Whoever Took It

Harry, Ron and Hermione had always known that Hagrid had an unfortunate soft spot for large and monstrous creatures.

In their first year he'd tried to hatch and rear a dragon in his little wooden hut, and it would be a very long time before any of them forgot the enormous three-headed dog he'd named Fluffy. So if Hagrid, as a boy, had heard there was a monster hidden away somewhere in the castle, Harry was quite sure he'd have moved heaven and earth to get a look at it. He'd probably have thought it was a dreadful shame for the poor thing to be shut up in the dark for so long. He'd have wanted to let it out for a run. Harry could just picture a thirteen-year-old Hagrid, already twice the size of everybody else in his year, trying to buckle a collar and lead onto something with a million legs and a lot of eyes.

But Harry was every bit as sure that Hagrid would never, ever have meant for anybody to die.

He half wished he'd never found out how to work Riddle's diary at all. He loved Hagrid. Hagrid had been the first person ever to give him a birthday cake. Hagrid had come and found him in a hut on a rock in the sea. And now Harry knew this, and couldn't un-know it, and it sat in his chest like a stone.

Ron and Hermione made him go over what he'd seen again and again. They made him tell it so many times that he was thoroughly sick of telling it, and even sicker of the long, round-and-round conversations that came after.

'So Hagrid's the heir of Slytherin, is he?' Harry said, the fifth time Ron asked him to describe the spider. 'Hagrid. Hagrid. Who cried for a week when Norbert went off to Romania. Who knits. Who calls a three-headed dog Fluffy. The great and terrible heir of Salazar Slytherin, who's sworn to purge the school of Mudbloods, and who once spent a whole afternoon trying to get a bird with a broken wing to eat a bit of scrambled egg. That Hagrid.'

'All right, all right,' said Ron. 'Nobody said he was the heir.'

'Riddle did. More or less.'

'Perhaps Riddle got it wrong,' said Hermione slowly. 'Perhaps he caught the wrong person. It might have been a completely different creature doing the attacks, and Hagrid's thing just happened to be...'

'What, two monsters?' said Ron flatly. 'In one castle? At the same time? How many d'you reckon this place has got room for?'

'We always knew Hagrid got expelled,' said Harry miserably. 'And it must have stopped, after. The attacks. Once Hagrid was gone. Or Riddle wouldn't have been given his award, would he?'

Ron tried coming at it from another direction.

'Riddle does sound a lot like Percy, though,' he said. 'Who asked him to go and grass on Hagrid? Nobody. He just went and did it. Typical swot.'

'But Ron,' said Hermione quietly, 'somebody died.'

'And if they'd shut the school,' said Harry, 'Riddle would've been sent back to that orphanage. For good. I don't blame him for wanting to stay here. I'd have done anything...'

He stopped.

His thoughts had gone back, without his meaning them to, to the Dursleys. To frying pans and rolling pins. To the cat flap in the bottom of his bedroom door, and the bars on his window, and a slice of cold bread pushed through to him three times a day, when they remembered. To what it would mean, to be told he could never come back here. Never. To be locked in that little room at Privet Drive with nothing to look forward to, ever again.

Ron saw his face change. He'd always been able to see it. He reached over and gave Harry's shoulder a rough, quick shove, the sort of shove that meant something else entirely.

'Well, they're not shutting it,' he said firmly. 'And you're not going back there. Not ever. You're coming to ours. So that's that, isn't it? There's no use thinking about it.'

Harry felt the coldness in his chest ease a little. He managed a grin.

'Yeah,' he said. 'Yeah. That's that.'

But later that night, lying in bed, he found himself thinking about Tom Riddle again. About his face when Dippet had said orphanage. Harry knew that face from the inside. He'd made it a thousand times. And it came to him that perhaps, out of everybody in the whole castle, out of everybody he'd ever met, Tom Riddle was the only person who would really, truly understand. Not Ron, who had a mum who knitted him jumpers. Not Hermione, whose parents sent her letters every week. Tom would understand. Tom had lived it.

His hand had crept out from under the covers, towards the edge of the bed, towards the gap underneath where the diary was wrapped in the old jumper. He wanted to talk to Tom. He wanted it very badly. He wanted to tell him about the cat flap, and the bread, and the bars. He'd never told anybody all of it. But Tom would listen.

Harry pulled his hand back.

He lay very still, staring at the canopy of his four-poster. Then he turned over, and put his back firmly to the edge of the bed, and made himself think about Quidditch until he fell asleep.

Ron bit his lip, the next day, and said, a bit hesitantly, 'Harry. You bumped into Hagrid in Knockturn Alley, didn't you? Before term?'

'He was buying Flesh-Eating Slug Repellent,' said Harry at once. 'For the cabbages. He said.'

None of them said anything for a while.

Then Hermione asked the hardest question of all, in a very small voice.

'Do you think we ought to go down and ask Hagrid? About all of it?'

'Oh, yeah, that'd be lovely,' said Ron. 'Afternoon, Hagrid. Nice weather. Lovely bit of rock cake. By the way, you haven't let anything big and hairy and murderous out in the castle recently, have you? Only we were wondering.'

In the end they decided they wouldn't say anything to Hagrid unless there was another attack. And as the days went by, and then the weeks, and there wasn't so much as a whisper from the voice in the walls, they began to hope they'd never have to ask him why he'd been expelled at all.

It was nearly four months now since Justin and Nearly Headless Nick had been Petrified, and almost everybody seemed to have decided that whoever was behind the attacks had given up for good. Peeves had finally got bored with Oh Potter, the plotter. Ernie Macmillan asked Harry, quite politely, to pass him a bucket of leaping toadstools in Herbology one afternoon. And in March, several of the Mandrakes threw a loud, wild party in Greenhouse Three, which kept half of Hufflepuff awake and made Professor Sprout very happy indeed.

'Once they start trying to climb into each other's pots,' she told Harry, beaming, with a pair of earmuffs round her neck, 'that's how we'll know they're grown. And then we can wake up those poor souls in the hospital wing.'

