Please note: Burke and Kelly were inspired by an overdose of Jack Higgins, specifically his Sean Dillon books.
Chapter 5
Ginny and Neville spent the next day poring over the documentation Carlisle had provided them, all the files, surveillance reports and transcripts of recorded conversations that the Auror Corps had gathered in the course of their investigation of Shadowlands. Ginny – under specific orders from Moody – spent her time studying the employee files, becoming familiar with the people whom she would meet when – when, not if – she went in undercover.
Right now, the files illustrated one of the major contradictions inherent in Draco Malfoy, something that she’d always found difficult to understand – he had an incredible gift for attracting loyalty. He may be a sardonic, arrogant bastard – indeed, he most often was – but somehow, he managed to attract and draw a certain type of people into his orbit, who would, despite all notions of pragmatic common sense, follow him wherever he chose to lead...
Like Blaise Zabini, who should have known better, but who – despite their unofficial rivalry, despite the future he might have had with the woman he might have loved – had, in a most unSlytherin act, thrown himself in front of a curse meant for Malfoy.
Like Horace Higgins, his right hand and major-domo, who had been with Malfoy for years, since before his father’s incarceration. A half-blood and a squib, normally he would never have gotten anywhere near the Malfoy Heir, but Lucius – always alert to shifts in the wind – had bailed the bankrupt and almost alcoholic ex-soldier out of prison and had watched the friendship with his son form with quiet satisfaction. A big, burly Cockney bruiser, Higgins had a heart like soft goo, and doted on his self-appointed charge like a mother hen.
And then there were Jim Burke and Patrick Kelly, the two cold-eyed Irishmen who acted as doormen, bouncers and occasional muscle. They had come to England six years ago from Belfast – in quite a hurry, apparently – and after finding temporary employment with Malfoy had decided, for reasons of their own, to stay on permanently. The Gods only knew what had inspired that unlikely alliance…
But for some strange reason, the fundamental tenets of his identity, the characteristics that constituted the basis of who and what he was – so rarely revealed – drew and held loyalty from men – and women too, no doubt – who were disillusioned with the normal, conventional notions of honour and ‘good’. Because deep down, beneath all his elusive, elaborate masks and defences, Draco Malfoy possessed an ironclad – albeit unconventional – sense of honour…
~()~
She’d always been fascinated by his hands, so smooth, white and elegant, and so unlike her brothers’ hands, which were large, freckled and unapologetically calloused. And yet, she discovered, they were just as strong, the latent power tensile and largely hidden, until she had seen him strangle a man with the same expertise as he employed when he made love to her.
For the first time, she was a little afraid of him, then; she had discovered that strength was not always obvious, that Draco, not nearly as bulky as her brothers, was just as capable of physical damage…
She had been very young, then.
The Aurors had an Honour Code, but Draco, son – and Lord – of an ancient Clan, had one fundamental Law engraved on his very soul:
Protect your own.
And by then, he had already considered her as his; he would no more have harmed her than he would have harmed any of the people on his estates, or any of his family. She had revelled in the security of his love, occasionally chafed at the restraints of his protection, but had always – always – trusted in the strength of his odd sense of honour.
That certainty had been shattered on the day he murdered his father.
**************
Sensing her distraction, Neville looked over at his partner, a worried frown creasing his forehead. He was no longer the chubby, baby-faced boy he had been at school – years of stress and worry aged him, just as it had everybody else – but one remnant of his past self had remained: his admiration of Ginny Weasley, tempered as it was by a healthy respect for her brother, and the knowledge that she had fixed her heart on Malfoy.
He was enough of a realist to know that she would never see him as anything more than a friend and trusted partner, so if the only safe way to express his feelings for her was through worry and concern and what she called nagging, then so be it. Lately, he had begun to worry about her in earnest, especially after Moody had all but ordered her to undertake this investigation at Shadowlands. Neville didn’t know what Draco Malfoy thought he was doing in those back rooms of his – and quite frankly, he didn’t particularly care, as Malfoy was not the type to play grand games of villainy – but he did know that Ginny was the very last person who should be sent in to find out.
Oh, logic – cold, emotionless logic – said that she was perfect, but Neville had never put much stock in logic when dealing with the High Clan.
