Chapter 5

Author's note: This story may not please everyone as it is not the usual fluffy Christmas story. The scenes depicted in this story may be offensive and objectionable to some readers for their explicit violence and gore. This story deviates from my usual writing. Emphases are in italics and titles of books &ca are underlined. Some readers may find my characterisation OOC, but I assure you, this is how I see them in the dark distant future. I assume that Dumbledore's death in Book 6 was staged and that's why he's still alive in this story.

Christmas Presents Undisguised

Chapter 5

The weather at Azkaban was overcast as usual. Hermione and Severus had been huddling under their cloaks as the little boat left the wizarding port of Ayr at the northernmost point of Scotland. Their boatman, a wrinkled weather-beaten shell of a man with hollow eyes and no soul, mechanically rowed the boat steadily and unhurriedly to the island where lightning clouds never dispersed. The stench of the water as they approached Azkaban assailed their olfactory senses. Disconcerted with the silence and the gloom that seemed to reach out and choke her soul, Hermione kept her eyes trained on the macabre waterborne path that kept the boat travelling slowly to Azkaban. How in the world the Potter Administration got so many heads and other fragments of traitors to sit on pikes to light the way to the prison, she did not know. While it was a sobering display, Hermione wondered if those fragments of treasonous traitors' heads and body parts were meant to be a deterrent. If these unnecessarily violent killings were anything to go by, she was certain that the murderer they were currently tracking was mocking the very displays the boat passed. Hermione could not help but stare at the sight in horrid fascination as she noticed that the closer they got to Azkaban, the heads were increasingly more decomposed. The boat passed by one that was rotted down from the nose down, the eyes glassed over with a thick murky film of shock, staring back at whoever who dared meet its eyes. Hermione turned her head aside, wrapped her wet cloak closer to herself, and wished that they would reach the prison soon.

'Frightened by Rodolphus Lestrange?' sneered Severus, raising his voice a little to be heard over the driving rain. 'A fitting end for him, don't you think?'

'Wasn't it enough that Mr Malfoy's head was the first we saw when we embarked from Ayr?'

Severus snorted briefly in ironic humour. 'You may take comfort in the fact that the Lestranges are dead and are not the chief suspects in this mystery.'

Hermione nodded grimly. She knew only too well the violence of the Lestrange brothers. They were brutal – excessively so – and when Voldemort was in power, the brothers' exploits were published in the newspapers as if they were heroes. They had attempted to flee when their master fell, but were apprehended by Severus and returned to wizarding London were they were tried and sentenced to death. Unlike Lucius Malfoy, the Lestrange brothers were more fortunate in that they managed to kill themselves before the show-execution. Their deaths, however, did nothing to prevent the new Potter Administration from treating them any differently from the other traitors – their corpses were still publicly disembowelled, beheaded and quartered. While Hermione could take comfort that the Lestranges' reign of terror was over, she wondered how long it would take before the current spell of bloody terror would lapse.

On touching the land (for land it must be called) at Azkaban proper, Severus and Hermione were greeted by the Chief Custodian and the prison's Administrator, a man known to both our Unspeakable Unspeakables as Neville Longbottom. Neville had grown to be a tall and muscular young man over the years and had steadily risen in the Aurory ranks since his graduation. It came as some surprise to his friends that he was by-passed in promotion for one of the higher end Aurory positions and appointed the Chief Custodian of Azkaban. Regarded in the Aurory as a job with no prospects for further promotion, the Chief Warden's job was more stressful than the Commissioner of the Aurors'. Now that the Dementors were gone, wizards had to take over the day-to-day administration of the place. These same wizards were also responsible for the interrogation, transportation and upkeep of the prisoners within its walls. Neville seemed to have taken to his responsibilities as Chief Warden very well. He was discreet and that was why the Unspeakable Unspeakables always spoke highly of him. He knew who they were and he never sought to reveal their identities to anyone. Hermione, who cordially shook his hand, thought that he never looked better. He had put on a little weight and seemed to take everything that came his way with a laugh.

