Harry felt sickened and angry: at this moment excited eleven-year-olds would be poring over stacks of newly purchased spellbooks, unaware that they would never see Hogwarts, perhaps never see their families again, either.

  ‘It’s … it’s …’ he muttered, struggling to find words that did justice to the horror of his thoughts, but Lupin said quietly, ‘I know.’

  Lupin hesitated.

  ‘I’ll understand if you can’t confirm this, Harry, but the Order is under the impression that Dumbledore left you a mission.’

  ‘He did,’ Harry replied, ‘and Ron and Hermione are in on it and they’re coming with me.’

  ‘Can you confide in me what the mission is?’

  Harry looked into the prematurely lined face, framed in thick but greying hair, and wished that he could return a different answer.

  ‘I can’t, Remus, I’m sorry. If Dumbledore didn’t tell you, I don’t think I can.’

  ‘I thought you’d say that,’ said Lupin, looking disappointed. ‘But I might still be of some use to you. You know what I am and what I can do. I could come with you to provide protection. There would be no need to tell me exactly what you were up to.’

  Harry hesitated. It was a very tempting offer, though how they would be able to keep their mission secret from Lupin if he were with them all the time he could not imagine.

  Hermione, however, looked puzzled.

  ‘But what about Tonks?’ she asked.

  ‘What about her?’ said Lupin.

  ‘Well,’ said Hermione, frowning, ‘you’re married! How does she feel about you going away with us?’

  ‘Tonks will be perfectly safe,’ said Lupin. ‘She’ll be at her parents’ house.’

  There was something strange in Lupin’s tone; it was almost cold. There was also something odd in the idea of Tonks remaining hidden at her parents’ house; she was, after all, a member of the Order and, as far as Harry knew, was likely to want to be in the thick of the action.

  ‘Remus,’ said Hermione tentatively, ‘is everything all right … you know … between you and –’

  ‘Everything is fine, thank you,’ said Lupin pointedly.

  Hermione turned pink. There was another pause, an awkward and embarrassed one, and then Lupin said, with an air of forcing himself to admit something unpleasant, ‘Tonks is going to have a baby.’

  ‘Oh, how wonderful!’ squealed Hermione.

  ‘Excellent!’ said Ron enthusiastically.

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Harry.

  Lupin gave an artificial smile that was more like a grimace, then said, ‘So … do you accept my offer? Will three become four? I cannot believe that Dumbledore would have disapproved, he appointed me your Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, after all. And I must tell you that I believe that we are facing magic many of us have never encountered or imagined.’

  Ron and Hermione both looked at Harry.

  ‘Just – just to be clear,’ he said. ‘You want to leave Tonks at her parents’ house and come away with us?’

  ‘She’ll be perfectly safe there, they’ll look after her,’ said Lupin. He spoke with a finality bordering on indifference. ‘Harry, I’m sure James would have wanted me to stick with you.’

  ‘Well,’ said Harry slowly, ‘I’m not. I’m pretty sure my father would have wanted to know why you aren’t sticking with your own kid, actually.’

  Lupin’s face drained of colour. The temperature in the kitchen might have dropped ten degrees. Ron stared around the room as though he had been bidden to memorise it, while Hermione’s eyes swivelled backwards and forwards from Harry to Lupin.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said Lupin at last.

  ‘Explain, then,’ said Harry.

  Lupin swallowed.

  ‘I – I made a grave mistake in marrying Tonks. I did it against my better judgement and I have regretted it very much ever since.’

  ‘I see,’ said Harry, ‘so you’re just going to dump her and the kid and run off with us?’

  Lupin sprang to his feet: his chair toppled over backwards, and he glared at them so fiercely that Harry saw, for the first time ever, the shadow of the wolf upon his human face.

  ‘Don’t you understand what I’ve done to my wife and my unborn child? I should never have married her, I’ve made her an outcast!’

  Lupin kicked aside the chair he had overturned.

  ‘You have only ever seen me amongst the Order, or under Dumbledore’s protection at Hogwarts! You don’t know how most of the wizarding world sees creatures like me! When they know of my affliction, they can barely talk to me! Don’t you see what I’ve done? Even her own family is disgusted by our marriage, what parents want their only daughter to marry a werewolf? And the child – the child –’

  Lupin actually seized handfuls of his own hair; he looked quite deranged.

