Summary: Alexander Jameson has spent his last two years at the Cairo Auror office riding a desk. When a case finally comes along that the Head feels he is suited for, he jumps at the chance to take it. Now he must solve a murder, figure out the significance of the murdered man’s missing ring, and keep the only witness to the death safe. But those things turn out to be much more difficult than he expected when they are combined with the added task of safe-guarding his heart.
This is hogwartsbookworm of Hufflepuff writing for the 2011 Mysterious May Challenge in the Great Hall, Prompt #2.
The title is a rewording of a quote from Shakespeare's Merchant of Vencie.
Categories: Mystery Characters: None
Warnings: Character Death
Challenges:
Series: None
Chapters: 1 Completed: No
Word count: 1831 Read: 1415
Published: 05/18/11 Updated: 05/26/11
1. Chapter 1 by hogwartsbookworm
Chapter 1 by hogwartsbookworm
I winced as, just outside my cubicle, someone cleared his throat. I had been up until the early hours of the morning, compiling evidence for a case against Iranian dark potions dealers, and had gained for my trouble an unusually painful morning-after headache.
Squinting through shaded eyes at my early morning tormentor, I found my friend, Ali Basheer, grinning down at me.
“You got bad head today?” he asked in stilted English. I groaned. I liked Ali, but his obsession with English, both with learning it from and speaking it to me, could be wearying. “Yes. Please tell me you had a reason for coming over here and aggravating it?”
Ali looked confused. “Aggravating?” he repeated.
I rolled my eyes. “Making it worse,” I simplified.
“Ah!” he said, flashing a quick grin. “Yes. Boss want you down quick.”
I tensed. “Did he say why?”
Ali nodded. “Translate.”
I sighed, but at the same time I could feel myself relax.
Ali leaned against the wall of my cubicle. “You aggravating Boss, you take so long.” He grinned again, as if this amused him highly. “You coming?”
Shrugging, I began extricating myself from the small space behind my desk.
I had been serving as the resident English-speaker ever since I had joined the Auror office. As the only person in the department who spoke it natively, I was the ideal translator. I even suspected that my fluency in English had been one of the factors that had decided the Head of the Auror office on taking me. But sorting through enormous piles of paperwork and the odd translation job hadn’t been what I’d thought I was signing up for when I had decided to become an Auror.
Finally I had managed to squeeze my way around my overly cluttered desk. Stuffing my hands in my pockets, I ambled down the hall to the lift. Ali remained at my elbow the whole way, cobbling together the few words of English he knew in order to yak about everything he could think of. We had descended over twenty floors before something he said caught my attention.
“And the English is very pretty, very pretty. And very little.”
I raised my eyebrows. “The English people are little?” I looked down at myself. “I dunno about that “ I’m half English, and I’d say I was about average height myself.”
Ali shook his head exasperatedly. “The English who is here. She is little.” He watched me for a reaction.
“There’s an English girl here?”
Ali nodded.
“And she’s small?”
He grimaced. I could see him fighting to find the right word without resorting to his native tongue.
“No, not small. She is... not old. What is word?”
“Young?”
He grinned. “Yes, yes, young. She is young, and very pretty.” He licked his lips. “Very pretty.”
I rolled my eyes. Ali thought all women were ‘pretty.’
The lift dinged to a halt, and we stepped out. Almost immediately, our ‘Boss,’ the Head of the Auror Department, Muhammad Mabarak, was at my other elbow. Speaking briskly in Egyptian, he explained the situation.
“There is a young witch in one of the examination rooms. She was witness to a murder.”
“Killing curse?” I asked, also speaking in Egyptian, trying to sound efficient and professional.
Muhammad nodded. “Yes, the Killing Curse. The strangest part is that it was a Muggle that was killed, in daylight, in the middle of a Muggle marketplace. We would like you to question her, find out if she knows anything. We need to know if this is just a random Muggle-killing or “”
“But if that was the case, sir, why would they kill only the one Muggle out of all the Muggles there?” I asked, then, realizing I had interrupted, added hastily, “I’m sorry, sir, it’s just””
“That is precisely why we need you to question her. We need to know if there was another motive.” He gave me an appraising look. “Well done, Jameson.”
I had to exert myself to keep my face smooth. I wanted to grin, perhaps let out a whoop or two. But I had learned a considerable amount about self-control in the last two years at that Department. One must never show one’s excitement at being complimented by the Head. It showed lack of discipline and maturity, two of the things that Mabarak most valued in his Aurors.
Admittedly, my self control did not extend to keeping myself from strutting a bit as I was led down the hall to the room where the witness I was to question awaited me.