“So,” said Neville, very casually, “are you really going to do this?”
She looked up from the file she was examining. “Listen to this, Neville – Jim Burke, born in Belfast 1960, parents killed in the…” she raised a brow, “…troubles in ’69…”
He ignored her efforts to distract him. “Are you actually thinking of going through with it.”
She continued on. “Went to live with his uncle, who no doubt introduced him to the Cause…”
Neville put a hand on the file she was holding, pushed it back against the desk. “Ginny.”
She sighed, and turned to look him in the eye. “Orders are orders. The great man has spoken.”
“Right.” Neville fixed her with a no-nonsense look, and she glared at him, all pretence at casual detachment gone. “It won’t work, Neville. Do you honestly think he won’t recognise me, no matter what disguise I wear? Then what?”
He raised a brow, stroked his chin. “I admit, it would be a little suspicious…”
“He’ll kill me and toss me into the river,” she scowled. “Just because he was on our side doesn’t mean he’s not every bit as bad as his father was…”
“Surely not.” Neville was genuinely shocked. Draco Malfoy was capable of many things, but he would never, ever harm Ginny. However, even if he didn’t kill her, the whole plan would be blown. “So what are you suggesting? You can’t go in, but there’s no one else who knows him as well as you do. Perhaps you could supervise, maybe train some other female operative?”
“No, there’s not enough time, he’s too complex. It’ll have to be me…” Ginny didn’t want to admit that the thought of watching some other operative seduce him – or try to, because Malfoy was notoriously elusive – stirred some unpleasant feelings.
“How? You’ve just said you can’t go in undercover. Surely you’re not thinking of walking in there as yourself.”
She shrugged, drummed her fingers on the desk, and then suddenly she grinned – the trademark Weasley grin that Neville had seen too many times on too many of her brothers: reckless, extravagant, and utterly mad. “How about this?” She lowered her voice, and with a sense of foreboding, Neville listened as she outlined her plan.
*********************************
Nightclubs are dramatically different places during the day, and Shadowlands was no different. The magic and mystery of the place was both created and sustained by darkness and shadows, by the thrill of the unknown and the unexplored – at just after one o’clock in the afternoon, it was simply empty, quiet and still in the drowsing summer heat.
Draco sat behind the bar, a half-full glass of whisky close at hand, and went through the accounts with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. The smoke from his cigarette curled above his head, and Higgins noted that there were a number of others crushed out and still smouldering in the ashtray.
“Those things’ll kill you one day,” he said, disapprovingly.
His employer – his charge – looked up from his books with a surprisingly warm smile, full of charm and wry, ironic amusement. “Better things have tried and failed,” he replied. “And I have enough enemies that these,” he lifted the cigarette, “will probably be quite irrelevant, in the end.”
Even so, Higgins scowled.
“And speaking of enemies,” Draco continued, “what else have you found out about Moody and his investigation?”
Apart from the fact that Ginevra Weasley was an Auror in Moody’s department, and the devious bastard was more than probably going to set her – and everything she knew – against them? That little piece of information hadn’t gone down well at all, Higgins had discovered the next morning, when he had had to dissuade Draco from ending it all then and there. He hadn’t known Malfoy to be capable of such melodrama. Of course, he’d downed a bottle of Ogden’s and had been higher than a kite at the time…
Happily, he seemed to be fully recovered now.
“That’s just it, sir,” he said. “It’s not Moody’s investigation.”
Draco put his quill down and gave Higgins his full attention. “Oh?”
“I sent Kelly around to see what he could see, as you said, and he found out that while the investigation is carried out by Moody’s department, it was instigated by a bloke named Carlisle. Apparently he’s high up in the Unspeakables, and quite publicly determined to put us out of business…”
“Carlisle…” Draco mused. “That name sounds familiar. What do we know about him?”
