Harry Potter is NOT dead! No, really, he can't be!

Epilogue: The Cat and The Crown

A/N Absolutely NOT from Draco's POV and more of an unexpected conclusion (on my part).

The higgled half-timbered Crown Hotel in Little Whinging, Surrey, sat nestled in the middle of the village. Unlike the more developed modern housing that sat around the village, the centre of the village was very old and quaint with its cobbled high street filled with little boutique shops and coffee shops and florists. The hotel itself was an old coaching inn and sat central to the village, set on a right-angled bend in the main street. It was filled with higgledy-piggledy corridors with heavy beams and uneven dark-oak floors that spoke of its age and during the colder months it always had a welcoming fire in the great inglenook fireplace in the main bar-lobby-lounge area. It was a very nice hotel and a lot of the staff had worked there for years and years and many of the village's youngsters got their first jobs there; cleaning or waitressing or working behind the bar or in the kitchens before they left home and moved on to university or elsewhere. Importantly, The Crown served a good breakfast and had won a local award for its evening menu and there were always a number of guest ales at the bar so the hotel was often filled with locals as well as its residents in the evenings. And the beds were very comfortable and everywhere was spotlessly clean so the hotel manager was pleased that they always had a good number of returning customers and an excellent rating on Trip Advisor. That was important for business.

The hotel manager also knew that it was important to have a unique selling point that would attract business in the first place. Amongst the hotel's features that he'd proudly written up on the hotel website was that Queen Elizabeth I was rumoured to have stayed there in 1573. None of the locals actually believed that rumour because it was beyond all of them why the Queen of England would ever want to visit Little Whinging. The hotel manager was also very proud that there were a number of peculiarities about the hotel. There was a Priest Hole under the Grand Staircase, which could be accessed if you tilted the back of the fourth step. There was rumoured to be a friendly ghost in the beer cellar, but only the bar manager had met him; he swore the ghost was Spanish, had been part of Armada fleet, and was always drunk. The waiting staff whispered behind their hands that the bar manager had been at the cognac bottle when no one was looking. The hotel also boasted a very large and stunning stain-glass window in the dining room, which when you looked closely, pictured Joan of Arc being burnt at the stake. And there were two whole suits of armour from the mid-1500s called Cecil and Norman, origins of both suits and their names unknown. Norman stood on the middle landing on the Grand Staircase and Cecil was in an alcove near the main door. The funny thing about the suits of armour was that if anyone tried to move them, they invariable were found back in their original posts but none of the staff would admit to being responsible. Several guests had complained that Cecil was 'looking at them funny' but invariably they were the sort of guests who tried to get away without paying for their drinks or wanted extras at no extra cost to their bills or were rude to the female waiting staff. And they never made any comments about Cecil on Trip Advisor so everyone ignored the complaints.

Amongst the hotel's other peculiarities was a female tabby cat with distinctive markings that would occasionally turn up and make a beeline for a noticeably comfortable-looking armchair next to the great inglenook fireplace.

In fact, the very distinctive tabby cat had first visited the hotel some sixteen and a half years previously, when it had appeared on a cold November night back in 1981, briefly surveyed the lobby/lounge/bar area and headed straight for the noticeably comfortable-looking armchair next to the great inglenook fireplace. Naturally, back then, the hotel manager attempted to have the cat removed from the premises. The cat refused all efforts to be thrown out and even locking the doors on it seemed to have no effect because she always found a way to get back in. She was, it seemed, a particularly belligerent and determined cat, but then, when weren't cats like that when they set their minds on something? And, as the stray didn't appear to have fleas, the staff decided to accept their fate and welcomed her with saucers of creamy milk and freshly-cooked trout and, in return, the distinctive tabby cat became a bit of local feature, if not a legend.