Dracina Malfoy had not been well, all that spring.

Harry noticed it without wanting to. She'd come back from the hospital wing after Christmas quieter and thinner and stranger, and since the Valentine's Day staircase, since Percy had plucked the diary out of her hands and given it back to Harry, she had got worse. She had gone grey, and thin, and quieter still. She hardly ate. She didn't sneer at anybody. She didn't even look at Harry, much. She sat at the end of the Slytherin table and stared at nothing, and every so often her hand went to her robes and pressed there, and found nothing, and fell away. Once, in Potions, Harry saw her sitting with her quill hovering over a blank bit of parchment for the whole double lesson, not writing anything, just waiting, as though she expected the parchment to write back. Snape, who never noticed anything a Slytherin did wrong, noticed that. Harry saw him watch her with his lips pressed together.

Harry told himself he didn't care. He told himself he wasn't going to speak to her again, and he didn't. But he noticed.

The second-years were given something new to think about over the Easter holidays. It was time to choose their subjects for the third year, and Hermione, for one, took it extremely seriously.

'This could decide our entire futures,' she told Harry and Ron, as the three of them pored over the long list of new subjects in the common room, ticking things off.

'I just want to drop Potions,' said Harry.

'Can't,' said Ron gloomily. 'You have to keep all your old ones. Otherwise I'd have binned Defence Against the Dark Arts the day Lockhart turned up.'

'But Defence is vital!' said Hermione. Then she caught herself, and stopped, and said in a different voice, 'Well. It should be.'

'Not the way he does it,' said Ron. 'All I've learned from Lockhart is never let pixies out of a cage. And never let Lockhart near your arm.'

Neville Longbottom had had letters from every single witch and wizard in his family, each of them telling him something different about what to pick. He sat in a corner surrounded by them, looking more and more frightened, reading the list with his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth and asking anybody who came near him whether they thought Arithmancy sounded harder than the Study of Ancient Runes.

Dean Thomas, who'd grown up with Muggles like Harry had, although those muggles weren't English, shut his eyes, waved his wand over the list, and signed up for whatever it was pointing at when he opened them.

Hermione signed up for absolutely everything. She didn't ask anybody's advice at all. But Harry noticed she didn't lecture anybody about their choices, either, which a few months ago she certainly would have.

Harry smiled grimly at the thought of what Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia would say if he tried to talk to them about a career in wizardry. Still, he wasn't completely without guidance. Percy Weasley was only too eager to share his wisdom.

'It all depends what you're aiming for, Harry,' Percy said, settling himself in the armchair opposite with the air of a man about to give a lecture. 'It's never too soon to start thinking about the future. I'd recommend Divination, personally. Now, people will tell you Muggle Studies is an easy option. I don't agree. I think every witch and wizard ought to have a proper understanding of the non-magical world, especially if they're going to be working alongside it. Look at Father. He's dealing with Muggle business every day of his life. Charlie, of course, was always more the outdoors sort, so he went in for Care of Magical Creatures. You've got to play to your strengths, Harry. That's the secret.'

But the only thing Harry thought he was really any good at was Quidditch. In the end, he signed up for the same new subjects as Ron, on the grounds that if he turned out to be hopeless at them, at least he'd have somebody friendly to be hopeless with.

'You know you're cleverer than you think you are, mate,' said Ron, when Harry told him so. He said it quite matter-of-factly, without looking up from his own list. 'You always do this. You go round thinking you're thick, and then you go and work out something nobody else can. You worked out the Stone. You talked that snake down. You'd be all right at anything, you would. You just think you wouldn't 'cause of them.'

He didn't say them who. He didn't need to.

Harry looked down at his list. He didn't know what to say to that. He wasn't used to people saying things like that to him. But it stayed with him for the rest of the evening, warm, like a coal in his pocket.

Gryffindor's next match was against Hufflepuff. Wood had them practising every single night after dinner, so that Harry hardly had time for anything except Quidditch and homework. But the practices were getting better, or at least drier, and on the evening before Saturday's match he went up to his dormitory to drop off his broomstick feeling that Gryffindor's chances of winning the Cup had never looked brighter.

His good mood didn't last long.

At the top of the stairs to the dormitory he met Neville Longbottom, who looked frantic.

'Harry! Harry, I... I didn't... somebody's... I've just come up and found...'

Neville's round face was blotchy and pink. His hands were twisting together. He couldn't seem to look Harry in the eye. He kept glancing at the door behind him, and then at the floor, and then at Harry's ear, and then at the floor again.

He pushed the dormitory door open. Harry looked in.

The contents of his trunk had been flung all over the room. His school cloak lay on the floor in a heap, torn right down one side. The bedclothes had been ripped off his four-poster, and the drawer had been yanked clean out of his bedside cabinet, and everything in it had been tipped out across the bare mattress. It looked as though a small whirlwind had been through, or a very large dog.

Harry walked slowly over to the bed, with his mouth open, treading on a few loose pages of Travels with Trolls.

He and Neville were pulling the blankets back onto the bed when Ron, Dean and Seamus came in. Dean swore loudly.

'Blimey, Harry. What happened?'

'No idea,' said Harry.

But Ron was looking at Harry's school robes, which were lying across the end of the bed. Every single pocket had been turned inside out.

'Somebody's been looking for something,' Ron said quietly. 'Something they wanted. Is anything gone?'

Harry began picking up his things and throwing them back into his trunk. His Potions kit. His quills. His socks. His spellbooks. His Gryffindor scarf, the long one, the one he wore to matches, should have been on the hook at the end of his bed, and it wasn't, and he couldn't find it anywhere, and he thought that was odd, but it was only a scarf. His Invisibility Cloak was still there, crumpled up at the very bottom of the trunk, which was something; whoever it was hadn't known what it was, or hadn't cared. It was only when he threw the last of the Lockhart books back in on top of it, and went to check the space under the bed, and found the old jumper lying there in a heap, unwrapped and empty, that he realised what was really missing.

'Riddle's diary's gone,' he said to Ron, in an undertone. 'And my scarf. My match one. That's gone as well.'