A soft, dangerous voice broke in. “Jared Carlisle, one of the more dangerous members of the Department of Mysteries…” The Department of Mysteries was the arm of the Ministry empowered to use any and all means to root out and destroy internal subversion and other nasty, dirty matters the government would rather not know about. The Unspeakables were – according to rumour and urban legend – the most dangerous tools at the Department’s disposal. “He had a grand time of it in Belfast, stamping out Catholic and Loyalist terrorists alike, and then he was summoned back to England immediately after the Resurrection, where he greatly distinguished himself…”
Patrick Kelly, black haired with flat, empty grey-green eyes, had an unmistakable accent and, to those who could recognise these things, the unmistakable mark of a conscienceless, amoral killer. Too many years fighting and killing for a hopeless cause had all but destroyed any care he might have had for his own life, but for reasons of their own he and his colleague Jim Burke had decided to take an interest in Draco’s.
“Of course he wasn’t decorated, because of the nature of his work,” Kelly continued, “but it did bring him to the attention of some very important people. He’s got influence, Malfoy,” he said warningly. “By God he’s got influence, and he hates you with an absolute passion.”
Draco sighed. “Why?” And then he stopped. “No, wait. There was a girl, wasn’t there…”
“Oh yes. His sister, Ellen.”
Abruptly he stopped, because it was more than apparent that Draco remembered. “Oh, Gods,” he said thickly, “her.” Yes, Draco remembered Ellen Carlisle, a beautiful girl-woman he had been too busy to help, too concerned with consolidating his security, building up his clientele. In those days, he had needed every dreamer he could get his hooks into, and he hadn’t particularly cared about any psychological hurts inflicted or inflamed in the process. By the time he’d realised she was dangerously addicted, that she’d lost all hold on reality, it was too late.
So, the beautiful girl had a dangerous brother, one patient enough to wait all this time to come after him, canny enough to know his weaknesses, and ruthless enough to employ them… And, by all reports, quite good enough at what he did that his chances of success were bloody high.
He laughed, a little roughly, and then tossed back the rest of his drink in one go, an ironic little toast to the upcoming struggle, yet another fight in what seemed to be an eternal challenge to prove himself, to establish himself, to build himself up, and then to keep what he had built. Well, he had done it before, and he could do it again.
“To the forthcoming weeks, gentlemen. They should prove to be exceedingly interesting…”
And then he got up and left.
As they watched him go, concern in their eyes, Higgins and Kelly exchanged silent, promising glances.
Chapter 5
Ginny and Neville spent the next day poring over the documentation Carlisle had provided them, all the files, surveillance reports and transcripts of recorded conversations that the Auror Corps had gathered in the course of their investigation of Shadowlands. Ginny – under specific orders from Moody – spent her time studying the employee files, becoming familiar with the people whom she would meet when – when, not if – she went in undercover.
Right now, the files illustrated one of the major contradictions inherent in Draco Malfoy, something that she’d always found difficult to understand – he had an incredible gift for attracting loyalty. He may be a sardonic, arrogant bastard – indeed, he most often was – but somehow, he managed to attract and draw a certain type of people into his orbit, who would, despite all notions of pragmatic common sense, follow him wherever he chose to lead...
Like Blaise Zabini, who should have known better, but who – despite their unofficial rivalry, despite the future he might have had with the woman he might have loved – had, in a most unSlytherin act, thrown himself in front of a curse meant for Malfoy.
Like Horace Higgins, his right hand and major-domo, who had been with Malfoy for years, since before his father’s incarceration. A half-blood and a squib, normally he would never have gotten anywhere near the Malfoy Heir, but Lucius – always alert to shifts in the wind – had bailed the bankrupt and almost alcoholic ex-soldier out of prison and had watched the friendship with his son form with quiet satisfaction. A big, burly Cockney bruiser, Higgins had a heart like soft goo, and doted on his self-appointed charge like a mother hen.
And then there were Jim Burke and Patrick Kelly, the two cold-eyed Irishmen who acted as doormen, bouncers and occasional muscle. They had come to England six years ago from Belfast – in quite a hurry, apparently – and after finding temporary employment with Malfoy had decided, for reasons of their own, to stay on permanently. The Gods only knew what had inspired that unlikely alliance…
But for some strange reason, the fundamental tenets of his identity, the characteristics that constituted the basis of who and what he was – so rarely revealed – drew and held loyalty from men – and women too, no doubt – who were disillusioned with the normal, conventional notions of honour and ‘good’. Because deep down, beneath all his elusive, elaborate masks and defences, Draco Malfoy possessed an ironclad – albeit unconventional – sense of honour…
~()~
She’d always been fascinated by his hands, so smooth, white and elegant, and so unlike her brothers’ hands, which were large, freckled and unapologetically calloused. And yet, she discovered, they were just as strong, the latent power tensile and largely hidden, until she had seen him strangle a man with the same expertise as he employed when he made love to her.