  ‘My kind don’t usually breed! It will be like me, I am convinced of it – how can I forgive myself, when I knowingly risked passing on my own condition to an innocent child? And if, by some miracle, it is not like me, then it will be better off, a hundred times so, without a father of whom it must always be ashamed!’

  ‘Remus!’ whispered Hermione, tears in her eyes. ‘Don’t say that – how could any child be ashamed of you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, Hermione,’ said Harry. ‘I’d be pretty ashamed of him.’

  Harry did not know where his rage was coming from, but it had propelled him to his feet too. Lupin looked as though Harry had hit him.

  ‘If the new regime thinks Muggle-borns are bad,’ Harry said, ‘what will they do to a half-werewolf whose father’s in the Order? My father died trying to protect my mother and me, and you reckon he’d tell you to abandon your kid to go on an adventure with us?’

  ‘How – how dare you?’ said Lupin. ‘This is not about a desire for – for danger or personal glory – how dare you suggest such a –’

  ‘I think you’re feeling a bit of a daredevil,’ Harry said. ‘You fancy stepping into Sirius’s shoes –’

  ‘Harry, no!’ Hermione begged him, but he continued to glare into Lupin’s livid face.

  ‘I’d never have believed this,’ Harry said. ‘The man who taught me to fight Dementors – a coward.’

  Lupin drew his wand so fast that Harry had barely reached for his own; there was a loud bang and he felt himself flying backwards as if punched; as he slammed into the kitchen wall and slid to the floor, he glimpsed the tail of Lupin’s cloak disappearing round the door.

  ‘Remus, Remus, come back!’ Hermione cried, but Lupin did not respond. A moment later they heard the front door slam.

  ‘Harry!’ wailed Hermione. ‘How could you?’

  ‘It was easy,’ said Harry. He stood up; he could feel a lump swelling where his head had hit the wall. He was still so full of anger he was shaking.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that!’ he snapped at Hermione.

  ‘Don’t you start on her!’ snarled Ron.

  ‘No – no – we mustn’t fight!’ said Hermione, launching herself between them.

  ‘You shouldn’t have said that stuff to Lupin,’ Ron told Harry.

  ‘He had it coming to him,’ said Harry. Broken images were racing each other through his mind: Sirius falling through the Veil; Dumbledore suspended, broken, in mid-air; a flash of green light and his mother’s voice, begging for mercy …

  ‘Parents,’ said Harry, ‘shouldn’t leave their kids unless – unless they’ve got to.’

  ‘Harry –’ said Hermione, stretching out a consoling hand, but he shrugged it off and walked away, his eyes on the fire Hermione had conjured. He had once spoken to Lupin out of that fireplace, seeking reassurance about James, and Lupin had consoled him. Now Lupin’s tortured, white face seemed to swim in the air before him. He felt a sickening surge of remorse. Neither Ron nor Hermione spoke, but Harry felt sure that they were looking at each other behind his back, communicating silently.

  He turned round and caught them turning hurriedly away from each other.

  ‘I know I shouldn’t have called him a coward.’

  ‘No, you shouldn’t,’ said Ron at once.

  ‘But he’s acting like one.’

  ‘All the same …’ said Hermione.

  ‘I know,’ said Harry. ‘But if it makes him go back to Tonks, it’ll be worth it, won’t it?’

  He could not keep the plea out of his voice. Hermione looked sympathetic, Ron uncertain. Harry looked down at his feet, thinking of his father. Would James have backed Harry in what he had said to Lupin, or would he have been angry at how his son had treated his old friend?

  The silent kitchen seemed to hum with the shock of the recent scene and with Ron and Hermione’s unspoken reproaches. The Daily Prophet Lupin had brought was still lying on the table, Harry’s own face staring up at the ceiling from the front page. He walked over to it and sat down, opened the paper at random and pretended to read. He could not take in the words, his mind was still too full of the encounter with Lupin. He was sure that Ron and Hermione had resumed their silent communications on the other side of the Prophet. He turned a page loudly, and Dumbledore’s name leapt out at him. It was a moment or two before he took in the meaning of the photograph, which showed a family group. Beneath the photograph were the words: The Dumbledore family: left to right, Albus, Percival, holding newborn Ariana, Kendra and Aberforth.