When the Unspeakable Unspeakables announced their mission to him on their way up to his office in the central tower, he paused in the middle of the stairs and looked down on them. 'You mean to say Gran was killed by this monster!' he exclaimed in horrified accents. 'If one of those damnable Death Eater swines has returned, I hope you catch him and wring his neck.'

'Returned?' murmured Hermione as Neville showed them into his office. 'That presupposes that some have left.'

'It is my contention that our murderer never left us,' Severus answered coolly, glaring Neville as he used to in his Potions classes.

'These degenerate Death Eater scums! The Ministry should have known, eh!' Neville commented, nodding sagely to Hermione 'It explains everything.'

'Your sentiments on my former comrades are well-known, I assure you. If rumours are to be believed, you are quite an expert in torture here in Azkaban,' Severus growled, privately wondering why he bothered talking to this imbecile.

'Oh, you...' stammered Neville, nervously wiping the sweat from his brow. 'You wanted help. Didn't you? What can I do for you?'

'I want to view the Azkaban records from the period marked by the Dark Lord's fall from power to the present,' Severus demanded with a great deal of irritation in his voice.

'Of course. They are with the administrative people in the east wing. Please wait while I fetch them,' Neville said, hurrying to the door. 'Oh and 'Mione, help yourself to the biscuits and lemonade on my desk.'

'You still have it in you to scare the pants off Neville, Professor Snape,' chuckled Hermione, as she started nibbling on a ginger snap.

Severus rearranged his face into a faint look of feigned outrage. 'And why would I do that, Dr Granger? I have no desire to examine his genitals!'

'I never said you did,' laughed the Arithmancer. 'What are you looking for in the record books? We already know who have been incarcerated here.'

'How in the world did you get your D.Mag.A, Dr Granger? Although simplistic thinking is to be applauded in the most complex situation, it is useless when we are dealing with a criminal mind who is a match for you and I,' said Severus, curling his lips. 'The Azkaban Records will not only inform us who have been here and the dates of their imprisonment; they will also inform us who have been released and when they were set loose on the world. They will also tell us the procedures that were used to extract confessions, the participants in those procedures as well as those civic-minded public-spirited officers who are responsible for the holding and release of these unfortunate souls here.'

'Knowing Neville, you'll have the most thorough records ever to have come out of Azkaban,' Hermione said. On receiving a dark look of warning from her colleague, she made no further attempt at conversation. She had long been used to his moods. Indeed, at St John's College, he was called the dark spectre because his mood was often dark and morose. Yet, Hermione knew that for all his loyalty to Dumbledore and his aloof stance to the world, Severus Snape had a humanistic streak in him. This did not mean that he routinely displayed signs of sympathy – far from it. Rather, he had a sense of justice and honour. She observed that if one overstepped his threshold for what he considered to be permissible, honourable or just, he would not hesitate to lash out at the sorry individual. Harry would not consider him an ideal member of the British wizarding public, Hermione mused with an ironic glint in her eyes. No – she knew her sometime friend regarded loyalty to himself, the Minister of Magic, as loyalty to the British wizarding community. Severus, she noticed, did not bother with personality cults of strong charismatic leaders. His first loyalty was always to his sense of honour, his pursuit of knowledge and truth, and perhaps to the over-arching state of justice in the general public. He cared little for the masses, that was certain – Hermione had heard him call the ordinary people they came in contact with in the course of their investigations, 'the mobile vulgus'. She smirked at the realisation that he was partially right on that score, for people (in general at least) were a mass of vulgar entities. Despite his cynicism, she knew he possessed flashes of something else she could not quite put her finger on. His absentminded kindness towards her through their duration as colleagues in the present murder mystery under the auspices of the Secret Department of Unspeakable Unspeakables evinced that he was more than the icy image he chose to portray. She wondered whether their pleasant social intercourse would remain on this present level when they returned to Cambridge when the semester reopened. Her reverie on his character was not to last, for Neville returned with the record books.

