Title: Except That Little Closet
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Content Notes: Horror, dark themes, character death, suggestions of suicide, mystery, angst, bittersweet ending
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: None, gen
Wordcount: This part 4500
Summary: Draco Malfoy is convinced that his mother has been murdered, not committed suicide, the way the Aurors have decided. He demands that Harry Potter, disgraced Auror, help him investigate to prove it and catch her killer. But the longer Harry and Draco investigate Malfoy Manor, the more Harry becomes uneasily aware that there is something strange about the stories Draco is telling him—and the little room that's always kept locked.
Author's Notes: This is the first part of a two-shot fic in my "From Samhain to the Solstice" series. The title, which comes from an English translation of Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard," uses "closet" in the old sense of a small private space that's not to be disturbed.

Except That Little Closet

"Potter."

Harry started as he looked up from the book on curses open on his desk. "Jesus, Malfoy, how did you get in here?"

"Through the door?" Draco Malfoy took a step forwards. He looked even paler than he had the last time Harry had seen him, which was at his father's funeral. Lucius Malfoy had died in Azkaban for a killing he committed after the war, and Harry had attended his funeral for lots of complicated reasons. "I need your help with my mother."

"I thought your mother had died, too?" Harry tried to keep his voice as soft as he could. He couldn't imagine what it would be like to lose both parents after you already knew them, the way Malfoy had.

"The Aurors said she committed suicide."

"Said?"

"She was murdered."

Harry blinked several times. Then he nodded to the chair in front of his desk. "Sit down, Malfoy. It sounds like we have some things to talk about."

Malfoy ignored the invitation, pacing back and forth in front of Harry's desk instead. "They said she didn't have anything to live for, with my father gone. They said she jumped over the balcony in the front of Malfoy Manor, the one that—there's a bamboo fence below. They said it. But she would never have done that! She would have lived for me, if nothing else."

After thinking about the way that Narcissa had lied to Voldemort just to ask about her son, Harry had to admit that he thought that, too. "What proof do you have that it was murder?"

Malfoy whirled to face him. "Because she wouldn't have jumped!"

"No, I mean, what proof do you have that it wasn't an accident? That she didn't just fall?"

Malfoy lowered his head. For an instant, he actually seemed to dim, as if some internal light burning in him had gone out. Harry blinked, but kept his gaze as steady and compassionate as he could. He had to ask those questions, as a trained Auror.

Even though he wasn't really an Auror now. Which brought him back to the other problem with Malfoy asking for his help.

"I suppose—I don't know that for certain." Malfoy's voice was a thing of torment that made Harry wince to listen to. "But I want someone who will tell me. Someone who won't decide that because she was the wife and mother of Marked Death Eaters, she doesn't deserve justice."

"Okay. But you should know that I'm not your best choice for that. I did terrible things, Malfoy. I'm not an acknowledged Auror anymore. They would have forced me to retire, but there were a few people who pulled strings in my favor."

Malfoy seemed to glance up and around for the first time, as if really noticing where Harry's office was, relative to the rest of the Ministry. "Thus the office in the cellars?"

"Instead of the DMLE, yes. So. Why come to me? There are other people who have a lot more clout. And some of them might still owe your family favors."

"They wouldn't listen to me. Not the way you will. They might pretend to indulge me, but they would look into the official files and at the balcony where she died and then shrug and tell me that yes, it was suicide. Or an accident. You owed us debts, Potter. You testified for us at trial. You'll do this."

Harry grunted in irritation. "Do you even know what I was disgraced for? What kinds of terrible things I did?"

"So long as it wasn't pushing my mother off a balcony, Potter, I don't care."

Harry held Malfoy's eyes. "I suspect you might have come to me because of the terrible things I did. Let me make this clear, Malfoy. I'm not casting the Retrocognition Curse ever again."

"Curse? I thought it was just a spell."

"It has a curse attached. It always caused pain and death for whoever asked me to use it. I didn't know that when I invented the spell."

"You think I'm afraid of pain or death, Potter? I'm not afraid of anything next to my fear of not bringing my mother's killer to justice."

Harry rolled his eyes. "You say that, but you don't know what happened to the victims of the curse. One woman I showed her husband's death to committed suicide the next day." Malfoy turned away and stared at the far wall. Harry went on. "Another man who insisted that I show him how his child was tortured at the hands of Death Eaters tried to kill them, and now he's in Azkaban. Then there was Lavender Brown."

