There was something very, very Greek about traveling to Azkaban.

Jonas had been trying out a variety of adjectives in his head -- foreboding, unsettling, -- but none of them really seemed to fit so well as Greek.  Whichever historic wizard had been responsible for building Azkaban Prison had surely been a fan of the Homeric Epics.  It sat all alone on an island in the middle of the sea, its towering stone spire barely visible from shore, but momentous up close.  The only way to access it, aside from a rough, nauseating-inducing broom ride, was by ferry.  Jonas kept half expecting the ancient, toothless old man who served as the pilot to ask him for a silver Sickle from under his tongue as the fee of passage.

And of course, there was the very Circe-esque fact that once most visitors stepped on these shores, they would be trapped here for years. 

It was not a pleasant journey, but in spite of it, he'd come -- traveled over the sea, and now deep under the stone heart of this ancient fortress.  To its credit, Azkaban was considerably less miserable now than it had been the last time he'd paid it a visit, back during the last war.  With the Dementors banished, the place was merely depressing -- it no longer had that soul-sucking quality that even his Patronus had struggled to shiver off.

He still did not envy the wizards who were assigned to police this forsaken rock.  One of them had met him at the dock, had led him to the visiting room per his appointment.  Jonas had done his best to be friendly with the man, despite the gruff nonchalance that met his attempts.  One would think that the bloke would have wanted to talk, after all the hours presumably spent in isolation here.

But he wasn't here to chat up the Azkaban guards.  He'd come for a conversation with a very different sort.  And when he stepped into the chamber, lit by that strange green curtain that cracked and sparked between them, he found his quarry inevitably waiting.

"Briggs."  It was impossible to ignore the starkness of their surroundings, the meaning of the Vidris Curtain that hung in the air between them, but Jonas did his best to maintain his usual cheerful attitude as he flashed a smile at the young man.  He reached for a chair at the table that was bisected by the protective charm, one half on either side.  "Thanks for agreeing to come chat, mate.  I hope it hasn't been too much of an imposition."

Day 244

Nate had never been all that thick physically, nor never very tidy.  There was something about this grim fortress that did things to people.  Sucked the meat from your bones, colored your eyes darkly.  And so he looked thinner and rougher than when Jonas Trevelyan would have last seen him.  Like a man who'd been sick.    But not like a man, thanks be to Shacklebolt, who'd lived under threat of a Dementor's Kiss. 

He'd had some warning of his visitor but the guards hadn't felt like telling him who it was.  They'd come by at the appointed time, marched him out to the cell, sat him down and shut him in.  He didn't have the bandwidth to really guess at or prepare for who might be coming up here to see him.  He couldn't dare hope it was Dazmond.  Even to hope for that would be asking too much of his little criminal wife, a wanted witch.  He didn't want it to be that insane Jowd from the Department of Mysteries here to bother him about the Muhra Glass when it was all sorted and done with.  He couldn't expect it to be -

- Nate's face rung with genuine surprise at the tall, red-headed Auror who limped his way in and sat across.  He'd have never guessed...  Nate couldn't help but smile at the unexpected visit from the only decent bloke in all of law enforcement arriving here in rotting Azkaban.   

"Nah, mate.  My pleasure.  Can we get you anything?"  The joking pleasantries hung in the air a moment as Nate remembered his last moments with this man.  The night when he'd slipped Trevalyan a bit of napkin with the letters 810 on it.  Or was it 018? The memory brought another smile to Nate's face.  Damn, he'd been clever that night.  Why couldn't have he been cleaver at the Apothecarium in the first place?

"You look like hell," he commented then, without malice, happy in the irony.  "You solve my riddle?"

The red-headed Auror laughed, flashing a grin at the younger wizard through the strange green curtain.  "Cheers, mate.  And yeah," he replied, looking bemused.  "A mate of mine did, anyhow.  Reckon it might've been too much brainwork for the likes of me."

It had seemed a task and a half, running down every possible iteration of the numbers 8-1-0 -- until Niobe Thursby had suggested that everything had been head-over-heels all along, and he really should have been looking out for 0-1-8, which had turned out to be a compartment on the Hogwarts Express.  After some legwork, the Muhra Glass had eventually been located and returned.  Last he'd heard, the Unspeakables had still been holding on to it; apparently someone on Level Nine was a bit antsy about letting it go back to the Apothecarium, where it had been stolen from in the first place.

