The night outside Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes was a washed-out violet, pinpricked with stars and lit by the distant glow of the setting sun. The cool night air was now quiet and still, the daytime crowds long gone and the shop itself merely a shadowy room full of boxes on shelves. Upstairs, however, was quite a different story.
"Right - remember," George was explaining, pacing the room and occasionally throwing glances at his twin to make sure he was listening. Fred was lying on his bed, watching his brother with a rather bored expression. "I'll be the only one who can see you, obviously, but I won't be able to talk to you, because Lee and Angelina will think I've finally lost my Gobstones and gone mad. You can talk to me, of course, and you'll probably be able to go places or see things that the rest of us can't, so you can point stuff out to me and I'll tell the other two. Ok?"
"No," Fred said lazily, gazing at his fingernails. "I don't think I've got it yet, can you run it by me again?"
George glared at him.
"What?" Fred pushed himself up and rearranged his limbs so that he was sitting cross-legged. "You've already explained it about eight times, I'll be singing it in my sleep soon enough. Not that I actually sleep anymore, but never mind. It's quarter to ten now - is Lee meeting us outside the shop?"
"Yeah," George replied, no longer glaring at his brother. He looked over at the dark window, then seated himself on his bed, still fidgeting. "Him and Angelina should be here around ten."
Fred nodded, then reached over for his leather-bound scrapbook, flicking through it until he found the page about the case. "Right, here's what we've got so far." He began reading from what looked like a complicated web of sentences, all connected together by spindly lines. "The people who we know are involved in the case are: old Banders (obviously), Dumbledore, and a rather lovely damsel in distress. That's Angelina, by the way."
George blinked in acknowledgement. "Go on," he said. "What else has that brilliant mind come up with?"
"So glad you asked." Fred grinned. "Well - we know from Angelina (and personal experience) that Banders was a pretty paranoid guy, and Angelina thinks he had the squeeze on him just before he was killed."
"The squeeze?"
"Yeah, you know - he was being blackmailed."
George shook his head. "Bloody Carter Sparks. You've been reading too many detective novels…"
"Moving on -" Fred stared back at his book. "Lee told us the story about the goblins, but that doesn't really fit with the manner of the murder. However, we can't really rule them out yet, because smashing stuff is the kind of thing they would do, so there's a possibility that they may have been involved. Also, the Ministry are acting a little less than jake about it all -"
"Speak English, Fred, or I'm going to take those books away from you."
"- the Ministry are not exactly behaving according to principal and so that makes us a bit suspicious about what they've got to do with it. But then, you've got to wonder what in the name of Merlin the Ministry would want with an old Quidditch supplies shopkeeper." He closed the book and put it back beside his bed. "Got all that?"
"Not by half," George said, smiling. "But that's why you're coming with us, isn't it?"
Fred smiled back. "Yeah - too bad I can't take a little notebook with me and a Quick-Quotes Quill or something, to take down the evidence, you know. Or a camera!"
"Right," said George sarcastically. "Because a floating notebook, and a camera which takes pictures of its own accord, wouldn't be weird at all."
"Wouldn't be that weird," said Fred defensively.
George sighed. "Alright - how about I take along a notebook instead? And you tell me what to write in it."
Fred beamed at him. "Great. Merlin's beard, it's ten o'clock. Where did you say we were meeting again?"
"Your memory really is bad," muttered George, before the two of them hurried down the staircase into the dark quietness of the shop, and out into Diagon Alley. Lee was already waiting there, his back to the doors.
"Thought you'd forgotten," he said, grinning, as George (and Fred) stepped out into the dusk.
George returned his grin, then looked back questioningly at Fred. Fred stared down at himself, then made a face as though he was listening hard for something. After a moment, he gave his twin the thumbs up and whispered, "Dumbledore must have been right - I don't feel wobbly at all!"
"Hi," said a voice a few feet from them, and George's gaze snapped round to see Angelina approaching. "Ready? Let's go."
The four of them moved on down the street, glancing from side to side at the shadowy shop-fronts, occasionally spotting someone shuffling down an alleyway or sneaking through a door. Far behind them, they could hear the muffled crowd in the Leaky Cauldron, clearly enjoying their Friday night out. With a pang, George suddenly remembered that he was supposed to be going home tomorrow.