'What?'

Harry jerked his head at the door, and Ron followed him out. They hurried back down to the common room, which was half empty, and went over to Hermione, who was sitting by herself in a corner reading a book called Ancient Runes Made Easy.

Hermione looked appalled when they told her.

'But only somebody in Gryffindor could have done that,' she whispered. 'Nobody else knows the password. Nobody else could even have got in...'

Harry didn't say anything. He was thinking, with a sick, sinking certainty: Malfoy. It had to be. She'd seen it. On Valentine's Day, on the stairs, she'd had it in her hands. Percy had taken it off her and given it back to him in front of everybody. Harry had seen her face. She'd been waiting ever since. Weeks and weeks. Grey and silent and waiting. And now she'd come for it.

But how had she got in?

'It must've been a Gryffindor,' said a small voice behind them.

It was Neville. He'd followed them down. He was standing a little way off, twisting the hem of his jumper, still not quite looking at anybody.

'It must have been,' he said again, rather quickly. 'Mustn't it? Like Hermione says. Nobody else knows the password. So it must have been someone in Gryffindor. Somebody in our house. It must have.'

'Yeah,' said Harry slowly.

He looked at Neville. And Neville, just for a second, looked back, and then his eyes slid away again to the fire.

Harry wasn't convinced. He knew Malfoy had got in here before. He'd never forget it. At the end of last year, the night they'd gone down through the trapdoor, she'd been standing in this very common room, and Neville had confessed to him afterwards, red-faced and miserable, that he'd been the one who told her the password. That she'd been nice to him. That nobody was ever nice to him.

Harry really, really hoped Neville wasn't lying to them now.

But there were only two ways it could have happened, and he didn't much like either. Either Neville had let Dracina Malfoy into Gryffindor Tower all over again and was standing here lying to their faces about it. Or it really had been somebody in Gryffindor. Somebody who'd taken the diary, and turned out every pocket he had, and pinched his scarf as well, for reasons Harry couldn't begin to think of.

He found he didn't know which was worse.

And underneath it all, under the fury and the worry, there was something else. It came creeping up while he stood there by the fire with Ron and Hermione talking in low voices round him. It was a hollow, aching, pulling feeling, like hunger. He wanted the diary back. He wanted it back so badly it frightened him. He wanted to sit on his bed with the curtains drawn and open it, and write, and see the words come rising up out of the page in that neat, slanting hand. He wanted to talk to Tom. Not to ask about the Chamber. Not even to ask about Hagrid. Just to talk. To know him. To be known.

It was so strong that for a moment Harry actually swayed on his feet.

Then he stopped himself. He stood very still and made himself think about his own thoughts. What he was feeling right now.

These weren't quite his thoughts. He was sure of it, suddenly. They felt like his. They sounded like his. But there was something underneath them, something smooth and patient that didn't belong to him at all, like a hand on the back of his neck, steering.

That's what it had done to her, Harry thought. That's what it had been doing to Dracina, all year. Making her want it. Making her need it. Making her go mental without it, turning out cupboards and screaming at people and throwing toast. And maybe it had made her come here, tonight, to get it back, and rip his things apart doing it.

The diary was the key. He was surer of it now than ever. It had something to do with the Chamber. Something to do with Hagrid, and Tom, the girl who'd died fifty years ago, Colin and Justin, Mrs Norris. He just couldn't see how.

He didn't sleep much that night. He lay in the dark with the curtains drawn, thinking about Malfoy.

He kept coming back to what Tom had written. That she worried about him. Whether he was eating. Whether he was safe. Where he went in the summers. And then: If I were you, Harry, I would be a little kinder to her. She has nobody else. And he thought about the singing Valentine, and her face while the dwarf sang it. She is silver and stubborn and wild as a flame. Silver. Who else had silver eyes? And he thought about the box of sugared violets he'd decided had been from Ginny, and the card with the spiky handwriting he'd seen somewhere before. And the Quidditch pitch, and Malfoy throwing her broom in front of the Bludger. That's how you stand in front of somebody.

Maybe Tom was right. Maybe there was something underneath. Maybe, if he looked hard enough at the horrible things she said, there'd be something else hiding behind them, something she couldn't say straight out. Maybe he ought to be kinder to her. Maybe...

Oh, listen to him, said the voice.

It was the old voice. The one that lived at the back of his head and had lived there for as long as he could remember. The one that sounded a bit like Uncle Vernon and a bit like Aunt Petunia and a bit like Dudley's gang in the playground, and a great deal like Harry himself on his worst days.

Listen to the freak. Something underneath. Thinks a girl like that secretly fancies him. Thinks the nasty things are secretly nice things. She called you an orphan in front of the whole Great Hall, boy. She called you a kicked dog. She laughed at Colin. She made Ginny cry. And you're lying here making excuses for her, because some book told you to. Nobody is kind to you unless they want something. You know that. You've always known that. Has anybody ever been nice to you, before Hogwarts, without wanting something back?

Harry lay very still in the dark.

The voice had a point. The voice usually did. He'd spent ten years learning that when somebody said something cruel to you, it was because they meant it, and that if you went looking for a nicer meaning underneath you'd only get hurt worse when you didn't find one. He'd spent ten years learning not to hope. It wasn't a lesson you forgot just because you'd changed schools.

And anyway, Tom was only a book. A memory in a book. What did a memory know?

Except that Tom had known his name. And Tom had known about the summers.

Harry turned over and pressed his face into his pillow. He didn't know what to think. He didn't know what to believe. And the not knowing went round and round in his head until the sky outside the window began to go grey.

They woke to brilliant sunshine and a light, fresh breeze.

'Perfect conditions!' Wood announced at the Gryffindor table, heaping scrambled eggs onto the team's plates as though he were stoking a boiler. 'Couldn't ask for better! Harry, eat up, you look like death. You need a proper breakfast in you.'

Harry wasn't listening. He was staring down the long, crowded Gryffindor table, wondering whether whoever had taken Riddle's diary was sitting right there in front of him, passing the toast.