"Brown? I thought she died at the Battle of Hogwarts."

Harry smiled bitterly. "So did I. But she showed up at the Ministry one day, declaring that she'd been bitten by Greyback and she was in hiding from the Ministry until they captured him. And because we don't treat werewolves properly. I showed her the scene of Greyback biting her; she wanted to be sure that he'd really done it instead of another werewolf. The next day, she disappeared. No one could find a trace of her."

"That doesn't mean a curse took her. Maybe she just decided to hide again because of how much the Ministry dislikes werewolves."

"We did find the cottage in the woods where she'd stayed all these years. There was blood on the walls and the sheets were torn up."

Malfoy hesitated. "All right, that does sound bad—"

"You see?"

"But what harm can your curse do to my mother, Potter? She's already dead."

Harry shook his head wearily. "It could still do something to you. I'm not going to use that spell ever again. Obviously I should have spent more time researching the magical theory behind it before I invented it."

Malfoy rolled his eyes n turn. "I'm not asking for such a huge favor, Potter. Avoid using the stupid spell if you want to. But come to Malfoy Manor for me. Investigate and see if you can find a trace of the murderer."

"Your mother died months ago, Malfoy. There won't be traces left to find. Besides, I'm sure the Aurors in the first investigation would have covered—"

"The investigation that claimed my mother committed suicide when I know there was someone else living in the Manor?"

Harry paused. "There was someone else living in the Manor?"

Malfoy nodded fervently, his eyes blazing in a way that almost made Harry think he could see straight through them into his brain. "I tried to tell the Aurors on the first investigation that, that I found the signs. They ignored me. It was like they couldn't hear me, couldn't see me." He smiled bitterly. "You know, the way they've always treated Malfoys since my father died."

Harry didn't know, actually. Being exiled to what was almost a cellar office in the Ministry kept him away from a lot of department gossip. But he stood up. "That sounds like something worth looking into."

"You'll do it, then?" Malfoy sounded as if he was holding his breath.

"Yes. But I make no promises, Malfoy. It's possible that I won't find anything because there's nothing to find, or because the murderer, if there was one, covered their tracks too well. And I'm not using the Retrocognition Curse."

Malfoy reached out as if he would take Harry's hand, then seemed to remember himself and pulled his hand back. "Thank you, Potter. Thank you. I promise, you won't lack for repayment."

Harry gave him an uncomfortable smile. He was essentially paid a Ministry salary for not involving himself in investigations now. He would have to keep this as secretive as possible. "Let's go and see what we can find, Malfoy."

Harry shuddered instinctively at his first sight of Malfoy Manor in years. It seemed to hunch behind the gate, staring at him in the way of a predator creeping through tall grass. In fact, the grass around it was tall. Harry stared back. Then he looked at Malfoy. "You don't have house-elves to take care of this place anymore?"

Malfoy shook his head in silence, staring at the looming marble walls. "My mother was already losing some of them. She didn't have Malfoy blood, and after my father died…I could have lived here and kept them with me. But I didn't want to."

Harry felt his heart clutch in sympathy. The pain in Malfoy's voice scraped down Harry's own back. He reached out to touch his shoulder.

Malfoy moved away in what probably would have looked like a casual step to Harry a few years ago, and cleared his throat. "Are we going to go in?"

"Yes," Harry said slowly. He didn't think Malfoy had meant to snub him. Maybe he just really didn't like being touched. "As soon as you open the gates. Or is there a key phrase or something that's supposed to open them?"

Malfoy closed his eyes for a second, as if he was trying to remember it. Then his brow furrowed, and he turned his head away. Harry had just opened his mouth to ask if there was another way in when the gates creaked softly open.

"Er, well, that's good, I suppose," Harry said. Malfoy just ducked his head and walked slowly into the house. Harry shook his head and followed. He knew it had to be hard for Malfoy to come back to this place, he scolded himself.

Of course, the scolding also helped to distract him from the way his heart was bounding and the way his ears seemed to echo with Hermione's scream as Bellatrix tortured her.

The spiraling gravel path that led up to the house hadn't been raked or smoothed in what looked like years. Harry glanced around, disquieted. It was more than the tall grass and the utter lack of white peacocks. There was a silence here that shouldn't be.