"It's just down here," Angelina told them, her words hushed with restrained excitement. "We can get in through the back entrance."
She led them through the narrow alley between Bandernsatch's Quidditch Supplies and Slither & Vial's Potion Emporium, emerging from the darkness into a small patio garden. A high brick wall surrounded them, its surface covered in vines and splatters of paint; to the left, rising higher than the garden walls, stood the back of the shop. The tiny windows were all dark, glassy eyes staring down at them, as Angelina edged towards the flimsy back door.
"It might look a bit pathetic," she said, pointing to the entrance, "but it was armed with about twenty enchantments before he died. They've all gone now, obviously, so all we need to get in is Alohomora." There was a faint click, and the battered wooden door swung open.
The four of them stepped inside. Like the rest of Diagon Alley, it was dark and quiet inside the shop, but here there was also something else - something which George felt was an unmistakeable sense of wrongness. They were standing in some kind of small stock room, the walls invisible behind rows and rows of shelves, stretching right up to the ceiling. Even though the shop had only been closed for a few days, there were already cobwebs shining against the worm-eaten wood, and dust was thick on every surface.
"Cheery in here, isn't it?" muttered Lee, as he, George and Fred followed Angelina through to the main part of the shop. The girl pushed aside a ragged curtain, which separated the stock room from the space directly behind the till, and stepped out into the shop. It was entirely empty.
George stared around at the bare shelves, the empty floor, the unburdened desk where even the till was missing. "Where is everything?"
"Confiscated," Angelina replied solemnly. "The Ministry took it all - most of it was broken anyway, destroyed in the fight. We have to order in completely new stock, the stuff in that back room is all out of date now."
"So, how are we supposed to investigate what happened if we can't even see the crime scene?" Lee frowned.
"Ah – watch and learn, gentlemen," said Angelina, pulling her wand from her robes. "I picked this up researching methods of magical law enforcement." She pointed her wand at the space before her and said, "Scaena videatur!*"
George let out an audible gasp. The room was suddenly full to the brim with debris: broken furniture and smashed bottles lay strewn about the floor, all coated with layers of torn paper and dust; the walls were splattered with substances of various colours, and broomsticks that had been splintered apart were scattered about amidst the chaos. Right in the centre of it all, only inches from where Angelina was standing, lay Mr. Bandersnatch.
How he could have sparked enthusiasm for Quidditch in anyone who came into his shop, George thought, was a mystery. Shrivelled and hunchbacked, with limbs like knobbly sticks and a head that seemed far too big for its body, the former owner of Bandersnatch's Quidditch Supplies looked more like he belonged in a Gothic horror novel, than in a shop for the best sport in the Wizarding World. Staring down at him now, however, George found it very difficult to feel anything but pity for him.
"Doesn't exactly look like he died of natural causes, does it?" he commented darkly, as he moved to get a closer look at the body. Stepping through the ruins of the shop floor, he noticed that the objects that had appeared as part of Angelina's spell were not really there. The destruction that littered the ground was all faintly see-through, and had no substance whatsoever. George suddenly realised that he was actually standing in a disembodied tabletop, and stepped out of it in alarm. "What is all this, anyway?" he asked Angelina.
"I told you, I found it in a book about crime investigations," the girl told him, bending down to examine her former boss. "It's quite a complicated spell, took me a while to get it right. You have to think of what scene you want to see, and it shows you how it was. It's not really here, obviously, but it gives us a good idea of what the Ministry saw when they came to 'investigate'." She said the last word with distaste, leaning her head to one side and staring intensely at Mr. Bandersnatch's wide-open eyes. "I think you're right, George - this doesn't look like a goblin attack to me. This is a wizard's work."
Lee was wandering up and down the shop walls, peering at the damaged objects on the shelves. "You can't even tell if they took anything from all this mess…" he said. "Do you think they were looking for something, or they really did have a fight?"
"If they were looking for something, why destroy the whole shop doing so?" asked Angelina, straightening up and stepping over the body on the floor to stand next to George.