Hermione had been on at him to report the theft. Harry didn't want to. If he went to a teacher, he'd have to explain about the diary. All of it. How they'd found it, and what it did, and what he'd seen inside it. And then how many people would know why Hagrid had been expelled fifty years ago? Harry didn't want to be the one who dug all that up again.

He looked across the Hall at the Slytherin table instead. And he stared.

Dracina Malfoy was laughing.

She was sitting in the middle of the Slytherin table, not at the end, with Pansy on one side of her and Tracey Davis on the other, and she was laughing at something Pansy had said, with her head thrown back. The grey had gone right out of her face. Her cheeks were pink. Her hair was shining, brushed smooth and pale and gleaming down her back like it had been at the start of the year, and her eyes were bright and clear, and she was eating. She had a full plate in front of her, bacon and eggs and toast and mushrooms, and she was working her way through it with an appetite Harry hadn't seen her show in months. She looked well. She looked better than well. She looked as though somebody had lit a lamp inside her.

She looked, Harry thought, with a horrible lurch, exactly like somebody who'd got back the thing she'd lost.

Except...

Except that when she'd had it before, she'd looked dreadful. Ill, and grey, and waxy, with shadows under her eyes like bruises. The diary hadn't made her shine. It had made her sick. And losing it hadn't made her shine either. Without it, she'd gone hollow and grey and silent, picking at her food at the end of the table. Harry had seen her with the diary and he'd seen her without it, and not once, in either state, had she looked anything like this. So if she'd got it back, why wasn't she ill again? Why was she glowing?

Harry frowned. It didn't fit. None of it fitted.

'Harry?'

He jumped. Ginny Weasley had slid onto the bench next to him.

She looked awful. Harry hadn't noticed, these last few weeks, how awful she'd started to look, because he hadn't been noticing much of anything except Quidditch and diaries. But now, close up, in the bright morning light, he saw it all at once. She was as white as the tablecloth. There were dark smudges under her eyes. She'd lost weight; her face had gone pinched and sharp. Her fingers were stained with ink, right up to the knuckles, and she was wearing her Gryffindor scarf, the long one, wound round and round her neck three times, even though it was a warm, bright morning and they were indoors.

'Ginny,' said Ron, frowning. 'You all right? You look terrible.'

'I'm fine,' said Ginny. She didn't look at Ron. She was looking at Harry, and her eyes were enormous. 'Harry. I need to tell you something. It's... it's really important. I've been trying to tell you for ages, only I didn't know how, and I didn't know if you'd believe me, and I...'

She stopped. She was twisting the end of the scarf round and round her inky fingers.

'What is it?' said Harry.

'I saw...' Ginny swallowed. 'Last night. I saw somebody. I couldn't sleep and I came down for a drink and I saw...'

'Saw what?' said Ron.

Ginny opened her mouth.

'Ah. Ginny. There you are.'

Percy had appeared behind them, looking pale and harassed and important, with a sheaf of parchment under his arm.

'If you've finished, I'll have that seat, Ginny. I need a word with Wood about the stands. Off you go.'

Ginny leapt up as though she'd been stung. She looked at Percy, and then at Harry, with a strange, desperate expression, and then she said 'Nothing! It's nothing, it doesn't matter,' and ran out of the Great Hall, with the long scarf flying out behind her.

'What was all that about?' said Harry.

Ron shrugged, but he was frowning after his sister.

'Dunno. She's been weird for weeks. Mum says she's been writing home about nightmares.' He watched the doors swing shut behind her. 'She's always writing in that diary of hers, too. Every night. Under the covers. Percy says the girls in her dormitory have been on at him about it.'

Harry looked at him.

'She's got a diary?'

'Had it for years. Mum gave it her. Pink thing, with a lock.' Ron caught Harry's expression. 'What? Loads of girls have diaries, Harry. Hermione's got one. It's not... she wouldn't have... Ginny?' He laughed, but it came out a bit uncertain. 'She can't even get past the Fat Lady when she's had a cold. She couldn't turn out your trunk if you paid her. And what would she want your scarf for?'

He stopped.

He looked at Harry. Harry looked at him. They were both thinking of a long Gryffindor scarf, wound round three times on a warm morning, and a first-year girl going scarlet at the back of a queue on the stairs while a dwarf sang about Harry's eyes.

'No,' said Ron firmly. 'No. Not Ginny. No way.'

'I didn't say anything.'

'You were thinking it.'

Harry looked back down the table. Neville was sitting at the far end, picking at his porridge. He wasn't eating it. Every so often he glanced up at Harry, and then away again, very quickly, and went pink.

Then Harry looked across at the Slytherin table one more time. And this time Malfoy was looking back.

She wasn't laughing any more. She was sitting quite still with her fork in her hand, watching him across the whole width of the Great Hall. Her face was calm and smooth and bright. And then, very slowly, she smiled at him. It was a small, private, secret sort of smile, and it was the strangest smile anybody had ever given him. It might have been mockery. It might have been triumph. It might, almost, have been fondness.

Harry had absolutely no idea which.

As he left the Great Hall with Ron and Hermione to fetch his Quidditch things, another, much more serious worry was added to the pile.

He'd just put his foot on the bottom step of the marble staircase when he heard it again.

'...hungry... so long... so long in the dark... let me out... let me taste... kill this time... kill...'

Harry yelled out loud. Ron and Hermione both sprang away from him.

'The voice!' Harry spun round, looking over his shoulder, up the stairs, at the walls. 'It's back. I just heard it. Just now. You heard it, didn't you? You must have!'

Ron shook his head, his eyes wide.

But Hermione had clapped a hand to her forehead.

'Harry... oh, Harry, I think I've just worked something out! I've got to get to the library! Now!'

And she shot off up the stairs, taking them two at a time, with her bag bumping against her back.

'Worked what out?' said Harry, still staring round, trying to make out where the voice had come from.

'Loads more than I have, whatever it is,' said Ron, shaking his head.

'But why the library?'

