was just Marcy screaming.’

He was sobbing now, his head in his hands, wailing down at the table. ‘I helped drag her away. I didn’t want her to see it. But I should’ve stopped it. I should have stopped it all.’

‘Were you the one that tried to cast a memory charm on Marcy?’ asked Theia.

He shook his head furiously. ‘No. No. I reckon that was… the shock of it all. Or Alma putting some kind of dementia on her. She wasn’t this dotty before. She really wasn’t. I don’t know if she will ever be right again.’

‘Thank you, Mr Osman,’ said Harry gently. ‘I’m sure you understand that this will go to trial. There will be consequences.’

‘I know,’ he gulped. ‘It’s what I deserve.’

‘But I appreciate your honesty. We need to continue our investigations, but I’ll send someone in with a cup of tea.’

They rose, and left the sobbing man alone in the interrogation room.

‘So something went wrong,’ said Theia. ‘Alma didn’t get her horrible dark magic right.’

‘Actually,’ said Harry, with a strange look on his face, ‘I think she did get it right. It was on Marcy where it went wrong. Her mother made a choice, out of love, and that trapped Marcy into a dark situation. It wasn’t the same for her child, because Marcy wasn’t making a selfless choice.’

‘I can’t believe how many people were complicit in it,’ said Theia. ‘I can sort of see it for Marcy, because she was brainwashed, but it was all of them… And it sounds to me like Ornella was the squib, if it’s even possible to transfer magic like that, so they robbed Marcy of that too.’ She felt disgusted. ‘I feel a bit sorry for Osman, and I feel sorry for Marcy, but the rest of them are evil. Pure evil.’

‘You can’t see Ornella’s reasoning?’ asked Harry mildly.

‘To kill another child to save your own?’ asked Theia. ‘Absolutely not. Makes me sick.’

‘I don’t agree with it,’ said Harry quickly. ‘But…’ He sighed. ‘I’ll be thinking about this case for years to come.’

‘Me too,’ she said quietly. She briefly imagined going and talking to Ben about it all, and felt the prickle of regret.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s jump in at the deep end and talk to the architect of it all.’

And so on they went to the next room, unaware that they were about to face the most difficult interview of their careers.

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