Severus immediately pounced on the books and thoughtfully read while pacing back and forth, occasionally mumbling to himself. Neville, who was a silent spectator to all this, finally plucked up enough courage to twist his handkerchief nervously and utter something that he thought might be important to their investigation. 'Did you know that Antonin Dolohov was released some time ago? He happened to be Voldemort's man in Azkaban while he was in power. He was an interrogator and jailer here. I was one of his prisoners in those days.'

'Dolohov still prowling the British Isles? Now, that is news, Mr Longbottom!' sneered Severus, who despite looking disparagingly at Neville, picked up the Azkaban record book detailing the prison's activities during Voldemort years and looked up his former associate's details.

Disturbed by her friend's distress, Hermione clicked her tongue in annoyance at Severus's charming interaction skills and promptly sought to soothe Neville's trepidation. 'Would you mind telling us more about Dolohov during the Voldemort years?'

'His exploits within and without Azkaban were infamous! His torture techniques were reputedly so brutal that our people at Ayr could hear the prisoners' screams.'

'Is there someone here who could tell us more about him?' Hermione asked.

'I have an even better idea,' announced Neville proudly. 'I'll let you meet him!'

As soon as Severus had perused all the record books of his choosing, Neville led the two Unspeakable Unspeakables down four flights of winding stairs, many draughty passageways to a place he called the first level basement dungeons of the South Wing. The South Wing was, as the number of guards in place suggested, one of the main prisoner holding areas. The person he wanted them to meet (or so he informed them) was at the fourth level of the basement dungeons. The stairs to this area was guarded by a tall and muscular man in a hood whom Neville addressed as 'Glazier'. The air down in these levels of the South Wing was as foetid as it was dark and the steps were so slippery that Hermione might have stumbled and broken her head had not Severus silently linked arms with her. Once her balance was regained, she noted with some disquiet that the stone walls were crumbling in places. Her discomfort grew as she heard muffled screams and crying. She was shocked that the gentle Neville whom she had known at school would actually sanction such acts of cruelty for the sake of extracting a confession. Fortunately for her, Severus espied the fear and trepidation dancing in her eyes and whispered an instruction to her to focus her energies on the finding the murderer.

After descending the stairs for what seemed to be an indeterminable period of time, Neville asked the investigators to await the guard in the Guards' pantry. The cheerless place suited Severus and he made himself at home on the sparse furnishing, and gestured for his companion to do the same. Two screams from the bowels of the dungeons and a minute of rattling chains later, Neville returned with a guard he introduced as Davey Gudgeon, the longest serving guard and interrogator in Azkaban.

Davey Gudgeon appeared to be very well built for an old man and it was clear to both Hermione and Severus that he was as broad as he was strong. His bald, slightly pointed head, coupled with his heavy-set grey brows and beady eyes gave him a look of overall unpleasantness, and Hermione would swear that had she encountered him on the street, she would have pegged him for a ruffian. After affecting a nod to both the investigators as if they were members of the same station in life, Gudgeon said in a rasping voice, 'The guv' 'ere said ye wanted to know about Dolohov. I remember that one. He was one of 'em dark wizards. Voldy came and placed him in charge of Azkaban when he made himself Minister. He was bloody good at interrogations this Dolohov – could give the Lestrange brothers a run for their galleons, I would say.'

'I'm sure that's all very interesting,' drawled Severus lazily. 'Now, if you would tell us how he conducted his interrogations?'

'Aren't ye one of their group? How come you don't know their methods?' asked Gudgeon suspiciously.

'In my day, it was fashionable to allow the Lestranges to do what they choose. The Lestranges were extremely persuasive. I merely wondered – on the level of intellectual curiosity – how Dolohov, who was more a doer than a thinker, compared to them,' Severus answered with a black scowl.

'Why didn't you say so, guv'? He was a nasty one, Dolohov. He treated the men and women equally in these walls. They were all chained up by their thumbs and toes, whipped, branded, cut into. I remember one time; he was silencing this pretty little witch by snapping off her fingers, one joint at a time. And he didn't stop when she tearfully confessed to be a separatist resistance leader even though she was a mere flower shop girl down at Diagon Alley.'

'He was a beast,' added Neville quietly, refusing to meet Hermione's searching eyes.