Mabarak pulled open the door and gestured me inside, and for the first time my excitement wavered. What exactly should I ask her? I had just turned to ask when the door closed behind me. I stared at it for a moment before squaring my shoulders and turning to look at the girl seated at the rusty little table in the centre of the room. She had light blonde, almost white, hair, and thin shoulders, but that was all I could make out of her appearance. She had crossed her arms on the table before her and rested her head on them.
Stepping forward, I sat down across from her.
Apparently hearing the scrape of the chair as I pulled it out to sit down, she sat up and I saw her face for the first time as she stared at me with unexpectedly dark brown eyes. With some surprise, I realized that, even glaring at me, Ali had been right: she was very pretty.
“Who are you?” she mumbled in English.
Settling back in my chair, trying to appear at ease, I was about to answer when, without waiting to hear it, she asked another abrupt question. “Is your name Muhammad?”
I raised my eyebrows. “Er...no,” I replied, flummoxed.
“Then is it Ali?” she continued.
“No, that isn’t my name either.” I think my distinctly British accent surprised her. At least, her eyebrows had gone far enough up her forehead to have disappeared under her fringe. “My name is Alexander Jameson. What is your name?”
She stared at me a moment longer before answering, “Dominique. Dominique Weasley. Sorry about that. It’s just that, I’ve met so many Muhammad’s and Ali’s while I’ve been in this country, I was beginning to think that the book of Most Popular Egyptian Baby Names had just the two names in it.”
I laughed. A flicker of a smile turned up her lips for a moment before she returned to watching my sombrely. It reminded me of why I was there. I cleared my throat.
“Eh hem. Well, Miss Weasley, I need to ask you a few questions.”
She shrugged.
“’Kay. Go ahead.”
I searched my head for what I need to know first. “Could you tell me about what happened this morning?”
She cringed. “Mason died.”
“I... I had heard. I’m sorry. Were you on close terms with... Mason?”
She bit her lip. “Well, we were sort of close. We’d only known each other for two weeks. We were in the same tour group, and he and I were the closest in age, so we just...” She broke off, looking around. “Shouldn’t you be taking notes or something?”
I jumped, feeling stupid. She was right. Hurriedly, I pulled out a pad of paper and a quill and, with a quick spell, set the quill to taking notes for me.
Looking up at her once again, I nodded. “Go on.”
“Like I said, we were the closest in age of all the people in our tour group. Well, there were other young people, but no one our age travelling alone. Most of the people came on the tour with other people that were already their friends. Mason and I were the odd ones out, so we got put together on the busses and stuff a lot, and “”
“This was a Muggle tour group, right?” I interjected, wanting to make sure that that fact was included in the notes.
“Yes. Mason is... was a Muggle.” Her eyes filled momentarily with tears, but then she swallowed and blinked them away. “Anyway, we got to be friends after just a few days on tour. So I guess you could say I was the person he was closest to when he died. He told me he was orphaned last year, and he didn’t have any siblings.”
“Hmm.” I checked the notepad, making sure that the quill was getting everything. “How did you, a witch, get to be touring Egypt with a Muggle tour group?”
She gave a half-hearted laugh. “I’m here because Mum wouldn’t let me go all the way ‘round the world like I wanted to.”
I looked up. “You wanted to go around the world?”
“Yeah,” she said with a grim smile. “I just finished school in June, and I was getting bored. I didn’t have a career picked out; I was never much excited by any of my subjects. I didn’t have a boyfriend. I didn’t have many close friends “ I suppose you could say I was a bit of a loner at school. I didn’t have a life, really. So I decided I wanted to do the trip around the world that everyone used to do when they finished school, ages ago. I reckoned I would be able to figure out what to do with myself while I was out exploring different countries and getting into adventures. But Mum wouldn’t let me go all the way around the world, especially when I said that I wanted to travel the Muggle way. I wanted to actually see the country, and Portkeys don’t provide much of a view, unfortunately.”
“But, why Egypt?” I prodded.
“Well, Dad used to work here as a curse-breaker. I’ve wanted to visit ever since I was a kid “ he told the most exciting bedtime stories about this place. So when Mum said she didn’t want me going to the other side of the globe, I insisted on at least coming here.”
I nodded. That made sense. She had come here, looking for the fulfilment of a childhood dream, and found... murder. Poor kid.
“So, you met Mason on the tour, and became close. What happened this morning?”
“We went to some kind of market, as part of the tour. Mason was bored of shopping, so he sat down at a table in front of some little restaurant while I kept looking. I went to check on him every few minutes, and to show him what I’d bought, and leave it with him so that I didn’t have to carry it around everywhere. The last time I checked on him, he looked like he’d fallen asleep. But he... he “” She swallowed. Her eyes met mine and she whispered, “He was dead.”
End Notes:
I hope this fits the prompt properly. >.<
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.