For the first time, she was a little afraid of him, then; she had discovered that strength was not always obvious, that Draco, not nearly as bulky as her brothers, was just as capable of physical damage…
She had been very young, then.
The Aurors had an Honour Code, but Draco, son – and Lord – of an ancient Clan, had one fundamental Law engraved on his very soul:
Protect your own.
And by then, he had already considered her as his; he would no more have harmed her than he would have harmed any of the people on his estates, or any of his family. She had revelled in the security of his love, occasionally chafed at the restraints of his protection, but had always – always – trusted in the strength of his odd sense of honour.
That certainty had been shattered on the day he murdered his father.
**************
Sensing her distraction, Neville looked over at his partner, a worried frown creasing his forehead. He was no longer the chubby, baby-faced boy he had been at school – years of stress and worry aged him, just as it had everybody else – but one remnant of his past self had remained: his admiration of Ginny Weasley, tempered as it was by a healthy respect for her brother, and the knowledge that she had fixed her heart on Malfoy.
He was enough of a realist to know that she would never see him as anything more than a friend and trusted partner, so if the only safe way to express his feelings for her was through worry and concern and what she called nagging, then so be it. Lately, he had begun to worry about her in earnest, especially after Moody had all but ordered her to undertake this investigation at Shadowlands. Neville didn’t know what Draco Malfoy thought he was doing in those back rooms of his – and quite frankly, he didn’t particularly care, as Malfoy was not the type to play grand games of villainy – but he did know that Ginny was the very last person who should be sent in to find out.
Oh, logic – cold, emotionless logic – said that she was perfect, but Neville had never put much stock in logic when dealing with the High Clan.
“So,” said Neville, very casually, “are you really going to do this?”
She looked up from the file she was examining. “Listen to this, Neville – Jim Burke, born in Belfast 1960, parents killed in the…” she raised a brow, “…troubles in ’69…”
He ignored her efforts to distract him. “Are you actually thinking of going through with it.”
She continued on. “Went to live with his uncle, who no doubt introduced him to the Cause…”
Neville put a hand on the file she was holding, pushed it back against the desk. “Ginny.”
She sighed, and turned to look him in the eye. “Orders are orders. The great man has spoken.”
“Right.” Neville fixed her with a no-nonsense look, and she glared at him, all pretence at casual detachment gone. “It won’t work, Neville. Do you honestly think he won’t recognise me, no matter what disguise I wear? Then what?”
He raised a brow, stroked his chin. “I admit, it would be a little suspicious…”
“He’ll kill me and toss me into the river,” she scowled. “Just because he was on our side doesn’t mean he’s not every bit as bad as his father was…”
“Surely not.” Neville was genuinely shocked. Draco Malfoy was capable of many things, but he would never, ever harm Ginny. However, even if he didn’t kill her, the whole plan would be blown. “So what are you suggesting? You can’t go in, but there’s no one else who knows him as well as you do. Perhaps you could supervise, maybe train some other female operative?”
“No, there’s not enough time, he’s too complex. It’ll have to be me…” Ginny didn’t want to admit that the thought of watching some other operative seduce him – or try to, because Malfoy was notoriously elusive – stirred some unpleasant feelings.
“How? You’ve just said you can’t go in undercover. Surely you’re not thinking of walking in there as yourself.”
She shrugged, drummed her fingers on the desk, and then suddenly she grinned – the trademark Weasley grin that Neville had seen too many times on too many of her brothers: reckless, extravagant, and utterly mad. “How about this?” She lowered her voice, and with a sense of foreboding, Neville listened as she outlined her plan.
*********************************
Nightclubs are dramatically different places during the day, and Shadowlands was no different. The magic and mystery of the place was both created and sustained by darkness and shadows, by the thrill of the unknown and the unexplored – at just after one o’clock in the afternoon, it was simply empty, quiet and still in the drowsing summer heat.
