"I didn't even realise," said Angelina, looking slightly horrified. "I saw all the smashed Sneakoscopes and spying devices, saw that all the log books were gone, but I didn't notice this cabinet." She prodded uncertainly at the hinge, and it fell straight off the side of the door.
George stared at it. "They were careful about this, weren't they? Like the one downstairs. Didn't destroy it, just unscrewed the hinge. But why kill him?"
"To get rid of the curses," Angelina said. "Like the security ones on the door, they only last as long as the person who cast them is still alive. He must have put up a pretty good fight, though."
She stared around at the cramped, dusty sitting room, where the same 'scene revealing' spell now showed them a collection of broken dark detectors littering the worn carpet. The walls were panelled with a kind of dark wood, scratched and faded, and the furniture was equally dark and old-fashioned. An ugly fireplace opened up one wall, the grate blackened and burned and thickly coated with ash. Fred was leaning against the wall beside it, watching the other three with narrowed eyes.
George noticed his expression and frowned, but then something in the fireplace caught his eye. Sticking out from under a particularly large heap of grey ash was something small, square and yellow.
"What's that?" he said, moving towards it. Tentatively, he brushed some of the ash aside and tugged out the thing from underneath. It was a thin, torn piece of parchment, only the corner of which was still intact. A line of brown scorch marks bordered the edge, where the rest of the paper had been burnt away. Visible in slanting black handwriting were the words: arrived at four-thirty this morning, again no owl, just asking for the b.
The four of them gaped at the parchment in George's hands.
"Asking for the what?" cried Lee.
"Don't know… there's a 'b' there, but that could stand for anything." Angelina shrugged. "These must be what's left of his journals - the attacker didn't steal them, they burnt them."
George flipped open Fred's notebook again and hastily wrote down the words from the parchment. "Anyone know a spell to get the rest of them back? I'm guessing reparo won't work…"
Lee shook his head. "Not sure there is one," he said. "It's to do with laws of magic, or something - if an object's destroyed by one of the four elements you can't -" He stopped suddenly, his eyes wide, and all four of them stared towards the sitting room door. There were noises coming from downstairs.
A crash. Then footsteps. George, Lee and Angelina all froze exactly where they stood. Fred, however, dashed towards the staircase.
George only stopped himself from crying out at the last minute. While the other two were still staring at the door, he mouthed to Fred, "What are you doing?"
"Going to see who it is," Fred told him, one hand on the doorknob. "It's not like they can see me. Distract those two, would you? I need to open the door."
His twin nodded. Then, improvising, he turned towards one of the over-stuffed armchairs on the opposite side of the room and shouted, "What's that?!"
As Lee and Angelina both whirled around in shock, George heard the sitting room door click open and Fred's footsteps hurry downstairs. Hopefully, he thought, the sound of somebody (albeit an invisible somebody) coming down the stairs might frighten their unwelcome visitor away. Angelina and Lee had both failed to notice Fred's exit, however, as they were still staring at the armchair.
"What?" whispered Angelina, sounding scared. "What did you see?"
"Er -" George tried to look genuinely confused. "I - I don't know. Um, I thought I saw something, but it must have just been a spider or…" he trailed off, as the other two looked at him mutinously.
Another crash from downstairs. George felt a sudden pang of anxiety for Fred.
"Who do you reckon it is?" murmured Lee, as he and George looked to Angelina for an answer.
The girl's eyes widened. "I don't know," she said, sounding scared. "Could be one of the other guys, but… why would they be here in the middle of the night?"
"Same reason as us?" suggested George, and Lee snorted.
"Unlikely," he said, then continued in a rather anxious voice, "Anyway, I don't think it matters who it is - do you really want them to know we're here? However legal it might be, Angelina, it doesn't exactly look good."
A third crash, accompanied by the sound of pounding footsteps.
"Don't you think we ought to get out of here?" hissed Angelina, her dark eyes fixed on the door.
"Good plan," said Lee, "Looks like we'll have to Apparate. See you back at the shop." And he spun on one foot and vanished.
Angelina made to follow him, but then she saw that George was still crouched by the fireplace. "What are you doing?" she whispered. "Let's go!"
George was digging through the ashes, his hands covered in coarse grey dust. "Trying to see if there's any more of the journals left," he said quickly, thinking that this also served as a good excuse to wait for Fred. "Help me, would you?"