'Because it's Hermione,' said Ron, with a shrug. 'Something goes wrong, she goes to the library. That's just how she's built.'

Harry stood at the foot of the stairs, undecided, straining his ears for the voice. But people were coming out of the Great Hall behind him now, chattering loudly, streaming out through the front doors towards the Quidditch pitch, and he couldn't hear anything over them.

'You'd better shift,' said Ron. 'It's nearly eleven. You've got a match.'

Harry ran up to Gryffindor Tower, grabbed his Nimbus Two Thousand, and joined the crowds pouring across the grounds. But his mind had stayed behind in the castle, with the voice in the walls. And as he pulled on his scarlet robes in the changing room, his only comfort was that everybody was out here now. Everybody was outside, watching the match. There was nobody left in the castle for the voice to find. Nobody, he would remember later, with a feeling like falling, except Hermione.

The teams walked out onto the pitch to roaring applause. Oliver Wood took off for a warm-up lap round the goalposts. Madam Hooch let the balls out of their crate. The Hufflepuffs, in canary yellow, were standing in a tight huddle, going over their tactics one last time.

Harry had just swung his leg over his broom when Professor McGonagall came across the pitch at something between a march and a run, with an enormous purple megaphone in her hand.

Harry's heart dropped like a stone into his boots.

'This match is cancelled,' Professor McGonagall announced through the megaphone, to the whole packed stadium.

There were boos. There were shouts. Oliver Wood, looking as though somebody had told him his whole family had been eaten, landed and ran towards her, still with his broom between his legs.

'But Professor!' he shouted. 'We've got to play! The Cup! Gryffindor! We're in with a...'

Professor McGonagall ignored him entirely.

'Every student will go straight back to their house common room. Your Heads of House will explain everything there. As quickly as possible, please.'

Then she lowered the megaphone, and beckoned Harry over.

'Potter. I think you had better come with me.'

Harry couldn't think how she could possibly suspect him this time. Then he saw Ron break away from the grumbling crowd and come running towards them as they started back towards the castle. To Harry's surprise, Professor McGonagall didn't send him away.

'Yes,' she said. 'Yes. You'd best come as well, Weasley.'

Some of the students swarming round them were grumbling about the match. Others looked frightened. Harry and Ron followed Professor McGonagall back into the castle and up the marble staircase. But this time they weren't taken to anybody's office.

'This is going to be a shock,' Professor McGonagall said, as they came near the hospital wing. Her voice was surprisingly gentle. 'I'm sorry. There's been another attack. Another... another double attack.'

Harry's insides turned a horrible somersault.

Professor McGonagall pushed open the door, and they went in.

Madam Pomfrey was bending over a sixth-year girl with long, curly hair. Harry knew her. She was the Ravenclaw they'd stopped by mistake on Christmas night, when they were trying to find their way to the Slytherin common room. And on the bed next to her...

'Hermione!' Ron groaned.

Hermione was lying perfectly still. Her eyes were open, and glassy, and staring at nothing. One of her hands was raised a little off the blanket, frozen in the middle of some movement, as though she'd been reaching for something.

Harry couldn't move.

For a long moment he just stood there, at the end of the bed, looking at her. Hermione. Who'd taken both his hands in Myrtle's bathroom, over a bubbling cauldron, and told him that what happened to Colin wasn't his fault. Who'd lain in this very ward with whiskers, crying because she'd been wrong about something. Who'd stopped herself, on the stairs, on Valentine's Day, and gone after Ginny instead. Who'd been trying so hard, these last weeks, to be a bit less. Who'd run off up the stairs this morning, shouting that she'd worked something out.

And then the shock went out of him, and something else came in to take its place.

It was quiet. It was very quiet and very cold and very, very still, and it spread out from his stomach all the way to his fingertips, and Harry recognised it, distantly, as fury.

Malfoy.

She'd got the diary back. Last night. She'd got it back, and this morning she'd sat at the Slytherin table glowing, laughing, eating her breakfast, smiling at him across the Hall. And now this. It was the only explanation. It had to be. She'd wanted Hermione dead. She'd always wanted Hermione dead because she was a muggleborn. I hope it's Granger, she'd said, on Christmas night, and giggled. And now she'd got her.

'They were found by the library,' said Professor McGonagall. 'I don't suppose either of you can tell me anything about this? It was on the floor beside them.'

She held up a small, round mirror.

Harry and Ron both shook their heads, without taking their eyes off Hermione.

There was a movement at the door.

Harry turned. Somebody was standing in the doorway of the hospital wing, half in and half out, as though she'd been passing and had stopped. It was Dracina Malfoy.

She wasn't looking at Harry. She was looking at Hermione's bed. At Hermione's frozen face. Her own face was perfectly calm and quite unreadable, and she stood there for a long, long moment, very still, with the sunlight from the corridor window on her shining hair.

Then her eyes moved, and found Harry's.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'About Granger.'

Her voice was quiet and flat and odd. It didn't sound like mockery. It didn't sound like anything at all. It sounded like something being read off a card. And then, just at the very corner of her mouth, there was something. A flicker. It might have been the beginning of a smile. It might have been a muscle twitching. It might have been nothing.

Harry took a step towards her. He didn't know what he was going to do. He didn't know if he was going to shout, or grab her, or hex her, or what. He only knew that every inch of him was shaking.

'Miss Malfoy,' said Professor McGonagall sharply. 'You should not be up here. Back to your common room at once.'

Malfoy went.

Harry stood there with his fists clenched so hard that his nails were cutting into his palms. He wanted to go after her. He wanted to run down every staircase in the castle after her, all the way to the dungeons, and make her tell him. Make her say it. Make her undo it. But he couldn't. He couldn't do anything. Professor McGonagall was standing right there, and Hermione was lying right there, and there was absolutely nothing at all that he, Harry Potter, twelve years old, could do about any of it.

He turned round and hit the stone wall beside the door. Hard. With his fist.

It hurt a great deal. He didn't care.

'Potter!'

'Mate.' Ron had got hold of his arm. 'Mate. Don't. Come on. Don't.'

