A Thief to Catch a Thief; a Death Eater to Catch a

A/N: And after however many re-writes, I give you chapter 22!

I’ve edited the previous chapter a little to fit with this.





Hermione, disguised as Claire Barrow just couldn’t put her finger on what was wrong with the orphanage.



Yes, the staff were all squibs (or in her case, pretending to be, her wand was transfigured into a simple necklace), and paid an abysmal wage – but squibs were generally not looked after by trade unions and as long as an establishment paid the required, minimum wage of one galleon per hour, there were no quibbles.



The children were all clean and were fed a balanced diet, sweets didn’t often make an appearance – but they weren’t one of the five required food groups. They weren’t clothed in new garments, but what they did wear weren’t rags.



But money was being siphoned away from the business account the orphanage had, to pay contractors for repairs – repairs that needed doing and never actually occurred. But, even so, the repairs would have barely required a hundred galleons to fix, but ten thousand galleons had gone missing to the contractors. Even Draco at his most expensive wouldn’t have charged that price for a whole new building.



Oh yes, something was definitely fishy about this.



Hermione’s days were filled with boiling and scrubbing bedding (by hand, as the wizarding world hadn’t discovered the washing machine); making beds, cleaning clothes (by hand), cooking meals, changing nappies, feeding babies, applying healing salve to scraped knees, cleaning hallways and observing playrooms. To put it simply, she was the equivalent of a paid house elf – though they would technically be above the squibs as they had magic, though a house elf cost more than a squib worker.



Hermione’s nights, however, were her opportunity for looking for where the missing funds were going. For the past sixty nights she’d searched every nook and cranny she could enter to find anything that might indicate a crime.



Two months into her methodical searching, Hermione came across a cupboard. An ordinary, basic, boring, cleaning-implement filled cupboard… a cupboard that was… sobbing?



Climbing carefully over the mop buckets and brooms in there, she pressed her ear to the back wall… listening once more for the sobs. The sobs were still there, but not coming from the back wall; the same was true for the other two walls.



“Where?” Hermione whispered, removing the necklace and silently transfiguring it back into a wand. She began to pace as best she could in the tiny space, thinking. She cast a few spells on the walls – telling them to reveal their secrets – but they were just walls, with no secrets to reveal.



The sobs continued.



“The floor!” she muttered, tapping her wand every inch to search for… something. She didn’t know what she was looking for, which didn’t help matters… but suddenly…



“There!” she smiled, revealing a wooden trapdoor that had been transfigured to look like the stone floor. She tugged the rusty ring, trying to open it and finding it locked.



“Alohamora!” she hissed quietly, hearing the little click of unlocking. “That was too simple! Anyone with a wand could have got in here!” she thought aloud, lighting the tip of her wand against the darkness; “Though, the only people coming into a cleaning cupboard would be squibs in this establishment.”



Hermione cast a silent and gentle stunning spell on the whole darkened room before lighting her wand fully to observe what she’d discovered.



The ministry were not going to believe this…