But despite Briggs' cooperation, all of the young man's help was completely off the record.  That in itself ate at Jonas a little.  He hated this; hated how the Ministry treated Knockturnites as irredeemable, how Briggs was stuck behind the ominous Vidris Curtain for another three months.  He couldn't use the failed thief's change of heart to get him off the hook, nor could he officially give the young man thanks for his cooperation.  So much of this had played out in the shadows.

"Funny, though," he continued, giving Briggs a crooked smile, "but we managed to stumble upon that thing you nicked after all.  Don't know if it'll do much for your sentence, but it might help out with parole a bit -- Attempted Thievery has a bit less going for it than Successful Burglary, even if you've got to knock one off your scorecard.  You might even end up completely misfortunate and get stuck with me as your parole officer."

"Long as there's coffee," Nate said.  Nate liked Trevalyan because Trevalyan wasn't as dim as Trevalyan said he was.  He liked that he didn't have to waste words spelling things out for him.  Liked that the Auror wasn't always an Auror.  In the long look after his comment and in the smile he allowed himself as he glanced into his lap, Nate was relieved that the Muhra Glass had been found.  It wasn't that he felt all that much compassion for the business he'd burgled, but relief that Cinead Tawse didn't have what he wanted.  And no one had been counted a rat in the process.  It had worked.  His daft little scheme had actually worked.  Mostly because Trevalyan had taken him at his word.  Or napkin, rather.

It was a huge relief.  A moment to celebrate.  A thanks was in order. But he couldn't say so.  So Trevalyan wasn't saying so.  And Briggs wasn't saying so.  The walls had ears here.

Still with a quiet sort of contentment, a touch of a smile on his face, Briggs shrugged and looked back at the Auror. 

"Are you here on your own? Or is that your badge I see?"

"Hard to get very far without that showing, innit?"  Jonas flashed a grin at the other wizard, his posture relaxed, not looking at all put off by the inquiry.  Ten months earlier, he might have been self conscious enough to let the remark sting.  Back then, it had been hard to think of himself as Part of the Ministry -- an ally to the government, by default standing in approval of the organization that had driven him away into hiding.  There was so much that the Ministry of Magic did wrong even today, but time was the best healer of all wounds. 

He might not approve of every action that the Ministry took, but he'd come to terms with representing it.  Just because his badge was omnipresent didn't mean he couldn't have his own ideas on things.

"Combination of the both, I think."  He gave an nonchalant shrug.  Looking nonplussed was somewhat of a challenge here in Azkaban, with the hard stone walls all around and the green Vidris Curtain shimmering between them, but Jonas did his best to manage it, stretching his legs out at an angle so his feet wouldn't extend into the magical barrier.  "Need the badge to get in, so the business is always official, but I thought I might ask your opinion on some things.  Unofficially."

He cocked an eyebrow at Nate, giving the young man a quizzical look.  "That is, assuming you're up to giving it," he said easily.  "This one's got me a bit stumped, so I thought I might get some hypothetical outside thoughts on it.  But if you decide you'd rather not, mate, then there's no hard feelings, yeah?"

Nate actually had had a cheery thought about parole.  Other than Trevelyan, there wasn't an Auror he'd met that he respected, or liked even.  So if it had to be one of them, then Trevelyan would be the best.  Although, he might prefer if their relationship stayed unofficial.  A relationship with rules might push them both to a place neither of them wanted to be. 

But what was this? He couldn't forget that this friendly chap was an Auror and that very often their interests did not converge.  But at the same time...

"Interesting..." he said and got cozy in the metal chair.  Jonas was making every indication that he was here to ask for Nate's help.  His advice.  His... unique take on some situation.  Nate was a vain sort of fellow in one very specific way: he really liked being smarter than other people.  But he was smart enough to know that a vice like that could be taken advantage of.

"Look at you, appealing to my vanity," said the scruffy, sunken convict in threadbare stripes. 

But that smarter-than-thou identity also gave Nate the confidence that if this was a ruse, he'd be able to spot it before it was too late.  Damn, he really wanted to trust Jonas.  He was really almost there.

"Devil."  But he was smiling and looking game.  "I've got time if you have.  What's the story?"