Which was ridiculous, when the grass was swaying to the push of the wind and wild birds called from the nearby trees. But he felt that way anyway.

Malfoy came to a halt in front of the Manor's door. He stared at it and shivered. Harry looked with him, and saw that the silver knocker was in the shape of a curling serpent, eating its own tail.

He saw Nagini devour people, didn't he? Harry cleared his throat. "I can open the door if you tell me the phrase or the spell that you need to use."

"Thank you, Potter," Malfoy whispered, his voice shaking. "Can you say Purus sanguis?"

If it's just a phrase, why can't he say it…? But Harry had learned not to second-guess other people's trauma, if possible, and if only so they wouldn't second-guess his own. He murmured, "Purus sanguis."

The silence stirred at his words, broken both by them and by the noise of the door as it swung open on silken-smooth hinges. Harry told himself that it was ridiculous to think something was listening, displeased by the breaking of the silence. He stepped forwards aggressively.

The house was dark and dusty. Harry cast a few spells to remove the dust, looking around. He couldn't remember enough of the front corridors when he'd been dragged through them by the Snatchers to say for sure if much had changed. He did see portraits with closed eyes on the walls, and a door standing ajar that, from the glimpse of books he got beyond it, probably led into a small library.

"What makes you think a murderer was living here?" he asked, turning to face Malfoy.

Malfoy stood with his arms wrapped around himself, his head bowed. He again appeared as if his fire had dimmed, the way he had in the office. Harry added softly, "I'm still going to help you. I just need the evidence, that's all."

He would have reached out, but he'd seen already that Malfoy didn't like being touched.

After a second, Malfoy nodded and summoned back the fire in him from wherever it had been hiding. "All right. Let me show you." He turned and led Harry up a staircase. Harry kept his wand drawn and eyed the sleek banisters and smooth steps uneasily. He'd have to fight in this slick place. Malfoy, by contrast, seemed to float up the stairs.

Well, it's his house, after all. Who knows how many times he's walked these?

They kept climbing past the first floor and up to the second one, then passed through a gigantic arched doorway that was missing its door. Harry shivered as he looked down the corridor beyond it. This one was even darker and dustier than the one on the ground floor. He cast a stronger Lumos Charm on his wand and watched as the fingers of light extended down the corridor. They didn't seem to travel that far.

"This is the floor where the murderer was living?" Harry's voice fell into the silence and died.

Malfoy nodded jerkily. Then he whispered, "This way," and led Harry to a door that stood open, but not far enough for Harry to see into the room. He twitched his head. Harry pushed it open the rest of the way.

There was a bed bigger than any of the ones at Hogwarts standing there, covered with thick curtains of rich, sky-blue brocade. Harry cast a spell that, this time, would hang as a light from the ceiling. Then he stepped forwards and began to prowl slowly around the room.

He had to admit there were signs someone had lived here, although he didn't know for sure that they went back to the time when Narcissa would have died. There were footprints in the dust, so many that in some places the floor was almost clean. Harry bent close to the bed and saw a dent in the mattress. Someone had slept in this same place for a long time. Harry shivered.

He turned, and found that Malfoy had vanished. He frowned. "Malfoy?"

"What?"

Harry jumped, cursed, and turned around. "Don't do that, will you? Walk like a fucking normal person!"

Malfoy gave the first smile Harry had seen on his face since Malfoy came to his office to beg for help. It was narrow and self-mocking, but Harry would take it. "Sorry. There are passages in the walls, you know. I think it might have been how that murderer came up on Mother unseen. I took one that runs around the side of the room to see if there was any evidence in it, but it looks like the bastard, whoever he was, didn't find that one." He looked at the bed. "Someone was sleeping in that?"

"Yeah. It looks like you were right. I have to check for signs of age and a magical signature, though. When did your mother die?"

Malfoy shivered. He seemed to shrink into himself, and Harry thought he would bolt back into the secret passage. But then he muttered something that sounded like, "I have to face it, don't I?" and straightened up again. "It was three months ago."

"Three months," Harry repeated thoughtfully. "To the day?"

Malfoy stared at him. "No, it's a week and a half past the day. That information matters to the spell?"