  His attention caught, Harry examined the picture more carefully. Dumbledore’s father, Percival, was a good-looking man with eyes that seemed to twinkle even in this faded old photograph. The baby, Ariana, was little longer than a loaf of bread and no more distinctive-looking. The mother, Kendra, had jet black hair pulled into a high bun. Her face had a carved quality about it. Despite the high-necked silk gown she wore, Harry thought of Native Americans as he studied her dark eyes, high cheekbones and straight nose. Albus and Aberforth wore matching lacy collared jackets and had identical, shoulder-length hairstyles. Albus looked several years older, but otherwise the two boys looked very alike, for this was before Albus’s nose had been broken and before he started wearing glasses.

  The family looked quite happy and normal, smiling serenely up out of the newspaper. Baby Ariana’s arm waved vaguely out of her shawl. Harry looked above the picture and saw the headline:

  EXCLUSIVE EXTRACT FROM THE UPCOMING BIOGRAPHY OF ALBUS DUMBLEDORE by Rita Skeeter

  Thinking that it could hardly make him feel any worse than he already did, Harry began to read:

  Proud and haughty, Kendra Dumbledore could not bear to remain in Mould-on-the-Wold after her husband Percival’s well-publicised arrest and imprisonment in Azkaban. She therefore decided to uproot the family and relocate to Godric’s Hollow, the village that was later to gain fame as the scene of Harry Potter’s strange escape from You-Know-Who.

  Like Mould-on-the-Wold, Godric’s Hollow was home to a number of wizarding families, but as Kendra knew none of them, she would be spared the curiosity about her husband’s crime she had faced in her former village. By repeatedly rebuffing the friendly advances of her new wizarding neighbours, she soon ensured that her family was left well alone.

  ‘Slammed the door in my face when I went round to welcome her with a batch of homemade cauldron cakes,’ says Bathilda Bagshot. ‘The first year they were there I only ever saw the two boys. Wouldn’t have known there was a daughter if I hadn’t been picking Plangentines by moonlight the winter after they moved in, and saw Kendra leading Ariana out into the back garden. Walked her round the lawn once, keeping a firm grip on her, then took her back inside. Didn’t know what to make of it.’

  It seems that Kendra thought the move to Godric’s Hollow was the perfect opportunity to hide Ariana once and for all, something she had probably been planning for years. The timing was significant. Ariana was barely seven years old when she vanished from sight, and seven is the age by which most experts agree that magic will have revealed itself, if present. Nobody now alive remembers Ariana ever demonstrating even the slightest sign of magical ability. It seems clear, therefore, that Kendra made a decision to hide her daughter’s existence rather than suffer the shame of admitting that she had produced a Squib. Moving away from the friends and neighbours who knew Ariana would, of course, make imprisoning her all the easier. The tiny number of people who henceforth knew of Ariana’s existence could be counted upon to keep the secret, including her two brothers, who deflected awkward questions with the answer their mother had taught them: ‘My sister is too frail for school.’

  Next week: Albus Dumbledore at Hogwarts – the prizes and the pretence.

  Harry had been wrong: what he had read had indeed made him feel worse. He looked back at the photograph of the apparently happy family. Was it true? How could he find out? He wanted to go to Godric’s Hollow, even if Bathilda was in no fit state to talk to him; he wanted to visit the place where he and Dumbledore had both lost loved ones. He was in the process of lowering the newspaper, to ask Ron and Hermione’s opinions, when a deafening crack echoed around the kitchen.

  For the first time in three days, Harry had forgotten all about Kreacher. His immediate thought was that Lupin had burst back into the room and for a split second, he did not take in the mass of struggling limbs that had appeared out of thin air right beside his chair. He hurried to his feet as Kreacher disentangled himself and, bowing low to Harry, croaked, ‘Kreacher has returned with the thief Mundungus Fletcher, Master.’

