The Minister for Magic

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The next day Harry returned to work wearing simple dark maroon robes, he had had enough of the scratchiness of the silver embroidery. Besides, today he wouldn't have to see anyone outside the employees of the Ministry.

Once Harry stepped out of the green fire in the Ministry's Atrium, Evergrey approached him with a hurried look on his face. He and Rivers had been interrogating the apprehended man, Gunther Ivanovski, and now Patrick was here to share the results. "Go on then, what did you find out?" Harry urged the man.

"Ivanovski was quite easy to crack, he admitted to having sold memory potions for a good price to some people at Knockturn Alley a few days ago. However, he's a small player, only a middleman to one distributor. After some persuasion he revealed that there are several distributors all around London, who are apparently getting the potions from one source." Evergrey was hectically going through his parchments and handed one over to Harry, "A copy of his statement."

"Cheers," Harry grabbed the piece of parchment, "what about the witch he was talking to? His distributor? Did he give a name?" Harry was eyeing the statement as they stepped into one of the packed elevators.

"Wouldn't that be convenient," Evergrey said dryly, "sadly, he had no idea about her name, and even his description wasn't too accurate, but I reckon we can work with it." The elevator bell dinged and they both stepped out, heading towards Harry's office. "Did you find out anything more in yesterday's interviews? Figured that must've been tedious as hell," Evergrey continued.

"Well one good thing is that I got a pretty specific description of the witch Ivanov met at the pub, I'll get you a copy and we can run it through the list of witches wanted, who knows, maybe we'll get lucky," Harry opened the door to his office, strode over to his desk, Accio'd Malfoy's statement from the piles of parchments and cast a Doubling Charm before handing the other over to Evergrey.

"Merlin's beard, Draco Malfoy gave you this statement? I thought Blackburn was yanking my chain the other day when he said Malfoy was one of the wizards there, bloody hell," the man was shaking his head in disbelief. Harry was still a bit wound up about his encounter with Malfoy the previous day, and didn't know the appropriate response to offer. He was just hoping Patrick would say something else. "Haven't seen that git in almost a decade and he shows up now in the middle of a bloody investigation. Can we trust him, do you reckon?"

Harry just shrugged and ran his hand through his hair. "Yesterday he seemed pretty headstrong not wanting anything to do with the Ministry, so I'd say he was merely at the wrong place at the wrong time," Harry found himself once again making excuses for Malfoy, defending him, and he couldn't not think that Malfoy would hex his arse into the next decade if he found out. The corner of his mouth wanted to curl into a smile but he suppressed it.

"Right then, I'll be back with the results about this profile, until then I'd recommend you organize this junk pile you call an office." Before Harry could raise his eyebrows at Evergrey, the man was already off. Patrick Evergrey was an Auror in his thirties, not much older than Harry, with a lovely wife and two young kids, Harry thought that if he was ever in his shoes, he'd seek employment from a more risk-free career. He now turned to the unholy mess that was his office.

Short of two hours later Evergrey returned with two pieces of parchment. Meanwhile, Harry had just sorted the piles and stowed them in his desk or put them away in the bookcase. A surprisingly large amount of it had just been junk, and Harry was relieved to see his office again from under all the rubbish.

"Well?" Harry asked, raising his eyebrows.

The man handed the other parchment to Harry. "At first, we didn't manage to find her from the regular list of wanted people, so we had to try a bunch of different variations of the characteristics described, still nothing. But then Maryse checked the arrest warrants for Europe as a whole, and up popped one madam Anastasie Dubois, a French con-woman who fled the country after being caught running an illegal Felix Felicis ring, fake stuff of course."

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