The words were familiar even as he said them.  The last time he'd had a chat with Nathan Briggs in a chilly, foreboding room, it had begun much the same way.  But the situation was no longer as immediate or as urgent: there was no missing artifact of mythic and mystic potential to find, less of a threat that Cinaed Tawse was waiting out there somewhere, ready to reign fiery doom on the Ministry.  Instead, there was only the long game to play.

Jonas dipped his head in a nod, and then cracked a brief smile.  "You might've heard it something like this already, if they let you keep up on the news at all," he said amiably, almost apologetically.  "You can chalk down any resemblance to a basic failing of me creativity."

"So."  He cleared his throat, giving Briggs a painfully bemused look.  "A long time ago, in a nondescript city located far far away, a Wizengamot Elder was found murdered in the middle of a Muggle tourist attraction.  No one had any idea what spell had killed him -- all they could reckon was that it had to be Dark Arts, because it was vicious enough to turn his body inside out.  Bit of a mess to clean up, I can tell you," he added ruefully, giving a shake of his head.

"Then, two months later, something similar.  This time, a Gringotts Arithmancer -- split in two, right in the middle of Westminster Abbey."  He was watching Briggs now, not with suspicion, but to see how the young man reacted, how he took this.  Briggs was sharp; he knew that.  The question that remained to be seen was whether or not he was interested in this unofficial consulting gig.  "The press didn't report right off that they're connected, but there are some quiet links between the two -- the Arithmancer was handling the Elder's accounts, for instance."

"It's been two months since the last murder, but personally, I don't think the Aurors involved like sitting around and waiting for another corpse to pop up so that they can stumble on another clue."  Jonas gave a grim, unhappy smile.  "Thought it might be one for you to mull over, Mr Briggs," he added, his attention still focused levelly on the other wizard.  "Takes an outside eye sometimes to catch the trick of it, doesn't it?"

Nate listened.  No, he hadn't kept up on the news.  Daily Prophets were traded around and if you had the right thing to barter you could get your hands on a weeks old edition, but with bits trimmed out, defaced, or all out missing.  But Jonas wove an interesting tale indeed, which seemed by the telling straight out of a Doctor When episode.  An Elder cursed inside out, an arithmancer cut in two.

"Blimey," he said in compliment.  It was a damn enticing puzzle and as Jonas told the story, dozens of questions came to his mind about any further details gathered.  But the fact that he'd framed the whole thing as a hypothetical told Nate that asking for more information wouldn't be the way to go, wasn't his role in this.  Jonas would tell him what he could and cover his own arse.

He thought for a moment, crossing his arms and letting his chin rest on his chest. 

"Those curses," he said after a few seconds.  "they're for a show-off.  The Killing Curse works just as well, and they say there's nothing worse than Cruciatus.  Seems like this is about sending a message to the living.  Something horrible to see, put out in open like that."

"You can kill someone quietly and not risk getting caught.  Not this chap's plan, looks like." 

He thought again.

"I'd look at the families, maybe.  Or someone they've got in common."  Nate knew that last bit was probably already done and done, but it followed. 

"You do that kind to be scary," Nate added leaning forward.  "The killing itself's the thing. Not revenge.  You want to be feared.  Cause panic."

It was gratifying to see that Briggs was taking this seriously.  Jonas let out a breath, leaning his chin on one hand.  He stayed silent as he listened, letting the other wizard work through his thoughts out loud.  That's why he'd thought to come to the young man in the first place -- aside from his ulterior motivation, sometimes it took an outside eye to catch onto a pattern.  If he and Archer weren't making progress on the case, perhaps it was because Aurors couldn't think far enough outside the box.

Briggs's analysis was sharp enough.  They'd wondered much the same thing -- but who was the message for?  Leaving a corpse in such a prominent Muggle location seemed like an attack on the Ministry's sovereignty, more than it was anything else.  A blatant announcement of the fact that not only could they not stop the murderer, but that they would be scrambling to cover up the crime from the Muggle public.

"But there's been no message.  No one's taken credit," he put in with a frown.  He wasn't disagreeing with Briggs -- just pushing the line of reasoning further.  "Aside from the fact that they were both found in Muggle locations, there's nothing even the same about the murders.  And it's not like there's been a quick string of 'em -- the two we've had were two months apart.  Who do you reckon our mate wants to cause panic with?"

Nate sat back with a tingle of apathy that came back like a school boy's dream.  It wasn't his homework, was it?  It was only a moment, a short moment of defiance when someone doubted him, questioned his ideas.

