"Albus, what on earth is going on?"
Even though Sherlock had just declared that the truth was about to surface, Fudge still couldn't make heads or tails of what he was seeing.
Whenever he found himself in a situation that required thinking—particularly deep thinking—he always felt as though his intelligence was being put to a rather severe test.
"Patience, Cornelius."
Dumbledore watched Professor McGonagall stride quickly out of the room, then turned and picked up the curved hip flask from the table. He unscrewed the cap, glanced inside, and passed it to Snape.
"Severus—it seems we've also found the culprit who broke into your office and stole your Potion ingredients."
Snape took the flask and brought it close to his nose for a single, careful sniff. His brow furrowed immediately.
A flash of intense disgust crossed his eyes as he said, in a tone of ice:
"Polyjuice Potion. How perfectly wonderful."
"Polyjuice Potion?"
This time, Fudge finally caught up. His eyes went wide as saucers.
"You mean—Moody… no, this person used Polyjuice Potion to take on Moody's appearance?"
Watching the genuine shock on Fudge's face, Sherlock felt a profound and wordless exasperation.
Why, he wondered, does the world always produce people who state the utterly obvious with expressions of thunderstruck amazement?
"Indeed…"
Dumbledore exhaled a long, quiet sigh, a faint note of sorrow in his voice. "You see how simple it is, and yet how ingenious. Everyone knows that Moody drinks exclusively from his own hip flask—it's one of his most famous habits. So, whoever wished to impersonate him needed only to fill that same flask with Polyjuice Potion and take a sip every hour on the hour. The disguise would hold, and no one would think twice about it.
"Of course, the impersonator would need to keep the real Moody close at hand, so as to obtain fresh hairs for each new batch of the Potion.
"That, naturally, also explains the missing ingredients from Professor Snape's office.
"Now then, Cornelius—all you need do is wait, and the truth will reveal itself before your very eyes. I believe," he added, with a small smile, "it will come as quite a surprise."
Just as Dumbledore had promised, the bound figure on the floor—the man they had known as Moody—began to change in ways plainly visible to the naked eye.
The jagged, criss-crossing scars that had carved his face into something fearsome receded like a retreating tide; the skin beneath grew smooth.
The mangled, half-missing nose slowly filled out and shrank back to ordinary proportions. The long, unkempt hair that had been shot through with grey quickly contracted and lightened into a soft, pale gold, lying flat and neat against his scalp.
Then the greater changes came.
His trademark wooden leg fell away with a dull clank, and from the stump, a whole and natural leg slowly grew—covered in fine hair, unmistakably real.
The magical eye that had never stopped spinning was ejected from its socket and rolled across the floor. In its place sat a perfectly ordinary eye with a light-brown iris.
"Crouch!"
Even the slowest among them could not hold back now. Fudge and Bagman cried out in the same breath:
"It's Barty Crouch—Junior!"
"As you can see," said Dumbledore, with a calm smile. "It is indeed he—the one who has been posing as Alastor Moody and lurking within Hogwarts all this time."
"But—but wasn't he already broken out of Azkaban?" Fudge stammered, his mind still struggling to absorb the staggering fact before him.
This wasn't a surprise. It was a shock.
"Idiot."
Sherlock let the word fall, perfectly flat, with no particular inflection.
The man had just witnessed the disguise stripped away in its entirety. And he still couldn't connect the dots. There really was no cure for that kind of intelligence.
"He was indeed broken out," Dumbledore agreed—and though he privately shared Sherlock's assessment, his nature did not allow him to say so directly to Fudge's face.
He continued, patiently:
"Based on what we know, it was Voldemort and his allies who took him from Azkaban during the Quidditch World Cup. Rescuing Barty Crouch Junior was always part of the design—all of it, everything we have seen today, was arranged in service of that plan."
"But—but even so…"
Fudge opened and closed his mouth, still wearing that blank expression, the words he wanted to say refusing to organize themselves into anything coherent.
It was Ludo Bagman, standing beside him, whose eyes were darting about in a way that suggested something had just clicked into place.
At that moment, rapid footsteps sounded in the corridor outside. Professor McGonagall swept back into the room.
Though Dumbledore had already told her the truth, seeing Barty Crouch Junior lying on the floor with her own eyes still stopped her short for a moment.
She stood rooted to the spot for a few seconds before she gathered herself and turned to Dumbledore.
