Who: Harry What: starting to put together the pieces re: OSTENDO and the List When: Tuesday, late afternoon/evening Where: DMLE, Auror offices, Harry's cubicle Warnings: Nah. Status: logged, complete
Both of the cases he was working on -- one official, one unofficial -- were starting to make Harry feel like banging his head against the wall. He'd prioritized the official one, of course; not only because it was what he was supposed to doing while here at work, but there had been actual blood shed, whereas Harry's experience (however traumatic) had only resulted in injury, and relatively minor ones at that. By death toll alone, Justin's case took precedence, but he also had more specific leads on who had done it: Walden Macnair and his two as yet unidentified cohorts, whom Harry had tentatively pegged as Amycus and Alecto Carrow. Death Eaters were far simpler for Harry to understand than whatever group had posted the list, but they had also done a very good job of covering their trail. Harry found himself reaching farther and farther for possible information regarding their whereabouts, so far to no avail.
There had to be something he was missing. He still couldn't shake the feeling that the attack had been personal, rather than random, that the Death Eaters involved had something against Justin Finch-Fletchley. But Justin had not been able to help him figure out what that might be, and Harry's own investigation had thus far turned up a whole lot of nothing in that regard.
He had taken to switching back and forth between cases to give his mind a break from one, even if it wasn't much of a break. At the moment his desk was covered in various papers, pictures, and notes from both. To the outside eye it might have looked like chaos, but there was a semblance of organization to it, at least in his head. His eyes were burning from looking at all of it, so he lifted his hands to rub them and lean back in his chair, then readjusted his glasses. Soon enough he was going to reach the point where he would be more productive going home to rest so that he could try again tomorrow, because it was getting late and it had been a very long day. But the feeling that there was something just out of reach -- an answer of some kind, though he didn't know what -- had kept him here, and was keeping him here still.
He reached for his coffee, and drank deeply. Underneath it, bearing a circular coffee stain from being used as a coaster, was the edition of the Prophet with the article about the children in Diagon. It was unrelated to either of his cases, so far as he knew, but that whole situation bothered him too, so he'd held on to it. In the same stack, and for largely the same reason, was the strange, apparently hijacked publication of Witch Weekly. The children in Diagon were not Harry's case, but he couldn't seem to get it off his mind, a fact which he chalked up to being overly protective of his own children at the moment, and thus exceptionally sensitive to the problems of other helpless children in general.
Even with the fresh burst of caffeine in his system -- though to be fair to the coffee, it probably needed a bit longer to kick in -- he nearly overturned his cup as he went to set it down again. Though he managed to right it, some of the (once hot, now rather lukewarm) liquid had spilled; with a curse, he moved to save all his papers from it. In the process, the Prophet was shifted aside to reveal the magazine beneath, open to the page from which Neville's face smiled up at him, along with Dawlish, Minister Smethwyk, and Martin Angelov. He cleaned a few drops of coffee from where they'd landed on Dawlish's face, and his mind suddenly went back to his fellow Auror being attacked, so soon after Harry himself. That reminded him, he really needed to talk to Ginny about getting a dog...
And then he stopped, staring at the page. Dawlish was on the List. Martin Angelov was, too -- and Neville, and the Minister; he knew that without looking at it, he practically had the List memorized by now. Harry flipped through the magazine, now on the edge of his seat. There was his own face, and Pansy Higgs, and Gwen Montgomery, and Hannah Abbott. Every single person he saw in the magazine, minus the muggle celebrities, was on the List. How had he not seen that before?
He jotted down the names and compared them to the List, just to be sure, though he already knew he was right. Stunned by what that connection implied, Harry simply stared at the magazine for a moment. He had been saying all along that there had to be a link between the people on the List, or at least among most of them: he had also said that the large and seemingly random selection of "enemies" probably meant that they were being targeted by a large and disorganized group of people. That would also explain the differences in the attacks, if they were being carried out by different teams within the larger organization. But the lack of a pattern, the lack of an obvious motive or link between any of the targets, had made it impossible to make any more logical leaps towards what sort of organization it was.
But here they all were, or a good portion of them at least, chosen for the same magazine, used to promote a single message. If this wasn't coincidence, then-- what did it mean? He lifted the Weekly and read it over again, mind racing. He had been searching his brain for what he could possibly have in common with the Minister, and Mr. Angelov, and everyone else on the List that he didn't know personally. But they had been grouped together here, and now he felt like the answer had been staring him in the face. What they had in common, according to this article, was a shared prejudice towards all things muggle. Or more accurately, that an activist group believed that they did. The fact that he had immediately disregarded the accusations towards himself and his friends as blatantly untrue had probably been what had kept him from seeing it. Now that he'd thought it, however, his mind wouldn't let it go.
What did he know about OSTENDO? According to the magazine he was holding, they wanted the magical and muggle worlds to combine; if he also took the kids in Diagon into account, they also seemed to be aiming for some sort of reparations to the muggle world for the damages that had happened during the war. It wasn't very much of a leap to think that people who could kidnap children and hijack a magazine for their cause might also stoop to the level of attacking their political opponents face to face. They had certainly attacked their reputations in writing -- the evidence of that was right here in front of him. One thing was certain, they had the quality that Harry had been expecting ever since his talk with Lee: a seemingly humane and positive cause, and terrible (at the very least hypocritical, as Lavender and Alicia had pointed out) methods of pursuing it.
He was on his feet now, and shuffling through the papers on his desk to bring all of the notes and articles related to the List and the people on it to the forefront. It didn't tell him much of anything new; he had been over all of this millions of times, but he went over his notes on each "enemy of wizardkind" again, searching for anything that would shed doubt his theory. Anything that would suggest one of them was actually in favor of OSTENDO's cause.
The Death Eaters on the List he disregarded immediately, without bothering to check, along with anyone he knew harbored anti-muggle or blood purity prejudices. Many of the others were less obvious-- after all, he had been looking into the events surrounding them, not their political opinions. So far nothing stood out to him, nothing that made him think that he was on the wrong track; he would have to delve a little deeper. Into the organization itself, first: once he put this information into the hands of the person on the case, he wasn't likely to be able to access much in the way of information regarding what else the organization had done. Speaking to his fellow targets on the other hand would probably be quite a bit easier.
Suddenly energized, Harry flicked his wand to organize and put away all of his files securely, and grabbed his coat. He intended to go to the Prophet offices first; they had reported something about OSTENDO before, he felt sure, though with the way his mind was whirling at the moment, he could not for the life of him remember what it was. Something about a train, perhaps. And after he stopped at the Prophet, he would start on other kinds of media. They had hijacked Witch Weekly, they had made enough of a spectacle to get themselves written up in the Prophet; it wouldn't be much of a stretch to think that they might have used other magazines or papers, or even the wireless. What if they were even on Muggle television? And he should try to find some record of signs and fliers posted in large wizarding areas, too, like the List itself had been.
As he left the department, a small Hermione-like voice in the back of his mind reminded him that this was all speculation, that he had no proof. But that argument was about as useful in convincing him as it had been in the past. He wouldn't be able to pursue this too far himself-- if he really wanted this to be effective, he would have to take what he had to the Aurors on the case, who could actually do something about it-- but that could wait until he had more evidence than a Witch Weekly magazine.
It hardly mattered to Harry how little evidence he had, though. He was on to something. He could feel it.