Chapter 7

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 7

'Severus... Professor Snape...' a voice softly called out to Severus. He slowly opened his eyes, allowing them to gradually adjust to the darkness near his face. He had been drifting in a deep dreamless slumber and as such, was a little disoriented on waking. The sounds of fabric being relentlessly dragged across the window made him sit up. The dazzling winter light hurt his eyes and for a moment, he wondered whether he was having a dream. He squinted a little in the direction of the voice and found Hermione leaning over him and fussing over his blanket. 'What time is it, Dr Granger?' he mumbled, scratching his neck.

'Noon,' she answered, her eyes dancing with a mix of excitement and fear.

'I thought I set the alarm clock for ten,' he mumbled, climbing out of bed, allowing her to make his bed.

'You must have been tired. You haven't slept in days. Besides, we only arrived back from Azkaban at four this morning. It's high time you woke up,' she said with some urgency in her voice.

Stretching his limbs in his grey nightshirt, he suddenly narrowed his eyes, grabbed his wand by the bed-stand, pointed it at Hermione and hissed, 'What are you doing here? How did you get into my house?'

Hermione sighed and rolled her eyes. 'You told me to stay and make tea while you had a nap. I caught forty winks on the sofa. Put that wand down, Professor Snape, and get dressed,' she chided, as she crossly folded her arms. 'We must go as soon as possible.'

'What happened?'

'I've just received word that there has been another murder.'

'Morosia?' He asked with a frown.

'No, Discedes, across the river.'

* * *

The day was unusually cold and as such, the streets were relatively empty. Not so at the place of the murder – a large crowd of onlookers had gathered there, pushing and shoving each other along the dirt encrusted paths and its adjoining filth strewn alley, hoping to get a better view of the mangled body. The spectators there were mainly wholesalers, pack-workers, fishmongers, and porters. So thick a thicket did they form that it was not easy for the investigators to find their way to the right wharf. However, Hermione flashed her British Wizarding Criminal Prosecution Ministry warrant and the crowd parted silently for the investigators. All the onlookers were eyeing them suspiciously, until Severus growled for them to go away.

While Severus bent over the body, Hermione approached the Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Ronald Weasley, who was taking notes. 'About time you arrived,' he said by way of greeting. 'The oyster girl reported it to the Discedes Aurors division. I told my men not to touch anything. I expect you want the scene all to yourself now.' He swallowed hard. 'It's a terrible sight, almost as bloody as the last.'

Ron pointed to the water's edge and the investigators looked down. There appeared to be some puce rags floating in the shallow waters and mud, but closer examination revealed that a metre away from the landing stage was something vaguely resembling a head, a torso and an arm. The face, they could see, was slashed and beaten so much so that there was no inch of skin left without a mark. The beating, hypothesised Severus, was not the cause of death. It was plain even to the casual observer that the woman had been cut open, butterflied like a de-veined prawn, and her body severed open from her throat to her genitals. The bloody organs bulged and quivered slightly through the long inexpert slit. As the investigators moved closer to the edge of the wharf to better examine the body, two ravens perched themselves by the slit, possessively pecking and pulling at the red innards, angrily glaring at anyone foolish enough to deprive them of a free meal.

'Witnesses to the crime?' Severus asked brusquely, turning to Ron.

'None. The oyster girl found the body as she was plying her wares, something about a pre-Christmas offer on clams 'alive-alive-oh'. You will notice that the mud is clean. There are no foot prints or signs of magic usage,' Ron mechanically pointed out to the Unspeakable Unspeakables.

Hermione cocked her head to the side and felt her mouth go dry at the sight of the body. She had seen dead bodies before when she fought against Voldemort in the war. She looked back at her brief career as an Unspeakable Unspeakable, and tried to recall the bodies she had seen – none of them approached the ferocity of these murders. Ron, who caught her expression of numb shock, placed an arm over shoulder and tried to soothe her.

'Cease molesting my colleague, if you please, Weasley!' barked Severus, violently flicking aside a lock of his hair that fell forward.

'Oh well,' murmured Ron, ignoring his injunction. 'Shall I tell my men to remove the body?'

'Not yet,' Severus answered, flinging off the young man's arm from Hermione's shoulders. 'I have to consult my esteemed colleague.' Once Ron had moved away from her and addressed a junior Auror, Severus hollered at him, 'Whatever you do, make sure no one touches the body until I say you may. This poor female is already dead and wouldn't object if we stared further at her wounds.'