"To the kind I cast, it does." Harry had to smile a little at the awed glance Malfoy was casting him. "I invented spells besides the Retrocognition Curse. Not all of them go wrong." He took a step back and focused on the bed and the footprints in the dust. His breathing dropped into one of the meditation patterns that he'd had to practice, and practice, and practice again, until he finally got it right.

Then, and only then, did he gesture with his wand.

"Gloria dierum," he whispered. It was far from a literal translation of "counting the days," the first incantation he had tried to use, but it was the one that had worked for the spell.

For a moment, the silence grew deeper and deeper, although it seemed to like this spell more than the others. Then the dust shot into the air and rotated, and the dent in the mattress began to glow blue. Harry opened his eyes to watch. Malfoy was utterly still beside him. Harry thought he might be holding his breath.

The dust and the blue light together formed a number: 102. Harry nodded slowly. "The person who slept here was here on the day your mother died," he said. "I can't tell for sure how long he would have been here before that, but we can be sure of this." He shot Malfoy a curious glance. "And the other Aurors really didn't listen when you tried to tell them?"

"None of them could use that spell you have."

"Yes, but I mean, they still could have looked at that bed and seen that someone was sleeping in it." Harry shook his head in disgust. He didn't like his fellow Aurors much, but there were some who were still professionally skilled. Like Ron—

Harry shied away from that thought, and cleared his throat. "What next? Other signs?"

"This way."

Malfoy led the way out of the bedroom, up some more stairs and around a corner. Harry noticed one door that he assumed was the one Malfoy was leading him to, but Malfoy marched past it. Harry reached out and tried to turn the knob. Locked.

"What about this one, Malfoy?"

Malfoy spun around, and for a second, his clothes floated behind him the way Snape's robes used to do. Harry recoiled. Malfoy's eyes were wide and wild, and Harry wouldn't have been surprised if foam had started dribbling from his lips.

"That's locked," Malfoy said. "You don't go in there. You don't ever go in there."

"All right. I was just thinking that there might be clues—"

"There's something important to me in there. Don't try to enter it."

Harry stepped back as Malfoy loomed close to him. The fire that seemed to burn in him at times was brighter than ever now. His eyes maintained that wild stare, and he brought a sense of cold with him that Harry didn't think was entirely a result of his own fear.

"All right," Harry said soothingly. "I just—are there secret passages that lead into that room, too? Maybe the murderer found them, and the locked door doesn't matter."

Malfoy had already turned and was making his silent way up the corridor. Harry sighed and followed.

Harry followed Malfoy onto the balcony that he said his mother had fallen from with a faint frown. Honestly, he hadn't found many other clues. It was true that someone had used a bathroom on the day Mrs. Malfoy died, and there was a hairbrush with faint strands caught in it, and someone had stood for what his spell to count moments of passed time said was nearly an hour on a balcony above this one. But none of that proved a murderer.

He'd even suggested to Malfoy that maybe some of those remnants had been his; the hair in the brush looked like his. Malfoy had given him an incredulous stare and said, "They were the murderer's," and then gone on staring until Harry had given up.

This balcony didn't look like the scene of a murder, although Harry had found in his years as an Auror that few places did. It was a plain one for Malfoy Manor, actually, made of the same white stone as the side of the Manor, without any elaborate carvings on the banister or balustrades. There was a stain on the stone that Harry bent over to look at.

"Mother's hand gripped that before she fell."

"It doesn't look like blood."

"It isn't. It's just the stain of her holding on."

Harry said nothing, but continued to study the stain skeptically. When he cast the Counting Days Spell, again it told him that it had been there for 102 days. But Harry still needed to know what the stain was made of before he decided it was from the murder, as Malfoy insisted. The trouble was, the dark flecks in the shape of, perhaps, half a handprint didn't look like anything he was familiar with. Not dirt, not blood, not sweat.

Not that sweat would have lasted this long anyway, Harry thought, taking a step back so that he could view the mark from the side, and have a look at the place Mrs. Malfoy had fallen. And the Aurors would have found blood.

The dark mark still wouldn't come clear, and Harry was no longer sure that it looked like half a handprint, anyway. He turned his gaze on the garden below—

And winced. Right beneath the balcony was a fence that looked as if it was made of sharpened stalks of bamboo. They pointed straight up, and apparently provided a sort of climbing trellis for some of the garden's flowers. The ground below was a riot of untended green, so Harry could no longer say exactly what the flowers had been.