Lee shrugged. "To cover their tracks, I suppose," he suggested. "Like I said - this place is such a wreck you can't tell whether something's missing or just buried under all this."
"Hey - George." Unseen by Lee or Angelina, Fred had been following the former in his inspection of the shelves. He was now pointing to a wooden box with a glass front, the inside of which was split up into small compartments. Lettering across the top of the box read: Second-Hand Snitches ~ Twenty-Six Galleons Each, and underneath, in a kind of spidery scrawl, someone had written: Don't ask if you don't have the gold.
George stared meaningfully at his twin, conscious of the fact that his facial expressions were in clear view of Lee, who was still standing by the shelves. Fred took the hint.
"There's none left," he explained. "And the box isn't smashed - the only damage is where someone's forced the lid." He scanned the room pointedly. "In fact - can you see a single Snitch in all this mess? You'd think they'd be flying around, wouldn't you?"
George followed his gaze and eyed the heaps of debris; despite the many broken broomsticks, bottles of varnish, punctured Quaffles and Beater's bats lying around, there was not a single glint of gold anywhere to be seen.
He pulled Fred's notebook out of his robes and crossed over to the shelf where the Snitch case stood. "Look at this," he said to Lee and Angelina. "This isn't broken, is it? And yet all the Snitches are gone."
"Oh yeah," said Lee. "I completely missed that. Well spotted."
George smiled, and then saw Fred's raised eyebrows. "Er - yeah, I only just noticed," he added hastily. "And I looked around the shop to see if I could spot them and noticed something weirder - there are no Snitches here at all."
As he spoke, he saw Fred move behind the shop desk and disappear into the stock room. He emerged a few moments later. "Nope," he said, "not a single Snitch in there either."
"Do you reckon there are any in the stock room?" asked Angelina.
"Er, no, I don't think so," said George immediately. "I looked when we were coming in - didn't see any Snitches at all."
Angelina raised her eyebrows, looking impressed. "How very perceptive of you," she said, smiling, but George found he couldn't smile back - his stomach had just performed some kind of somersault. Instead, he gave a very false cough and started scribbling in his notebook.
"Did he keep Snitches anywhere else?" Lee queried, now examining the shelves on the opposite wall. "Come to think of it, are there any Bludgers around either?"
"There's one here," said Fred from next to a rickety staircase. He pointed to a heap of wrinkled leather. "I'd recognise that angry shade of black anywhere…"
"Isn't that one there?" George said, indicating where Fred was standing.
Lee glanced at the ruined Bludger. "Oh yeah," he said. "Someone's on the ball tonight, eh?"
George shrugged and carefully avoided Fred's eyes, but then met Angelina's by accident. She smiled again, and he felt his insides go numb.
"Right," announced Angelina, moving to stand in the middle of the room and surveying the wreckage around her. "So, we've found Bludgers, Quaffles and broomsticks," she ticked off the items on her fingers, "but no Snitches. That's very odd." She tapped the side of her head thoughtfully. "Why would someone want to steal Snitches?"
"Well," said Lee, "they're valuable, aren't they? I mean - twenty-six Galleons just for a second-hand one, that's pretty steep."
George frowned. "Yeah, but broomsticks are worth a hundred times that, and whoever it was hasn't been very careful with them."
"Now I come to think of it," said Angelina slowly, "I'm pretty sure he kept a collection of old stuff upstairs, including Snitches." She glanced at the staircase, looking straight through Fred. "Not second-hand ones," she added, "I mean really old ones. He kept them in a cabinet - locked, and guarded by about a million spells - most of which, I'm sure, were illegal. They were antique ones, I think. Most of them were gifts. Not that he ever let us see them up close, mind." She looked meaningfully from Lee to George, both of whom knew exactly what she was thinking.
Lee sighed. "Who wants a wager?" he said with a grimace, as the three of them moved towards the staircase. "Because I'm willing to bet everything I own that every single Snitch is gone."
*For those of you who might be interested, scaena videatur (sky-na wid-ay-ar-tor) translates from Latin as 'let the scene be seen'. It sounds pretty good in English as well, I think.