'So, Dr Granger,' he continued, handing his gloves to Hermione. 'Put on my gloves, you're shivering.'

'This undisturbed scene of crime is disturbing me,' she offered by way of apology.

Severus turned away from her, tracing his lower lip in thought. 'The woman was killed yesterday no doubt. Your thoughts, Dr Granger?'

'It's apparent that her body was dumped somewhere up the river,' Hermione said, earning her an enquiring look from Severus who raised a brow, inviting her to continue. She swallowed hard with one hand at her throat and the other gesturing to the trail of mud around the woman. 'See the tidal mud-flat she's lying on? The ebb-tide left her there.'

A smirk of faint admiration played at the corners of his lips. He wondered whether he should move to disabuse her of her erroneous theory. 'This means that our dear friend, Antonin Dolohov, could not have done it. By the way, Dr Granger, she was killed this morning in the early hours, before dawn.'

'Your reason for this, Professor Snape?'

'The blood, my dear Dr Granger. Look at her, she's covered in her own blood, even the mud has traces of it. If she had been here since last night, the river would have washed her quite clean. Then there is the small matter of the dates.'

'Yesterday was a saint day. Every day is one!' she responded, not bothering to brush his hand off her elbow.

'Not every saint day is a holy day in the wizarding tradition, Dr Granger. The same holds true in the Muggle tradition, does it not? Yesterday was a saint day but not a holy day. Today, however, is both,' he explained without any patience. Severus narrowed his eyes at her curious liquid ones and conjured another cloak over her when he saw that she was still shivering. 'The cold has killed your brain cells perhaps?' he mocked.

'I so hate to disappoint you – only half of them are dead,' she rejoined, wrapping the cloaks around herself. 'This still does not prove that there is a method.'

'Have you forgotten that which we saw at the Wizarding Shrine to the Sainted Few?'

Hermione gasped, realisation dawning in her mind. 'Is that the pattern? The statues there?' she asked in quick succession, her hand flying to her mouth in shock.

'Your talent for stating the obvious astounds me, Dr Granger, I never thought you had it in you. Today is December the 13th, the feast day of St Lucy.'

Ron, who had been listening to his conversation, was determined to have his say as well. 'If this woman was indeed killed this morning as you say, Snape, then she must have been dumped here at low tide when the water was out. However that couldn't have been the case. There are no footprints, no marks in the mud, no drag marks – nothing! Our killer does not use magic! He must have done everything manually!'

'No, ye of little grey matter!' hissed Severus, stalking towards Ron and grabbing him by the collars of his robes. 'He does not use magic because magic kills too cleanly. It's quick and painless. An Avada Kedavra does not give you mutilations, decapitations and disembowelments! Our man is a wizard – I'm sure of it. He deliberately seeks to kill without magic. A very clever fellow to think so. He takes to much care to ape the Muggle-styled murders in the Victorian era. It has to be a wizard with an insight into Muggle history; one would think it would be a supreme irony to do something like this, leaving most of the superstitious wizarding populace horrified.'

'Oh yeah?' challenged Ron, searching his pockets for his wand. 'How do you know that? You can't even catch the fellow! I still say that the body was washed here.'

Hermione gently pulled Severus away from her friend's throat and patted his arm. Somewhat pacified by his companion's gestures, Severus narrowed his eyes dangerously and hissed, 'What if I told you that the body was thrown down from this very wharf?'

'Thrown? How could she have been thrown?' Ron stared at him like a gaping fish in his initial surprise. That shock however soon turned to disbelief as he shook his head. 'She must have been three-and-a-half metres away.'

'Exactly.'

'I still don't follow,' complained the redheaded Auror, blushing for his inability to grasp the meaning behind Severus's words.

Hermione laughed lightly to diffuse the tension. 'You know, in our department, there is a precept, that Professor Snape invented – when one has eliminated all the impossible facts and probabilities, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'

'I find that hard to believe,' opined Ron stoutly, scratching his shock of flaming hair.

'Well, Ron,' laughed Hermione uneasily, 'stranger things have happened.' Shooing Ron away to one of the junior Aurors who wanted him, Hermione turned to Severus. 'Our suspicions were right. It wasn't Dolohov, the timing is off – he's in Azkaban.'