"Are you mad?" Angelina said exasperatedly, but she knelt down by the grate anyway, and began frantically rummaging in the fireplace.
The crashes downstairs were growing louder. Then, suddenly, the sitting room door banged open. Angelina threw a dust-covered hand to her mouth to stifle a shriek, staring wildly at the doorway. But there was no one there. No one she could see, anyway.
Fred looked very pale as he shoved the door shut and rushed over to his twin. "I think you'd better leave," he said, his gaze flicking from George to Angelina, then back to the door.
"Just a minute," said George through gritted teeth, leaning forward to reach right to the back of the fireplace. There were now cinders all over the carpet, the black dust flying out in clouds as George swiped at the back of the grate. "There's something stuck here!" he cried.
There was a creak on the staircase - then the stomp of a heavy boot.
"George!" shouted Angelina, tugging at his robes, but George remained where he was.
"It's a book," he said, the sound muffled through the clouds of ash. "I can feel the cover - it's just stuck -"
Another heavy stamp came from the staircase, this time from somewhere near the top.
"Hurry up!" It was Fred's voice this time. "Use your wand, you idiot!"
At his words, George jerked backwards. Still kneeling on the carpet, he pulled his wand from his pocket and aimed it at the back of he grate. "Accio book!" he cried.
A small, brown bundle of pages flew out of the fireplace and straight into George's hand, just as the sitting room door burst open.
Not even stopping to think, George leapt to his feet, grabbed Angelina and turned to Disapparate. As he spun round to face the door, he saw a tall, dark figure silhouetted in the doorway. He caught only a glimpse of the man's furious face, before he and Angelina disappeared.
His feet hit the ground with a thud, and he didn't need to open his eyes to know they had landed in darkness. The shop was calm and quiet, but George's heart was banging out a drum solo in his chest, as he took in a deep breath and realised he was still clinging onto something.
He blinked open his eyes and saw that he had both arms wrapped tightly around Angelina, who was still shaking violently. Very slowly, he pulled himself away.
"Are you alright?" he asked quietly. The girl nodded.
"Yeah," she said, her voice sounding slightly hoarse. "I think so… did you get the book?"
George raised his right hand, where, in his ash-covered grip, he held the tiny, brown book. He grinned at her rather sheepishly.
"Where the hell have you two been?" demanded Lee, as he strode over from the other end of the shop. He waved his wand towards the ceiling and an array of bright yellow orbs began to glow with light above them. "I thought you were right behind me!"
"We were," said Angelina, her voice sounding a little more natural now. "But then George found this -" She pointed to the book.
Lee frowned. "What is it?" he asked, and George suddenly realised that he wasn't really sure. Tentatively, he lifted the leather cover. A tumult of ash and dust dropped out from the first page, causing George to take several steps backwards. He coughed loudly, waving away the clouds of dust, then peered down at what was inside.
The pages were very badly singed, the parchment crinkled and bleached, so that most of the writing was no longer visible. Very carefully, he turned the pages, causing more ash to fall to the floor, and noted that each leaf of paper was headed with a date, and that various times and days had been scribbled in the margins. "It's a diary," he breathed. "Or some sort of log book. I can't read a lot of it, though…"
"How did it survive the fire?" said Angelina, moving closer to him to look at the battered book. George shrugged, thinking over the heaps of ash now spread all over Mr. Bandersnatch's carpet. Then, suddenly, a horrible weight slammed down into his stomach.
He jerked himself out of his own thoughts, almost dropping the book in his haste to stare around the room. Where was Fred? He had just Disapparated, expecting Fred to follow - he hadn't stopped to think about the fact that Fred couldn't use magic anymore, that Fred couldn't Disapparate to escape.
He raced towards the shop door, peering out at the dark street.
"George?" he heard Angelina's voice, as though from miles away. "What in the name of Merlin -?"
"I need to go back!" he cried, panic-stricken. "I think - I think I left something -"
He yanked open the door and rushed outside, not caring that his friends were staring after him as though he had gone completely mad. He heard them shouting after him, but he didn't stop. He was half-way down the dark street, running as though for his life when, only a few feet from where he stood, someone said, "I'm here. It's alright - don't wait for me, or anything…"
George's feet almost slipped from under him in his haste to stop. He straightened up, and saw Fred tottering towards him up the street, hunched over slightly and looking out of breath. George felt a tidal wave of relief wash over him, as he ran a shaking hand through his hair and cried, "How?"
