6:43 PM

It had taken a few days for Jonas to reconnect with Niobe Thursby.  The events of the last full moon had left the Ministry particularly on edge, and with February's lunar apex less than a week away, he'd been struggling to balance the hectic bustle of Level Two with spending time with Anna, who was juggling her own busy schedule.  It hadn't helped that the reporter seemed to be equally busy, swept up in the latest business at the Daily Prophet.

Normally, he and Niobe convened their conspiratorial sessions over Indian food, but considering the topic that they were coming together to discuss, Jonas didn't feel entirely comfortable holding the deliberations in public.  Instead, he'd offered to grab Chinese takeout (provided that Thursby brought the beer) and invited the reporter over to the small private investigator office that he still maintained near Charing Cross. 

The beer had been the most important thing, of course, and they hadn't wasted any time in breaking into it.  Jonas had lifted his glass to take a sniff, and then taken a long drink, glancing upwards as he savored the taste against his tongue.

"Not bad," he told Niobe cheerfully as last, flashing her a lopsided smile.  Raising his glass, he gave her a mock salute.  "Cheers, mate."

Setting the drink down, Jonas leaned back in his chair and picked up his chopsticks and plate again.  For once, he'd had enough forethought to dust before his guest arrived, which minimized the constant sneezing, but the desk chair still gave an uncomfortable squeak that hinted at its disuse.  It had been several years since he'd regularly occupied this office.

"So is everything alright at the Prophet?" he asked, his forehead creasing, as he unsuccessfully chased after an egg roll with his chopsticks.  "You lot were having some trouble with Cuffe last week, yeah?"

Niobe used a finger to wipe a spot of foam from the corner of her mouth. Her brother Pollux's special-brewed Pomona Stout was the choice for a cold, wet winter day. It had just a touch of peat to it, apropos of its namesake. The trade of nosh for beer had been more than enough incentive to reconnect with Jonas. Their palaver had always been spread out, but Niobe really valued the informal partnership, the routine if it. That's what made the sudden change of venue all the more peculiar.

"No word on Cuffe," Niobe said soberly. "I can't well believe it. It's been..." she paused to visualize a calendar, "...eight days? Nine? It's grim, mate."

At first Cuffe's disappearance had been castle intrigue and wild speculation but everyone assumed he'd turn up. Then he didn't. And didn't. And didn't.[1] Niobe and a few others had been running their own investigation underneath the Ministry's, but there was utterly nothing. She was beginning to worry he was dead and his wife, too.

"Your lot are stumped as well, not for lack of trying. Cuffe and Carstairs are thick as thieves. I dunno."

Niobe picked at the plate, wrinkling her nose to herself. It was an utter mess.

1.	20 Jan - Barnabas Cuffe Missing

The red-haired Auror paused in his egg roll reconnaissance as he listened, head tilted slightly to the side.  He didn't know Barnabas Cuffe at all, although he had his own opinions about the Prophet; it had hardly been the bastion of independent journalism back in the 1990s.  But even with that being said, no one deserved to go suddenly missing. 

"Well, I hope he turns up again soon," he said, concern creasing his forehead. 

He hadn't been tapped for the Cuffe investigation, but by all accounts, it was hardly as if the man had just simply up and left on an unexpected holiday.  Something must have either happened to him and his wife, or was likely enough to happen that it had driven them into the shadows.

Jonas paused, glancing at Niobe, doing his best to assess whether or not she wanted to stay on this subject or move on, and then turned to face the wall.  "I haven't heard much on Cuffe, but I reckoned I owed you an update on our redux at the wax museum," he said over his shoulder as he bent over, fiddling with the loose molding along the bottom of the wall.  "Cohen managed to open that warded compartment we spotted.  We found a couple of bits inside."

There was a trick to opening the molding; once it had clicked into place, it only took a moment longer to free the plastic sandwich bag that he'd tucked inside.  Straightening, Jonas turned back in his chair and slid the plastic bag across the wooden desk to the reporter. 

There were two small objects inside:  a small arched fang and a torn corner of bright purple paper.