He chuckled to himself and shook his head.

"Look, I don't know, you know? I would say - there's been no message for you.  Sure, maybe I'm wrong, but somewhere  out there is some bloke shitting a brick, nailing his door shut from the inside, and drawing chalk lines on the floor because he knows what this all means.

"And that he's next."

Nate tilted his head.  "The murders were nasty enough and public enough that they couldn't be missed by anyone, right?  Maybe whoever it's all for is too scared to go to Aurors because he knows who's after him, or he's just as afraid of Aurors."

The more he talked about it, the more he was building on his own guesswork.  And while it was a nice story, each new thing he thought of could just be a whisp of smoke. 

"Hypothetically, of course."  He smiled flatly, trying to be cute.

The Auror had shifted to lean back in his chair, his arms folded across his chest as he regarded the younger man thoughtfully, almost absently.  There was no way to say for certain if Briggs' supposition was the truth.  Surely, there was more than a bit of projection in it as well -- Nate Briggs struck him as the sort who was always on the fringes of the criminal community, always the outsider.  It was not surprising that he'd approach the current problem from the outsider's point of view.

But that didn't mean that there wasn't worth in the idea.  The Aurors could certainly cast their net a little wider -- look for a flurry of activity that wasn't definitely associated with the murders, but happened just surrounding it.  Something that might have been triggered by the deaths.

Then again -- they'd already noted just one such concentrated flurry, hadn't they?  And it had been centered around one particular organization.

He gave a brief smile in response to Briggs', but it was obvious that his attention was already elsewhere.

"So taking it as a threat, maybe not a crime all for its own sake..."  Jonas let the thought trail off absently.  The problem with being back in scarlet was that he approached every problem as an Auror would.  How ought he to approach this one?  He wasn't even certain that Briggs' point of view was the right one; thinking like the future victim wasn't going to get the quick answer.  He needed to get into the mindset of the murderers.

"There's another incongruity," he said, his gaze shifting back to Nate.  "There was a shop in Knockturn that showed up in the financial records of both blokes who were killed.  When we went to investigate it, it was abandoned -- but we found another body inside.  Young girl, just a few years out of Hogwarts, dropped out of sight of her family, but aside from the fact that someone killed her there, there's no other link to anything.  Where would you look for a connection?"

It was probably good that Jonas didn't look like he was hanging on Nate's every word - Nate was the sort to get pretty big-headed if he thought he was impressing someone.  But Nate also figured that even if he did say something useful there was an ego and a security streak in Aurors that wouldn't let Jonas show it too much.  And so Nate really had no way of knowing if any of this made any sense to Jonas.

A bit boring, but better than the alternative.  He shifted in his seat, mirroring Trevelayn's casual posture.  It would be better to take his time.  Savor this nice break from daily life in here. 

Whereas Jonas couldn't or wouldn't commit to any response to what he was told, Nate didn't have the same feeling of limitations.  When Jonas told him about the witch found in an abandoned shop, he let his interest show.  He wondered what shop it had been.  Knockturn had its old staples, but other buildings seemed to have a new occupant every week.  It could have been any number of places on the winding, cramped back street.

"Was it all nasty like the others? Flayed out and ..." he let a sort of butterflying, disjointed gesture of his hands finish his question.  He could picture it - a shop with windows blackened by soot, a narrow door, a claustrophobic cellar. 

"Seems off.  Knockturn's a place for hiding things," he said.

"No.  It wasn't like the others."  Jonas gave a brief shake of the head.  Aside from the dead girl's appearance in the tailor shop[1] that had been tangentially connected to both Corpus victims, there was nothing at all to connect her to the two well-publicized murders.  All he had as a link were the most coincidental of circumstances...and a hunch.

"We found her body at the end of October.  October 29th," he said matter-of-factly.  It was easy to recall the facts as he'd entered them into the case file.  "She'd been dead at least a couple of weeks at that point -- it wasn't pretty.  But so far as the Healers could tell, she wasn't killed by magic.  Smashed her head pretty brutally against something.  Someone laid her out, covered her with a dirty sheet, but otherwise, they just left her there."

That was the part of it that didn't make sense -- and the part that was most infuriating.  The girl didn't fit the pattern at all.  And despite the brutality of the other murders, somehow the thought of such a young woman, murdered so intently and left all alone, twisted his stomach even more. 