Draco sat behind the bar, a half-full glass of whisky close at hand, and went through the accounts with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. The smoke from his cigarette curled above his head, and Higgins noted that there were a number of others crushed out and still smouldering in the ashtray.
“Those things’ll kill you one day,” he said, disapprovingly.
His employer – his charge – looked up from his books with a surprisingly warm smile, full of charm and wry, ironic amusement. “Better things have tried and failed,” he replied. “And I have enough enemies that these,” he lifted the cigarette, “will probably be quite irrelevant, in the end.”
Even so, Higgins scowled.
“And speaking of enemies,” Draco continued, “what else have you found out about Moody and his investigation?”
Apart from the fact that Ginevra Weasley was an Auror in Moody’s department, and the devious bastard was more than probably going to set her – and everything she knew – against them? That little piece of information hadn’t gone down well at all, Higgins had discovered the next morning, when he had had to dissuade Draco from ending it all then and there. He hadn’t known Malfoy to be capable of such melodrama. Of course, he’d downed a bottle of Ogden’s and had been higher than a kite at the time…
Happily, he seemed to be fully recovered now.
“That’s just it, sir,” he said. “It’s not Moody’s investigation.”
Draco put his quill down and gave Higgins his full attention. “Oh?”
“I sent Kelly around to see what he could see, as you said, and he found out that while the investigation is carried out by Moody’s department, it was instigated by a bloke named Carlisle. Apparently he’s high up in the Unspeakables, and quite publicly determined to put us out of business…”
“Carlisle…” Draco mused. “That name sounds familiar. What do we know about him?”
A soft, dangerous voice broke in. “Jared Carlisle, one of the more dangerous members of the Department of Mysteries…” The Department of Mysteries was the arm of the Ministry empowered to use any and all means to root out and destroy internal subversion and other nasty, dirty matters the government would rather not know about. The Unspeakables were – according to rumour and urban legend – the most dangerous tools at the Department’s disposal. “He had a grand time of it in Belfast, stamping out Catholic and Loyalist terrorists alike, and then he was summoned back to England immediately after the Resurrection, where he greatly distinguished himself…”
Patrick Kelly, black haired with flat, empty grey-green eyes, had an unmistakable accent and, to those who could recognise these things, the unmistakable mark of a conscienceless, amoral killer. Too many years fighting and killing for a hopeless cause had all but destroyed any care he might have had for his own life, but for reasons of their own he and his colleague Jim Burke had decided to take an interest in Draco’s.
“Of course he wasn’t decorated, because of the nature of his work,” Kelly continued, “but it did bring him to the attention of some very important people. He’s got influence, Malfoy,” he said warningly. “By God he’s got influence, and he hates you with an absolute passion.”
Draco sighed. “Why?” And then he stopped. “No, wait. There was a girl, wasn’t there…”
“Oh yes. His sister, Ellen.”
Abruptly he stopped, because it was more than apparent that Draco remembered. “Oh, Gods,” he said thickly, “her.” Yes, Draco remembered Ellen Carlisle, a beautiful girl-woman he had been too busy to help, too concerned with consolidating his security, building up his clientele. In those days, he had needed every dreamer he could get his hooks into, and he hadn’t particularly cared about any psychological hurts inflicted or inflamed in the process. By the time he’d realised she was dangerously addicted, that she’d lost all hold on reality, it was too late.
So, the beautiful girl had a dangerous brother, one patient enough to wait all this time to come after him, canny enough to know his weaknesses, and ruthless enough to employ them… And, by all reports, quite good enough at what he did that his chances of success were bloody high.
He laughed, a little roughly, and then tossed back the rest of his drink in one go, an ironic little toast to the upcoming struggle, yet another fight in what seemed to be an eternal challenge to prove himself, to establish himself, to build himself up, and then to keep what he had built. Well, he had done it before, and he could do it again.
“To the forthcoming weeks, gentlemen. They should prove to be exceedingly interesting…”
And then he got up and left.
As they watched him go, concern in their eyes, Higgins and Kelly exchanged silent, promising glances.
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