'It's not just the timing,' drawled Severus silkily, as his fingers traced his lips. 'It's the fact that she was thrown three and a half metres. Our friend, Dolohov is slightly built and when we left him, he was not in condition to move on his own. Even if Azkaban provided Skele-grow for its inmates, which it does not, the bone regeneration time does not coincide with the murder. Furthermore, he had been on the run for too long. You saw him yesterday. He was emaciated. He couldn't even strangle your little neck even if he wanted to.'

Ron, who dismissed his junior Auror, returned to participate in their conversation. He was still unconvinced of the investigators' theory. 'If whoever did this did throw her from the Wharf, he must be very, very strong! He must have been a giant or something. A Troll maybe?'

'Trolls have better brain functions than you, Weasley,' snapped Severus testily. 'Whoever did this is the killer.'

At this pronouncement, alarm surfaced, bubbled and radiated out in a smooth ripple back through the rapidly restless crowd of spectators. People started to push and shove, to argue, to accuse, to hurry away seeking refuge from the killer or to spread the word that the murderer was still running loose. All around the wharf, the cry went up that the Morosia-side murderer had demonic powers and could have been a giant or an ogre. Ron and his Aurors struggled desperately to keep order. However, the population of the Discedes, Alkane and Morosia areas of wizarding London were not known for keeping peace with each other, let alone with officers of the law. In these areas where cheating, poverty, murders and vice were integral parts of their people's lives, the Aurors could not hope to really keep the mob at bay. Punches were soon thrown and spells to stun and immobilise were soon fired. This led to much shouting and screaming, which in turn led to arrests being made. Hermione, much shaken by the sight of the body, clung to Severus's arm, suddenly frightened that the people would go wild and tear them apart. Only Severus remained calm in the chaos and he silently placed a comforting hand over the shivering young lady's. He studied the panic-stricken scene with steely indifference. 'The same thing must have happened in Northumberland before they caught Guillaume Wydevyll.'

'Ignorant buffoons!' Hermione hissed, the colour returning to her cheeks at the feel of his cold hand on her gloved ones. 'It clearly is the work of a man – a wizard.'

'You and I are well-aware of that, Dr Granger. But the ignorant, as you know, do not want to see what is outside the cave. They would rather stay in darkness and ignorance. When will they learn that man and his very nature is more frightening than any monster or devil from mythology. Only man can smile and smile and deceive everyone. His use of fraud, deception and evil gives him the illusion of power and endows him with mythological traits. The whole history of man is associated with death and violence because you can't stop human beings from killing one another,' he mused to his companion whose hand he was unconsciously patting.

'This butchery has to end, Professor Snape. This madness cannot continue, and we are no closer to unveiling the killer than we were when we were first assigned to this mission,' Hermione lamented.

'Oh no,' he answered with a thin smirk. 'We already know who he is.'

'We do?' she queried, tightening her grip on his arm. 'For Merlin's sake, tell me who?'

'Let me answer your question with a question. Where have we seen similar displays of decapitation and disembowelment? I'll give you a hint – it's sanctioned by our very dear own Minister of Magic,' he said with an irrepressible sneer.

'At the show-executions,' she said. 'But the connection is tenuous at best, unless you mean a public servant.' She paused and gasped in sudden realisation. Then before she could register the shock to her system when she realised that the person whom Severus hinted was the murderer was known to her, she was overtaken by a feeling of tremulous nausea. Doubling over and spattering her bilious vomit on the ground, she came to appreciate how it was all connected. The stench of the river, the sight of the latest body and the knowledge that she was well acquainted with the killer – it was too shocking to be true. Yet it must be, for all the evidence, as she now realised with horror and regret, pointed to that individual.

'Is it that shocking to you?' he asked in a gentle tone, handing her a handkerchief. 'You really should eat something before vomiting so profusely. Having bile burn through gut is not a pleasant sensation.'

'I see it now,' she murmured weakly and allowed her colleague to support her by her shoulders. 'The victims were all either stabbed in the throat or had their windpipes crushed, disembowelled and decapitated. He did it all while they were still alive. He wanted them to feel their pain; he wanted them to watch what he was doing to them and their bodies; he wanted them to fear him! But surely, he must realise he is not alone. He has an active occupation and is a useful member of our society!'

'Precisely. But when man is dissatisfied with himself, he returns to the state of war of all against all,' he whispered softly to her. 'Come,' he continued in bracing accents, his resolve riding high, 'we must confirm our theory.'

'How will do that?'