"Her name was Rosemary Hampton."  He'd talked to her family himself -- worried, despairing parents from a town just outside of Leeds.  She'd been an only child.  There had been nothing to go on there, no hints of who or what might have killed her; not much of anything besides an exhausting, all-encompassing grief.  "She was twenty-one.  Hufflepuff.  Her family and friends seemed to have lost touch with her a few months before -- she ran away with a bloke from school, but we haven't been able to turn up anything on him either."  He ran a tired hand over his face.  It wasn't always the best way to approach things, letting oneself be affected by victims, but the second he wasn't, Jonas knew he wouldn't have a right to carry Tait Aldridge's badge.

"So maybe they were just hiding there."  He gave a shrug, returning his attention vaguely in Nate's direction again.  "Two kids, just hiding out.  They have a fight, she dies, he bolts."  There had been that hooded figure too, down in the basement.  And the potent, metallic smell of blood.  But if something nefarious had been going on down there, there were no remaining signs of it -- it must have been all washed away in the magical battle that had followed.

Except --

Huh.

A piece that he hadn't considered before suddenly clicked into place.  Frowning, Jonas gave the young man across the table from him a more intent look.  "Do you know anything about a place called Grimshaw Tailoring and Alterations?" he asked, suddenly interested.  "No one in Knockturn's told us much about it, save for the fact that no one in recent memory can remember it being open."

1.	Two Men in a Dress Shop...Again

Trevelyan was letting his fatigue show and Nate couldn't fault him.  Only so much of a wall you could put up.  A heart had only so many compartments.  It did sort of put cracks in his image of The Auror, the stalwart, emotionless force comprised of chiselled jaws and Gryffindors, noble, true and dim.  Something was getting to Trevelyan about this. 

Probably all the bodies, thought Nate. He rather wondered if old Jonas hadn't come by for a bit of companionship, sought for and delivered. 

They were allowed cigarettes.  He'd been holding off as they were not always in easy supply, but he lit one with a match and took a draw.  He didn't like smoking much - made him cough, stank like his grandfather - but it did calm the nerves and feel like a treat somehow.

He sighed.  He wished he had something to say about the witch found dead.  It was obvious to them both - the reason she was killed was totally different from the other two.  Hit on the head and hidden away.  No one of consequence, poor thing.  It didn't make any sense.

But then Jonas asked him a question he could answer.

"I know that name," he said with a nod,  happy to deliver some facts he knew that Jonas might never be able to figure out on his own.  "Grimshaw's, yea.  Puzzled the hell of me, but they ordered from Sellaphix[1] all the time.  Once a month.  Um, weird stuff.  I mean, they were a tailor's apparently, and like you said - never open.  Don't really know what they'd want with all that."

As most people probably knew by now, who cared to know about such things, Sellaphix Apothecary was exposed for being not entirely above board.  Surprise, surprise, it was in Knockturn Alley.  But they'd kept their nose clean for three generations until our special little friend here bungled it.  He drew another drag and just ashed onto the metal table.

"He was one of the customers in the other book."

1.	Sellaphix Apothecary, Nate's previous place of employment until Oct 2009.

Jonas paused, his head tilting as he gave Briggs a quick look.  He hadn't been presuming that the younger man knew anything at all, and if he had, the Auror would have guessed that it was more rumors off the street.  Vague mentions of lurking shadows, a general sense of unease -- not something concrete like back room orders or actual information that he might be able to use.

It was a vivid reminder of just how much more there was to the dark streets of Knockturn Alley.  The Knockturnites were really a closed society, distrusting of anything that even hinted of Aurors or the Ministry.  Even when there was no chance that they would be implicated at all, they still shied away from providing the most basic of information to Level Two.  The faintest hint of collaboration was as good as asking to be ostracized, and the thought that he could never really win their trust, no matter how well meaning he might be, drove Jonas batty.

And yet here was Briggs, volunteering information of his own free will that Jonas would never have suspected him of having.  It made him give the younger man a second look, a much more considering one.  Perhaps the insane schemes that he occasionally allowed himself to linger on weren't all simply out of the goodness of his heart.

"You remember any of what they ordered?" he asked, eyebrows raising.  "Or anything about whoever placed the orders?  Who was it that would make the deliveries?"