'Right about that too, guv',' agreed Gudgeon with a hearty snort into his sleeve. 'They say he took an unnatural pleasure in other's pain. He once told me he felt a connection with the people he had "handled". He would accompany them to the executions. Executions in Voldy's day were worse than the show-executions we have now. In those days, you were kept alive while they dismembered you one joint at a time. Dolohov would accompany them to the execution grounds for he was also the executor. All throughout their final journey, he would exhort them to buy into Voldy's principles in exchange for a quicker death – whatever that meant! The guv' here,' he paused and indicated Neville with his head. 'The guv' was one of his last prisoners afore e' was shipped off to tear down one of your shrines don't ye know! Two months after the guv' was shipped off, young Potter came into his own and took over as Minister.'

Hermione shuddered at his graphic description and paced around the pantry in a bid to shake the sense of foreboding hanging over her head.

Gudgeon, blissfully unaware of anything but his narration, continued excitedly, 'Then when Potter was made Minister and Voldy worst than dust, Dolohov was imprisoned here. There was enough evidence to charge him but not enough to send him to the gallows though because he was not one of those fellows who went around telling other people to kill Dumbledore's people or anything. He was none too smart in the head, if you know what I mean. He was imprisoned here for five years before he was let out a year short of his sentence. The internal court services thought him to be sane enough to be "re-introduced" to society, whatever that means! Between you and me, guv', I say this Dolohov fellow is still queer in his attic. No telling what he might do. Why when I think of the times I see him grinning and laughing like a banshee, he was always torturing somebody!'

'From what you've told me, Hermione, he sounds like your man,' said Neville.

Hermione looked to Severus, her arms tightly folded. 'This looks like the man we were looking for, Professor Snape.'

Severus leaned back in the dingy chair and traced his lips pensively. 'I would never have thought that Dolohov had it in him to be Death incarnate. He lacked ambition. All you heard here is that he enjoys pulling his victims apart joint by joint.'

'Whereas our man prefers to play surgeon with the bodies,' continued Hermione, following her colleague's train of thought.

'Who's to say,' added Neville, paling a little at Gudgeon's words. 'I read somewhere that killers and their methods evolve. It is likely that Dolohov went from hacking at joints to hacking up peoples' insides.'

At which comment, the two Unspeakable Unspeakables exchanged meaningful looks of resignation and unsettled anxiety.

* * *

A further two days of investigation revealed nothing on the location of Dolohov or any other suspects, much to the two academics' chagrin. In their discussions, they both owned that Dolohov was too convenient a suspect. It was as if he was deliberately thrust under their noses. However, as they were unable to come up with a more plausible suspect, they had little choice but to give his name to Dumbledore when he recalled them to his office.

'A runaway Death Eater? How novel!' exclaimed Dumbledore, spinning around his chair and sagely stroking his beard. 'It certainly takes the biscuit! Antonin Dolohov, very well done!'

Hermione, who was looking out on the London skyline from his office sighed in dissatisfaction. 'We are not one hundred percent sure.'

'Nothing is one hundred percent certain, my dear,' chuckled the old man as he noisily chewed a sweet. 'Harry will be pleased when I tell him the news.'

'Ha!' spat Severus in a mocking accent. 'He's sure of himself. Is he so sure that he will apprehend Dolohov? Is he so sure that Dolohov is the man? If Dr Granger and I cannot be sure on it, how can he rest on the reports you submit to his notice?'

Dumbledore waved his hand over his quills and they started scribbling warrants and instructions on their own accord. 'Harry has stated he will double the reward money to 1000 galleons. Money is a definite incentive, my boy.'

'That's assuming that he is being sheltered by someone,' commented Hermione, fingering a glass bauble on the Christmas tree. 'What if he's managing on his own?'

'"For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows", Dumbledore,' interposed Severus before the old man could say anything. 'There will be people out there who are so avaricious that they will claim their kneazle is Dolohov for the reward money. When will you policymakers learn that money is not a valid incentive for instilling the value of public-spiritedness?'