Niobe recognized the Runespoor fang instantly and subconsciously raised her right hand to her mouth, curling her four remaining fingers against her chin. She'd rushed headlong at a raging serpent coming up on four years ago, narrowly avoiding a fatal attack, losing her finger to the complications of Runespoor venom. The gnarled little stub had acted as a (mostly) effective reminder to look before leaping these years since.

"Well, bugger me," she said, realizing instantly why they were meeting behind a closed door.

"You don't see these much anymore." The Ministry had come down hard on the illegal Runespoor trade following some very public catastrophes. As a result, there'd been nary a whisper of them since.

"What's that?" She flipped over the plastic bag to see if there was any writing on the purple scrap of paper.

Jonas allowed the smallest of smiles as he leaned back in his chair.  There was a part of him -- a very small part, he'd tried to convince himself, which he certainly wouldn't allow to influence his decisions or surface itself in any way to Anna or his colleagues -- that almost enjoyed the thrill of this. 

The look on the journalist's face left no doubt that she'd placed the broken fang just as quickly as he had.  Jonas flashed her a lopsided grin -- no, ever since Charisma Aldridge had given them the clues that they'd used to turn the tide on the Runespoor trading ring a couple of years before, the smugglers had largely gone silent.  But just like the many-headed snake that they traded in, the criminal ring rarely seemed to keep their heads down for long.

Niobe, though, had less reason to recognize the second clue inside the bag.  Jonas paused for a moment and then reached under his desk for the satchel that he carried to and from work every day.  Rifling through it for a moment, he pulled out a piece of bright purple parchment, separating it from the stack.

"There's the rub, innit?" he remarked, as he slid the paper -- a memo from Pratt reminding everyone to get their requests for full moon shifts in before the end of the day on Thursday or they'd be expected to shut their gobs and stop complaining at where they ended up -- across the table to the reporter.  "Quite a coincidental color of parchment."

"A Ministry memo," Niobe spoke the obvious out loud. The colors would be a perfect match if the little scrap hadn't been a bit dusty. She sat back and took a drink from her beer.

"Proximity, that's a complicated relationship," she said. A journalist and an investigator would share this understanding. Two objects in the same place implied everything and proved nothing.

"The fang's likely meant to be there," Niobe continued, beginning to work the problem out loud brows furrowed. "It's intact and they're hard to come by nowadays. But that corner looks just left behind, like when you tear apart stapled pages. I get hiding the fang, but who'd need to keep a Ministry memo hidden in a brick wall?"

All kinds of theories started to form, from hints and smoke. Niobe leaned forward again.  "But is it a safe or a drop, know what I mean? If you truly want to hide something, you don't choose an external wall of a tourist attraction. It's got to be a cache for handing things off. Someone's passing notes at school."

It was always a pleasure to watch Niobe Thursby puzzle through something.  There were times when he almost thought the journalist had missed her calling, but it was probably much more important to have champions of deductive reasoning serving the public interest outside of the Ministry than it would have been to have another skilled detective on Level Two.  It wasn't as if corruption stopped at the red phone box that functioned as the Atrium's Visitor's Entrance.  Lately, it had begun to feel as if there needed to be even stronger public forces able to hold the Ministry to account.

Niobe had quickly gotten to the same place that he had.  It had to be a drop point at least tangentially connected to the smuggling ring, chosen for its proximity to Muggles in hopes that the Aurors would stay away. 

"There's a bit more that I've found out since I saw you last," he said, looking back at the reporter, "but this all needs to stay off the record.  Deeply off.  As in, not even poking about to try and verify what I'm about to tell you through other means, alright?"

Jonas knew that he didn't need to lecture Niobe Thursby, who had always been professional and better than her word.  But he still hadn't managed to puzzle out the strange connection between Moira McBoid's testimony, the strange talisman, the Runespoor Smuggling Ring, and the Werewolf Capture Unit's mess from December, and sharing what he knew with someone else meant putting the girl potentially at risk.  He needed to be clear.

"And we're back."

Niobe tossed up her hands with a wry smirk. There would always be a line between Niobe and Jonas. Sometimes it was as permeable as sand and other times it was bottom-thick glass. She'd always say that's what made this friendship 'fun' but 'fun' wasn't the dominant feeling now.  Usually she could coax him her way at least a few steps but this was the first time he'd warned her off so completely, so Niobe relented.