Harry let Ron pull him back. His knuckles were bleeding. He looked at them, and then back at Hermione, and his eyes were burning, and he wouldn't let them do anything else.

Professor McGonagall looked at his hand, and at his face, for a long moment. Something moved behind her square spectacles. She took out her wand and tapped his knuckles once, and the bleeding stopped.

'I'll take you both back to Gryffindor Tower,' she said, heavily. 'I have to speak to the house in any case.'

'From this evening, every student will be back inside their house common room by six o'clock. Nobody, for any reason, is to leave their dormitory after that hour. A teacher will escort you to and from every lesson. Nobody is to visit a bathroom without a member of staff to accompany them. All Quidditch practices and matches are postponed until further notice. There will be no evening activities of any kind.'

The Gryffindors crammed into the common room listened to Professor McGonagall in total silence. She rolled up the parchment she'd been reading from. When she spoke again, her voice was not quite steady.

'I hardly need tell you that I have very seldom been so upset. It is very likely now that the school will be closed, unless whoever is behind these attacks is caught. If any one of you knows anything, anything at all, I am asking you to come forward.'

She climbed rather awkwardly out through the portrait hole. The moment it swung shut behind her, the Gryffindors all started talking at once.

All round Harry, people were frightened. He could see it on every face. Lavender was crying. Neville was white. The first-years had all huddled together in one corner like sheep before a storm.

Harry wasn't frightened.

Harry was furious.

'That makes two Gryffindors,' Lee Jordan was saying, counting on his fingers, 'not counting a Gryffindor ghost. And one Ravenclaw. And one Hufflepuff. Hasn't one teacher noticed that every single Slytherin is fine? Not a scratch on any of them? Isn't it obvious where this is all coming from? The heir of Slytherin, the monster of Slytherin, the Chamber of bloody Slytherin! Why don't they just throw the whole lot of them out and have done with it?'

There were nods, and a scattering of applause.

Harry thought the applause was cheap. It was easy to clap. It was easy to shout. It didn't do anything. He knew who was doing this. He knew. And he had to stop her.

Percy Weasley was sitting in an armchair behind Lee, but for once he didn't seem to have an opinion. He was white and stunned, staring at nothing.

'Percy's in a state,' George murmured to Harry. 'That Ravenclaw. Penelope Clearwater. She's a Prefect. I don't reckon it ever crossed his mind the thing would go for a Prefect.'

But Harry was only half listening. He couldn't get the picture out of his head: Hermione, lying on that hospital bed as though she'd been carved out of stone, with her hand lifted a little off the blanket. And Malfoy, standing in the doorway, in the sunlight, with that flicker at the corner of her mouth.

And if Malfoy wasn't caught, and soon, they were going to close the school.

And if they closed the school, Harry was going back to the Dursleys. Not for a summer. For good. Forever. Back to the cat flap and the bars and the bread. No Ron. No Hogwarts. No magic. Nothing, for the rest of his life, but that little room at Privet Drive.

No. Harry's hands clenched on his knees. No. Never. I won't let it happen.

And for the first time, he understood exactly how Tom Riddle had felt, fifty years ago, standing at the foot of the moving staircase with his forehead creased, making up his mind. Faced with the orphanage forever. Faced with losing the only home he'd ever had. Harry knew now what that felt like. He'd have done anything, too. To escape those dreadful, evil muggles.

Ron was watching him. Harry could feel it. Ron had sat down on the arm of his chair, close, the way you'd sit close to a firework that hadn't gone off yet, and he was talking to him in a low, steady voice, asking him things, making him answer, keeping him there.

'Harry. Mate. Look at me. What're we going to do?' Ron said quietly, right in his ear. 'Eh? Think. What do we do? D'you reckon they suspect Hagrid?'

Harry made himself breathe.

'We're going to go talk to him,' said Harry assertively, making up his mind. 'I can't believe it's him this time, but if he set the monster loose last time he'll know how to get inside the Chamber of Secrets, and that's a start.'

'But McGonagall said we've got to stay in the tower, except for lessons...'

'I don't care. Malfoy got the creature to attack Hermione! I think,' said Harry, more quietly and conspiratorially still, 'it's time to get my dad's old Cloak out again.'

It was the only way they had of getting out of the castle to see Hagrid without anybody knowing.

They went up to bed at the usual time. They lay in the dark and waited while Neville, Dean and Seamus went over and over the Chamber of Secrets in low, frightened voices, until at last the voices trailed off one by one into snores. Then Harry and Ron got up, pulled their clothes back on, and threw the Invisibility Cloak over both of them.

It wasn't a pleasant journey. Harry had wandered round the castle at night more than once before, but he'd never seen it so busy after dark. There were teachers patrolling the corridors in pairs, and Prefects, and ghosts, all peering into every shadow for anything out of the ordinary. The Cloak hid them, but it didn't stop them making a noise, and there was one horribly tense moment when Ron stubbed his toe on the bottom of a suit of armour only a few yards from where Snape was standing guard. Luckily, Snape sneezed at almost exactly the same instant that Ron swore.

It was a great relief to reach the front doors and ease them open.

It was a clear, cold night, full of stars. They hurried across the dark lawn towards the lit windows of Hagrid's hut, and only pulled off the Cloak when they were right outside his door.

A few seconds after they knocked, Hagrid flung the door open. They found themselves staring straight up the business end of a crossbow, with Fang barking his head off somewhere behind it.

'Oh,' said Hagrid. He lowered the crossbow slowly and peered down at them. 'It's you two. Wha' are yeh doin' out here?'

'Oh, just here for more rock cakes, Hagrid. What do you bloody think we're here for?' Harry said sarcastically.

Hagrid sighed, and stood aside, and let them in.

'What's that for?' said Harry, nodding at the crossbow as Hagrid propped it against the wall.

'Nothin'... nothin'.' Hagrid wasn't looking at them. 'Bin expectin'... never mind. Doesn' matter. Sit down. I'll make some tea...'