  Mundungus scrambled up and pulled out his wand; Hermione, however, was too quick for him.

  ‘Expelliarmus!’

  Mundungus’s wand soared into the air and Hermione caught it. Wild-eyed, Mundungus dived for the stairs: Ron rugby-tackled him and Mundungus hit the stone floor with a muffled crunch.

  ‘What?’ he bellowed, writhing in his attempts to free himself from Ron’s grip. ‘Wha’ve I done? Setting a bleedin’ ’ouse-elf on me, what are you playing at, wha’ve I done, lemme go, lemme go, or –’

  ‘You’re not in much of a position to make threats,’ said Harry. He threw aside the newspaper, crossed the kitchen in a few strides and dropped to his knees beside Mundungus, who stopped struggling and looked terrified. Ron got up, panting, and watched as Harry pointed his wand deliberately at Mundungus’s nose. Mundungus stank of stale sweat and tobacco smoke: his hair was matted and his robes stained.

  ‘Kreacher apologises for the delay in bringing the thief, Master,’ croaked the elf. ‘Fletcher knows how to avoid capture, has many hidey-holes and accomplices. Nevertheless, Kreacher cornered the thief in the end.’

  ‘You’ve done really well, Kreacher,’ said Harry, and the elf bowed low.

  ‘Right, we’ve got a few questions for you,’ Harry told Mundungus, who shouted at once: ‘I panicked, OK? I never wanted to come along, no offence, mate, but I never volunteered to die for you, an’ that was bleedin’ You-Know-Who come flying at me, anyone woulda got outta there, I said all along I didn’t wanna do it –’

  ‘For your information, none of the rest of us Disapparated,’ said Hermione.

  ‘Well, you’re a bunch of bleedin’ ’eroes, then, aren’t you, but I never pretended I was up for killing meself –’

  ‘We’re not interested in why you ran out on Mad-Eye,’ said Harry, moving his wand a little closer to Mundungus’s baggy, bloodshot eyes. ‘We already knew you were an unreliable bit of scum.’

  ‘Well then, why the ’ell am I being ’unted down by ’ouse-elves? Or is this about them goblets again? I ain’t got none of ’em left, or you could ’ave ’em –’

  ‘It’s not about the goblets either, although you’re getting warmer,’ said Harry. ‘Shut up and listen.’

  It felt wonderful to have something to do, someone of whom he could demand some small portion of truth. Harry’s wand was now so close to the bridge of Mundungus’s nose that Mundungus had gone cross-eyed trying to keep it in view.

  ‘When you cleaned out this house of anything valuable,’ Harry began, but Mundungus interrupted him again.

  ‘Sirius never cared about any of the junk –’

  There was the sound of pattering feet, a blaze of shining copper, an echoing clang and a shriek of agony: Kreacher had taken a run at Mundungus and hit him over the head with a saucepan.

  ‘Call ’im off, call ’im off, ’e should be locked up!’ screamed Mundungus, cowering as Kreacher raised the heavy-bottomed pan again.

  ‘Kreacher, no!’ shouted Harry.

  Kreacher’s thin arms trembled with the weight of the pan, still held aloft.

  ‘Perhaps just one more, Master Harry, for luck?’

  Ron laughed.

  ‘We need him conscious, Kreacher, but if he needs persuading you can do the honours,’ said Harry.

  ‘Thank you very much, Master,’ said Kreacher with a bow, and he retreated a short distance, his great, pale eyes still fixed upon Mundungus with loathing.

  ‘When you stripped this house of all the valuables you could find,’ Harry began again, ‘you took a bunch of stuff from the kitchen cupboard. There was a locket there.’ Harry’s mouth was suddenly dry: he could sense Ron and Hermione’s tension and excitement too. ‘What did you do with it?’

  ‘Why?’ asked Mundungus. ‘Is it valuable?’

  ‘You’ve still got it!’ cried Hermione.

  ‘No, he hasn’t,’ said Ron shrewdly. ‘He’s wondering whether he should have asked more money for it.’

  ‘More?’ said Mundungus. ‘That wouldn’t have been effing difficult … bleedin’ gave it away, di’n’ I? No choice.’

  ‘What do you mean?’