"Malfoy?"

"Down here, Potter."

How did he get down there so fast? Harry thought in irritation as he bent over the side of the balcony. Probably more bloody secret passages.

Malfoy was standing near the fence, his head bowed. Harry cleared his throat. "Your mother fell right on top of the stakes?"

"Yes," Malfoy whispered, his voice tiny. His word sounded more like a blowing wind.

Harry swallowed. It would have been a nasty way to die. He'd dealt with a Muggleborn Dark wizard who used sharpened bamboo like that on one of his cases. Apparently he'd picked up the idea from Muggle movies.

Nasty, but fairly instant, Harry thought, trying to place himself in the head of a murderer who would have killed a woman years after the war, a woman who had saved Harry's own life and done no harm in that time. Too instant? Did he intend to do something else, but he was afraid of someone catching him?

"If you used the spell you invented…"

"I am not casting the Retrocognition Curse," Harry snarled in irritation. Yes, it would form precise images of the past crime, one of the reasons he had invented it, but there was no telling what it would do to Malfoy.

"I'm not afraid," Malfoy whispered, his head bowed. "As far as I'm concerned, the worst has already happened to me."

"Yeah, you say that, but you can't know it."

Malfoy was silent. Harry turned back to look at the huge, folding glass windows that led out onto the balcony from the Malfoy parents' bedroom. It was hard to see how someone could have come up behind Mrs. Malfoy without her hearing them. True, the bedroom had lush carpet, but not thick enough to prevent the sound of footfalls. Harry had seen that for sure when he walked across it, while Malfoy hovered outside the door.

That left…

Harry's glance went back to the higher balcony where his spell had confirmed that someone had stood. A spell cast from there? A weapon? Of course, a murderer would have had ample time to retrieve the weapon before Aurors arrived.

Harry shook his head. Too many unknowns, and too many variables that he couldn't narrow down because it had been so long since the crime was committed.

The Retrocognition Curse would have told him the truth at once, but Harry wasn't about to expose someone else to the death and mayhem that he had already spread too much of. Instead, he closed his eyes to gather his strength and then cast the second most powerful of the charms he had invented.

The magic spread out around him. When Harry opened his eyes, the mark on the balcony railing was softly glowing, and he turned around to see that certain portions of the house were, as well. Harry relaxed. There. He knew what his own magical signature looked like, and he would get Malfoy to separate out his and his mother's. Then they would be able to see the magical signature of the murderer.

He looked more closely at the mark. It still refused to make any sense to him, except that maybe it did look like half a handprint, with the actual light on it. The magical signature here showed a faint silvery-blue. Harry's own was a violet that had swirls of red mixed in.

He looked over the balcony, and hid a wince as he saw a brilliant green staining the bamboo fence below. That was probably Mrs. Malfoy's, but he would have to get Malfoy to confirm for certain, and to tell Harry what his own looked like.

"Malfoy?" he called.

"What?"

Harry jumped. Malfoy had apparently taken his secret passage back to the balcony again. He turned around with a scowl. "Can you tell me what this mark is? And what the murderer's magical signature looked like? We'll have to separate it from yours."

Malfoy bent his face close to the mark, ostentatiously still not touching Harry, who leaned back to give him room. "A handprint," Malfoy said at last. "I don't know what material it's made of, though."

Harry sighed. That was a dead end. But then again, the smudge of the handprint was a minor mystery compared to being able to see the places the murderer's signature had touched. "Well, come on, then. Let's see if the imprint on the bed and the rest of it matches the glow here."

Malfoy glanced at him weirdly as he straightened up. "I did come to you in the first place because of the Retrocognition Spell," he murmured. "I think you're taking what happened to the people who asked you to use it too seriously. You have no proof it was a result of the spell."

See, Harry? said what sounded like Hermione's voice in his head. Even Malfoy can see reason. You have to—

Harry shut the voice away, and shrugged at Malfoy. "Lead on."

Malfoy sighed loudly, and glided away in front of him. Harry followed him, while mentally considering something. Malfoy had said before that the stain was just the mark of his mother holding onto the balcony.

That it glowed with a different signature than the bamboo fence made…

Well, it made Harry a bit concerned.