He hardly seemed to know what he was doing. He very nearly put the fire out, slopping water from the kettle all over it, and then smashed the teapot with one twitch of his huge hand, and stood looking down at the pieces as if he couldn't think how they'd got there.

Harry was trying very hard to keep hold of his temper. He'd been trying all evening. But it came out anyway, in a hiss.

'The creature got Hermione, Hagrid! They got my friend!'

'I heard,' said Hagrid. His voice cracked a little. 'Oh, I heard all righ'.'

He kept glancing at the windows. He poured them each a big mug of boiling water, forgetting to put any tea in it, and he was just cutting them a slab of fruitcake when there was a loud knock at the door.

Hagrid dropped the fruitcake.

Harry and Ron looked at each other in panic. Then they threw the Invisibility Cloak back over themselves and backed away into a corner. Hagrid checked they were hidden, grabbed his crossbow, and flung the door open again.

'Good evening, Hagrid.'

It was Dumbledore. He came in looking very grave, and behind him came a second man, a very odd-looking one.

He was short and stout, with untidy grey hair and a worried, put-upon sort of face, like a man who'd been woken up to be told his house was on fire and was still hoping it might be somebody else's. He was dressed in the strangest mixture of clothes Harry had ever seen on a wizard: a striped Muggle suit with a bright scarlet tie, and over it a long black cloak, and on his feet a pair of pointed purple boots. He was clutching a lime-green bowler hat against his chest.

'Dad's boss!' Ron breathed in Harry's ear. 'That's Fudge! Cornelius Fudge! He's the Minister for Magic!'

Harry jabbed him hard with an elbow to make him shut up.

Hagrid had gone pale and sweaty. He sank down into one of his enormous chairs and looked from Dumbledore to Fudge and back again.

'Bad business, Hagrid,' said Fudge, in a short, clipped voice. 'Very bad. Had to come. Four Muggle-borns attacked now. Four. It's gone far enough. The Ministry's got to step in.'

'I never,' said Hagrid. He was looking at Dumbledore, begging. 'Yeh know I never, Professor Dumbledore, sir. Yeh know I'd never...'

'I wish it to be quite clear, Cornelius,' said Dumbledore, looking hard at Fudge, 'that Hagrid has my complete trust.'

'Yes, yes, Albus, I know.' Fudge shifted uncomfortably. 'But look here. Hagrid's got a record. It's against him. The Ministry's got to be seen to do something. The governors have been on at me...'

'And I tell you again, Cornelius, that taking Hagrid away will achieve nothing whatever,' said Dumbledore. There was something blazing in his blue eyes that Harry had never seen there before.

'Try and see it from where I'm standing,' said Fudge, turning his bowler round and round in his hands. 'I'm under a great deal of pressure, Albus. A great deal. People want to see action. If it turns out it wasn't him, he'll be back here in no time, and not another word said about it. But I've got to take him. I've got to. I'd be failing in my duty if...'

'Take me?' said Hagrid. He was trembling all over. 'Take me where?'

'Only for a little while,' said Fudge, not quite looking at him. 'It's not a punishment, Hagrid. Think of it as a precaution. If somebody else turns out to be responsible, you'll be released with a full apology...'

'Not Azkaban,' Hagrid croaked. 'Not... not Azkaban...'

Before Fudge could answer, there was another sharp rap on the door.

Dumbledore opened it. And this time it was Harry who got an elbow in the ribs, because he'd let out a gasp loud enough to hear.

Lucius Malfoy swept into the hut, wrapped in a long black travelling cloak, with a cold, contented smile on his face. Fang began to growl.

'Ah. You're here already, Fudge,' he said, sounding pleased. 'Excellent. Excellent...'

'What're you doin' here?' said Hagrid furiously. 'Get out o' my house!'

'My dear fellow, you may take my word that it gives me no pleasure whatever to be inside your... your...' Lucius Malfoy looked slowly round the little hut, at the hams hanging from the ceiling and the enormous bed and Fang drooling in his basket. 'Forgive me. What do you call this? A house? I merely called up at the school, and was informed that I would find the Headmaster here.'

'And what is it you want with me, Lucius?' said Dumbledore. His voice was perfectly polite. But the fire hadn't gone out of his eyes.

'A sad business, Dumbledore,' said Lucius Malfoy lazily, drawing a long roll of parchment from inside his cloak. 'A very sad business. But the governors have come to the view that the time has come for you to step aside. This is an Order of Suspension. You will find all twelve of our signatures on it. I'm afraid we feel that you are... how shall I put it... not quite the man you were. How many attacks is it now? Two more today alone, I understand? At this rate there will soon be no Muggle-borns left at Hogwarts at all. And we all know what a grievous loss that would be.'

Harry went cold.

He was remembering Dracina, in the Slytherin common room on Christmas night, curled in the chair by the fire with the diary in her lap. Bits of it came back to him, in her strange, far-away voice. I knew he was planning something with it. But not what. And then, later, after the giggling: I think he's being forced to do something with the Chamber... he tried to warn me. Harry looked at Lucius Malfoy's cold, pleased face, and the parchment in his hand, and he understood all at once that this had been planned. Somehow. Some of it, at least. Lucius Malfoy had something to do with the Chamber. Harry didn't know what. But he was sure of it, as sure as he'd been of anything.

'Oh, now, look here, Lucius,' Fudge was saying, looking alarmed. 'Dumbledore suspended? No, no. No. That's the very last thing we want just now...'

'The appointment of the Headmaster, and his suspension, is a matter for the governors, Fudge,' said Lucius Malfoy smoothly. 'And since Dumbledore has so signally failed to put a stop to these attacks...'

'But see here, Lucius,' said Fudge. There was sweat on his upper lip. 'If Dumbledore can't stop them, then... well, I mean to say, who can?'

'We shall see,' said Lucius Malfoy, with an unpleasant smile. 'But all twelve of us have voted, and...'

Hagrid leapt to his feet, so that his shaggy black head brushed the rafters.

'An' how many of 'em did yeh have ter threaten, Malfoy? Eh? How many of 'em did yeh have ter blackmail before they'd put their names to it?' he roared.