'If you would but listen to me, I will tell you. I am confident that by this afternoon or early evening at the very latest, we will be in a position to unmask the killer.'

Hermione gazed at him with a faint smile of approval and squeezed his arm. 'You're not going to do something stupid and get yourself killed, are you?'

After patting her hand in a bid to assure her that he would not (for he had an unfortunate affection for the art of breathing), he curled his lips into a self-satisfied smirk and thoughtfully bade her to follow his instructions to the letter. 'I need you to go on a few errands for me, if you please. You must do all these tasks personally and see to it that they are done. You are on no account to delegate these responsibilities to others. You must personally call on Longbottom at Azkaban. I'm sure the prison can spare him for a few hours. He has his deputy waiting in the wings to run the place. Have Longbottom call out his chief jailer, Gudgeon, and bring them to the Wizarding Shrine to the Sainted Few at the Chardobis district of Mortuary. They must arrive at four o'clock this afternoon. Tell them that we are about to unmask the real Morosia-side murderer and are in need of his urgent assistance. Also, arrange for Antonin Dolohov to be released and his charges cleared. See to it that this is the first thing that you do. The moment his release is secured, Antonin is removed to the infirmary at Ayr where the air is more salubrious for the recuperation of broken bodies.'

'What about you, Professor?' she asked in a small uncertain voice, as Severus Apparated them both back to the Leaky Cauldron.

'I have my own set of things to do,' he said curtly. 'Do as I say, Hermione. It will be for the best.'

After calling for a small luncheon to be served to his colleague, he promptly left, leaving Hermione to wonder how he would succeed in his task.

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 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.

December 13th is the feast day of St Lucy, who is the patron saint of blindness. Lucy's name means "light", with the same root as "lucid" which means "clear, radiant, understandable." Unfortunately for us, Lucy's history does not match her name. Shrouded in the darkness of time, all we really know for certain is that this brave woman who lived in Syracuse lost her life during the persecution of Christians in the early fourth century. Her veneration spread to Rome so that by the sixth century the whole Church recognized her courage in defence of the faith.

Because people wanted to shed light on Lucy's bravery, legends grew up. The one that is passed down to us tells the story of a young Christian woman who had vowed her life to the service of Christ. Her mother tried to arrange a marriage for her with a pagan. Lucy apparently knew that her mother would not be convinced by a young girl's vow so she devised a plan to convince her mother that Christ was a much more powerful partner for life. Through prayers at the tomb of Saint Agatha, her mother's long illness was cured miraculously. The grateful mother was now ready to listen to Lucy's desire to give her money to the poor and commit her life to God.

Unfortunately, legend has it, the rejected bridegroom did not see the same light and he betrayed Lucy to the governor as a Christian. This governor tried to send her into prostitution but the guards who came to take her way found her stiff and heavy as a mountain. Finally, she was killed.

As much as the facts of Lucy's specific case are unknown, we know that many Christians suffered incredible torture and a painful death for their faith during Diocletian's reign. Lucy may not have been burned or had a sword thrust through her throat but many Christians did and we can be sure her faith withstood tests we can barely imagine.

Lucy's name is probably also connected to statues of Lucy holding a dish with two eyes on it. This refers to another legend in which Lucy's eyes were put out by Diocletian as part of his torture. The legend concludes with God restoring Lucy's eyes.

The line "When one has eliminated all the impossible facts and probabilities, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" is taken from Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four. It's a nice touch for Hermione and Severus to be acting as Holmes would given their reading of Muggle literature. Hermione's being ironic in her use of the line. Severus did not invent it; he merely appropriated it. Actually, he has a poster with those words in bold behind his desk in his Alchemy office at St John's College, Cambridge.

The line 'But the ignorant, as you know – do not want to see what is outside the cave...' is a reference to Plato's Republic where the ignorant remain in the cave unwilling to venture out into the light. Thus, all they see are shadows and they take these shadows as truths. An enlightened person will venture out of the cave, see what's out there, go back in the cave and teach his/her compatriots that the shadows aren't real and that there are wondrous things outside the cave.

Severus's line of 'But when man is dissatisfied with himself, he returns to the state of war of all against all' is a reference to Thomas Hobbes's state of nature in his Leviathan. In the Leviathan, the state of nature is not a state of plenty. It is a terrible state of war of all against all. Until we learn to give up this warlike state and enter the civil state, we will all be killing each other.