"Fine, then. I wouldn't have known anything if you hadn't brought me along in the first place." She dutifully mimed locking her mouth and throwing away the key.

"So go on. Is it to do with Balfour Spectre?" She couldn't help but ask. He was the new head of the Ministry department tasked with keeping this Runespoor business from exploding again. He wouldn't be nearly the first name on a list of likely Ministry corruption, but there was a question as to how much could happen in his house without him knowing.

That wasn't a name that he'd been expecting.  Jonas cocked an eyebrow at Niobe.  The reasoning behind why she'd brought up the new head of Level Four might deserve its own line of inquiry in a moment, but what he was about to tell her was likely to make her want to sock him, so he might have to remember for a later date.

"No," he said, shaking his head.  "But it is a bit to do with your old flame, actually..."

Turning in his chair, he reached back into the hidden compartment in the wall and freed a second plastic bag.  This one, though, had a small silver token inside.[1]  On one face, there was the unmistakable emblem of a three-headed Runespoor snake.  An ornate design ran along the edge of the opposite side, with a blank, smooth space in the middle.

He passed the second bag across the desk to Niobe.

"A young witch brought that to me a few weeks ago," he began, arching an eyebrow at her.  "Said she found it on the bank of the Thames a few weeks before that, near where the other Runespoor bits had washed up.[2]  But she was in the area of the wax museum on the night of the full moon when one of Bagnold's lot supposedly saw the drop happening, and he apparently knew her well enough to recognize her patronus."

That obviously was going to beg a particular question.  The Ministry, in a rare agreement between Levels Two and Four, had been especially close-lipped about the Cold Moon ambush at the London Zoo.  Jonas had kept an eye on the Daily Prophet for any mention of it, but aside from a brief clipping buried deep in the paper,[3], they'd been largely successful.

That had seemed decidedly irresponsible to him at the time.  If Tawse was preparing to stage an attack, people deserved to know.  The Ministry always assumed that the general magical public was going to panic if they knew the worst about a situation, but from Jonas's experience, elite governmental officials tended to panic far more than the public, who were far more reasonable and unified than most gave them credit for.

Now, though, in the wake of January's attacks, keeping it secret felt downright criminal.

So he told her.  Tawse's ambush at the zoo.  The strange net spell and the dead Muggles.  The patronus that Moira had sent in warning to Bagnold at the Ministry -- though he kept the girl's name carefully out of it. 

"I don't know for certain if any of it is connected," he said at last, shaking his head.  He wasn't quite avoiding looking at Thursby, but he also wasn't exactly engaging with it.  She'd want to throttle him, and she'd have every right.  "But the pieces seem to fit together too well, yeah?  I think the girl must have been the one to see something at the wax museum drop, found the token near there, and then told Bagnold about it when he followed up with her."

1.	First discovered on December 10, 2011 in Something from Nothing.
2.	December 27, 2011 - Hidden Currents
3.	December 2011 - Beyond the Headlines

M: Language

Niobe was livid. As Jonas filled her in on a massive Ministry cover-up she stayed silent, an expression of contempt growing word by word. And her old flame. Cinead Tawse, who'd physically assaulted her, who had the blood of dozens of people on his hands and Jonas was being flip about it. She'd dropped the coin back on the table like it was a bag full of shit.

"What the everloving fuck, man," she said voice raise raising arms crossed for lack of something to throw at him. It had been a long time since she'd felt this angry and she didn't know what to do with herself. "The public has a right to know about this! Tawse turning up again, targeting werewolves, killing muggles. What the fuck is wrong with you? All of you?"

You, Jonas. You, the Aurors. You, the Ministry. All of them, pompous, paternalistic jackasses.

"You played me this whole time, bringing me in like a friendly favor. I can't believe you'd done this."

She got up then, suddenly resolved and put on her coat.

"You're insane if you think I'm not going public. Sod your off-the-record. This is criminal."

Part of her was aware that her friendship was about to fall to shambles but there were some things that were more important. She'd not be complicit in the cover-up.