'Tut, tut. That temper of yours will land you in a great deal of trouble one day, Hagrid,' said Lucius Malfoy. 'If I were you, I should take care not to raise your voice like that to the guards at Azkaban. I'm told they don't care for it.'

'Yeh can' take Dumbledore!' bellowed Hagrid, and Fang cowered whimpering in his basket. 'Yeh take him away, an' them Muggle-borns won' stand a chance! It'll be killin's next! Killin's!'

'Be calm, Hagrid,' said Dumbledore sharply. He turned to Lucius Malfoy. 'If the governors wish me to go, Lucius, then naturally I shall step aside.'

'But...' stammered Fudge.

'No!' growled Hagrid.

Dumbledore hadn't taken his bright blue eyes off Lucius Malfoy's cold grey ones.

'However,' he said, very slowly and very clearly, so that nobody in the hut could possibly miss a single word of it, 'you may find, Lucius, that I am not quite so easily removed from this school as a few signatures on a piece of parchment might suggest. For so long as there is one soul left within these walls who keeps faith with me, I shall not truly have gone. And you will find that at Hogwarts, help has always come, and always will come, to those who ask for it.'

For a moment, Harry was almost certain that Dumbledore's eyes flicked across the hut to the corner where he and Ron were standing, hidden under the Cloak.

Dumbledore gave a sly grin. Of course he knew, Harry thought. Dumbledore was wise and knew everything.

'Very stirring,' said Lucius Malfoy, with a little bow. 'We shall all miss your... ah... most individual way of doing things, Albus. We can only hope that your successor will manage to prevent any... killin's.'

He strode to the door of the hut and held it open, and bowed Dumbledore out. Fudge, still fiddling with his bowler hat, waited for Hagrid to go out ahead of him. But Hagrid stood his ground. He took a deep breath, and said, very slowly and carefully, to nobody in particular:

'If anyone was wantin' ter find somethin' out... if anyone was lookin' fer answers, say... all they'd have ter do is follow the spiders. Tha'd take 'em righ' where they need ter go. Tha's all. Tha's all I'm sayin'.'

Fudge stared at him in astonishment.

'All righ',' said Hagrid. 'All righ'. I'm comin'.'

He pulled on his moleskin overcoat. But as he was about to follow Fudge out of the door, he stopped once more, and said, very loudly:

'An' somebody's goin' ter have ter feed Fang. While I'm gone.'

The door banged shut.

Ron pulled the Invisibility Cloak off them both.

'We're in trouble now,' he said hoarsely. 'Dumbledore's gone. They might as well shut the school tonight. There'll be one a day, with him not here. One a day...'

Fang had begun to howl, and to scratch at the closed door.

Ron turned round. And it was then that he saw Harry's face.

Harry was standing in the middle of the hut with his fists clenched at his sides and his whole body shaking. He was white. He was absolutely white, white to the lips, and his eyes behind his glasses had gone so dark and so hard that for a moment Ron didn't recognise them. The air in the hut seemed to have gone heavy and strange. The flames in Hagrid's fireplace were leaning, all of them, away from Harry, as though a wind were blowing from where he stood. The empty mugs on the table had begun, very faintly, to rattle.

'All of them...' Harry growled out. 'All of the Malfoys have to pay! This is because of them!'

One of the mugs cracked straight down the middle.

'Harry...'

'Hermione's stone, Ron! She's lying up there like a statue! And Hagrid's going to Azkaban! And Dumbledore's gone! And he just stood there and smiled! He smiled! And she sat there this morning eating her breakfast like... like... and then she came to the hospital wing, Ron, she came and looked at her, she came to have a look...' His voice cracked and went up. 'And they'll shut the school. They'll shut it, and I'll be sent back, I'll be sent back there, for good, for ever, and there's nothing I can do, there's never anything I can do, I just have to stand there and watch as they take it all away from me!.'

The window behind him rattled in its frame. Fang had stopped howling and was cowering under the table.

'I'm not going back! I am not going back!'

Ron didn't back away.

He came straight across the hut instead, and took hold of Harry by both shoulders, quite hard, and held on.

'Harry. Harry. Look at me.'

Harry looked at him. His breath was coming in great ragged heaves.

'I know,' said Ron. His own voice was shaking, but he didn't let go. 'I know, mate. I know. I'd like to see the lot of them in Azkaban too. Lucius and Dracina and their stupid peacocks and their whole stupid house. I would. But if you go off down those dungeons tonight with your face like that, you'll do something you can't undo, and then they'll have you. That's what they want. You know that's what they want. Then it'll be you they're carting off, and not Hagrid, and who's going to help Hermione then?'

Harry stared at him. His shoulders were heaving under Ron's hands.

'And you're not going back,' said Ron fiercely. 'You hear me? Not for good. Not for a summer. Not ever. I don't care if they shut every school in Britain. You're coming home with us. Mum'll fight the Ministry with her bare hands if she has to. You know she will. She'll set Errol on them.'

Something in Harry's face cracked, just a little.

'Errol,' he said, in a strange, choked voice. 'Errol can't fly in a straight line.'

'Exactly,' said Ron. 'They'll never see him coming.'

Harry let out a breath. It came out of him shakily, half a laugh and half something else. The flames in the fireplace slowly straightened up again. The window stopped rattling. The mugs went still on the table.

He sat down very suddenly on Hagrid's enormous chair, and put his face in his hands.

Ron stood beside him with one hand still on his shoulder. He didn't say anything else. He just stayed there, the way he always did, until Harry was ready to lift his head again.

When he did, his eyes were dry, and steady, and very, very determined.

'Follow the spiders,' Harry said quietly. 'He said follow the spiders.'

Ron's face went the colour of old porridge.

'Yeah,' he said faintly. 'Yeah. I heard him. I was sort of hoping you hadn't.'

Under the table, Fang whined, and crept out, and laid his huge, slobbery head in Harry's lap. Harry put his hand on it.

'Come on,' he said. 'Let's feed Fang. Then we'll go back. We'll need a plan.'