'I'll send word to young Weasley to paste up Dolohov's old "wanted" posters,' said Dumbledore matter-of-factly. 'Sherbet lemon, Severus? Hermione? No?'

Hermione signalled her displeasure with a harrumph. 'How will it help those uncouth philistines on the streets? Don't tell me you're actually thinking of keeping your word and paying the reward money?'

Severus curled his lips at the dotty old man stroking his pet phoenix's head and stalked over to Hermione's station by the window. 'Dr Granger, I believe it is obvious from that annoying twinkle in his eyes that he has no desire to pay. The Potter Administration can ill afford it – it is in debt and there are all the other rebuilding efforts requiring funding. 1000 galleons is a prize that is too good to be true.'

'I recall your lesson on this, Professor Snape and verily, I believe you – that which is too good to be true most likely isn't true.'

'Quite right, my dear,' acknowledged Dumbledore, surprising his two best Unspeakable Unspeakables with his honesty. 'Sooner or later, one of young Ronald Weasley's pups or the other wizards in our department will catch hold of this fellow. A great show-trial and great show-execution later, wizarding London would be safer and more revenue would pour in, allowing for further improvements in our world.'

'What a coup de grace!' ejaculated Hermione, not bothering to hide the disgust in her eyes.

'Ah, such is life outside the ivory tower, my dear,' chuckled Dumbledore placidly. He shuffled his papers briefly and signed two documents. 'In either case, it will be a show of this Administration's efficacy, strength and efficiency.'

'Or if could make a mockery of the system and render Dolohov a martyr for the remaining Death Eaters out there,' Severus ventured to state.

'Severus, Severus, there will always be martyrs and there will always be people to disabuse the martyrs' foolish followers. Thank you both for your efforts; you have done well. But you do understand that I cannot allow either of you to leave the service of the Secret Department of Unspeakable Unspeakables until the accused is caught and sentenced?'

'And Severus,' he added, just as the younger wizard curled his lips into an ugly smirk. 'You do realise what Harry will do to you if you leave my service without my blessing? He'll never forget what you did to me in his sixth year at Hogwarts.'

'It was under your orders!' barked Severus viciously.

'Harry does not seem to believe that. He is of the mind that you intended to kill me then to aid the rise of Riddle. Tread carefully over this case and I'll keep Harry in check. Who knows, he may be persuaded to look on you in a new light. Disregard my counsel and request and you might very well end up like your friend, Lucius. You know Harry's temper...'

His companions' reactions were as Dumbledore had anticipated: one cast him dark looks of abhorrence, while the other nodded cynically at him. Then, satisfied that he would say no more that day, they left him alone to mull over their reports. 'How quickly the young become jaded,' Dumbledore murmured to the phoenix perched next to his desk. 'Do not worry, Fawkes,' he muttered, as he watched the sunset from his office window. 'I will keep my word and set them both free from their obligations to me. I only need them to apprehend the real killer.'

Footnotes:

The title of this tale is a pun. 'Presents' is a double entendre. It means (1) gifts and (2) shows. If you take its latter meaning and dissect it, you will realise that I could mean it as a masque or pageant (in the 17th century understanding of the term). Think about it. I'll leave you to figure out how it fits with the story. 'Presents' could also mean 'current' – which would be another pun for Christmas now under the Potter Administration and Christmas then, under the Voldemort administration.

D.Mag.A stands for Doctor of Magical Arts. It's a made-up wizarding PhD.

Davey Gudgeon was mentioned in Book 3 as a Hogwarts student in the 1970s who tried to get past the Whooping Willow. In so doing, he nearly lost an eye. The Harry Potter Lexicon states that 'Gudgeon' comes from the Latin 'gobion', a variant of 'gobius'. It is from the Middle English 'gudyon' from Old French 'goujon' and refers to something to be used as bait, or a gullible person. This nomenclature is significant to the Davey Gudgeon we see in the final chapter of this tale.

'For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows', is a quote from 1 Timothy 6:10. It is generally misquoted as 'Money is the root of all evil'.

'Mobile vulgus' is Latin for 'mob of people'.