Fred shuffled a little closer to him, still looking as pale as he had done in Bandersnatch's living room. "Don't really know," he said quietly, his face sporting a rather bemused expression. "When you took off without me - thanks for that, by the way - I just sort of… disappeared as well. It all went dark, and I felt really, really wobbly for a second, and then… I was just down there -" He pointed a little further down the street, somewhere near Florean Fortescue's old ice-cream parlour.
"It must be the connection," said George, still sounding shaky, "the one Dumbledore was talking about. To do with this -" He gestured to the charm around his neck, most of it hidden under his robes.
"George! GEORGE!" Frantic footsteps were racing down the street behind him, and George spun round to see Angelina hurtling in his direction, followed, at a distance, by Lee. The girl slid to a halt, her face stricken.
"Thank God you're alright," she said, panting. "When you didn't come back, I thought - but it's ok." She looked away from him, suddenly seeming embarrassed about how panicked she had been. "Whatever it was, George, I can go back tomorrow and get it, but you can't possibly be thinking of -"
"It's alright," George said, also feeling embarrassed, though he was not sure why. He avoided looking anywhere near Fred. "It's fine, it doesn't matter."
Lee's footsteps slowed to a stop just behind Angelina. "Ok?" he asked George, eyebrows raised. "Not gone mad just yet?" George grinned and shook his head, and Lee rolled his eyes. "Right then - I'm off to bed. I think that's enough excitement for one night…"
George awoke the next morning to a thumping headache. The events of last night all seemed like a bad dream, buzzing and blurry in his mind. After Angelina and Lee had departed, he had simply sunk down onto his bed and fallen instantly asleep, all the strength gone right out of him. He had not had time to ask Fred what he had seen downstairs in the shop, or to properly examine the book that he had risked his and Angelina's lives to retrieve, or to think any more about the connection between he and Fred - the one that had dragged Fred away from the scene as George had Disapparated…
Someone was shaking his bedclothes, and a girl's voice was saying, "George, you promised!"
He gave an unintelligible grunt and rolled over. Standing over him, her hands on her hips, was Ginny. "It's half twelve already," she snapped. "You said you'd come early because Mum has to go to Madam Malkin's this afternoon."
"Ginny… what on earth…?" he grumbled, turning away from her and pulling the duvet over his head. She snatched it away from him. He glared at her, then sat up, peering blearily around the room. "How did you get up here, anyway?"
"Lee let me in," Ginny told him, throwing the duvet back in his face and looking around the floor. As soon as she spotted any discarded items of clothing, she began picking them up and tossing them onto George's bed. "He just came round to put a 'Closed for the Weekend' sign on the door. He said without you here it'd be a nightmare, being the summer holidays and everything. I knew you weren't already at home, so I -" she stopped, her meticulous gaze falling upon the mounds of letters on Fred's bed – the letters from Angelina to Fred. Ginny picked one of them up, the annoyance in her face fading as she scanned its contents. "George, what are all these…? Oh, George."
"It's - not what you think -" George said hurriedly, leaping out of his bed and pulling on a random collection of clothes. "Really - I was just clearing out some stuff and -"
Ginny was wearing a very sympathetic and slightly teary-eyed expression. She placed the letter in her hand back with the others and looked around the room again, spotting the open boxes of Fred's belongings and the untidiness of his bed. When her gaze returned to George, she looked as though she didn't really know what to say.
"It's nothing…" George began uncertainly. "Really… I'm not…" He sighed, knowing, from the look on Ginny's face, that he was fighting a losing battle. He decided the best option was to play along. "Just don't tell Mum, ok?"
Ginny nodded. "'Course not," she said, managing a watery smile. Then, "Look, George -"
"I know."
"- we all miss him too -"
"I know."
"- staying away from home, you're only shutting yourself out -"
"I know, Ginny." His words sounded too forceful, and Ginny looked rather taken aback. He suddenly felt angry with himself for upsetting her, and compensated for it by saying, "Right. Give me a few minutes in the bathroom, and then I'll be ready to go, ok?"
She nodded again. "Do you want me to pack some stuff for you?"
"Yeah," George said, smiling. "Thanks, Ginny."