"I've found Moody. Crouch had him locked inside a trunk with seven locks—you had to open it seven times with seven different keys before you could reach the innermost compartment where a person could be hidden.
"Moody is in a bad way. His wooden leg and magical eye have both been taken. He's little more than skin and bone, terribly weak—but there's no immediate danger to his life. Madam Pomfrey is with him now."
"Thank you, Minerva," said Dumbledore, inclining his head. He then turned to Snape. "Severus—are you ready?"
"I've been ready," Snape said, with a thin, cold smile.
He stepped forward and drew from within his robes a small glass vial, the liquid inside perfectly clear and colorless.
Veritaserum—legendary truth potion, the indispensable remedy for an interrogation where no torture is required.
Snape crouched down before the prone Crouch Junior, gripped his jaw without ceremony, and forced his mouth open. Then he simply upended the entire vial down his throat.
Harry and Sherlock exchanged a glance.
That rough, unsparing gesture instantly brought back the memory of the scene with Peter Pettigrew. Snape had administered the Veritaserum in exactly the same way then—without preamble, without hesitation.
It seemed Snape had some particular, personal score to settle with Death Eaters.
After all, as Snape himself had once said, a single drop of this potion was enough to make even the Dark Lord reveal the deepest secrets of his heart. There was absolutely no need to pour out the whole vial.
"Cornelius—this is the most potent Veritaserum available," said Dumbledore, turning to the speechless Fudge and Bagman. "I believe what he says next should answer every question you have."
Fudge's mouth moved. No words came out.
Bagman's expression was much the same.
Left with nothing else to do, both men stared down at Barty Crouch Junior on the floor and waited for the truth to arrive.
The interrogation that followed had nothing elegant about it.
Under the influence of Veritaserum, Crouch Junior lost all capacity for resistance. He answered every question asked of him, holding nothing back.
Regarding how he had escaped from Azkaban, his account was consistent with the testimony his father, Barty Crouch Senior, had given earlier—the whole thing had depended on his mother's sacrifice and devotion.
Crouch Junior's version was simply more detailed. He described how his mother had used Polyjuice Potion to switch places with him, and how she had spent her remaining strength—her very life—within the walls of Azkaban.
Yet for all the detail, not a syllable of what he said suggested the slightest gratitude toward her. Every word dripped instead with fanatical adoration for Voldemort.
On the matter of Bertha Jorkins, his account also matched the known facts perfectly.
And then came the secrets that only Barty Crouch Junior himself knew.
Just as Sherlock had deduced, Voldemort had encountered Bertha Jorkins by chance in Albania, where she had gone on holiday. As a supreme practitioner of Legilimency, he had broken through the Memory Charm that Barty Crouch Senior had placed on her without difficulty, unearthing the true memories buried beneath.
What came next was where it grew significant—the part that only Crouch Junior could have known.
After Voldemort found Bertha Jorkins, he learned two things he had not known before: that Barty Crouch Junior was still alive, and that the Quidditch World Cup was soon to be held.
With those two pieces of information, a bold plan took shape in his mind. He would rescue Crouch Junior—a Death Eater of unshakeable loyalty—and put him to use. He was desperately short of reliable servants, after all.
As it happened, at that very time Crouch Junior had been secretly attending the top-level box at the Quidditch World Cup, concealed under an Invisibility Cloak. Neither his father, old Crouch, nor the house-elf Winky had suspected for a moment that he had already learned to resist the Imperius Curse.
Taking advantage of a moment when Winky—overcome by her fear of heights—had buried her face in her hands and refused to look down, he had quietly stolen Harry's wand from the seat in front of him.
He had believed himself perfectly undetected. What he had not accounted for was the presence in that box of someone like Sherlock Holmes—and so he had been caught on the spot.
Every pair of eyes in the room drifted toward Sherlock at that. The looks they carried held admiration.
Sherlock's expression did not change. "How were you taken away?" he pressed.
Voldemort, as it turned out, had never originally intended to act at the Quidditch World Cup. His plan had been to wait until the Cup was over and then go directly to Crouch's house to retrieve his servant. His ally—a man named John Smith—had come to the World Cup merely to gather information.
But no one had foreseen that Sherlock would expose Crouch Junior at the World Cup itself, upending the entire scheme. Forced to improvise, John Smith changed the plan on the spot and seized him then and there.
What surprised them even further was how easily it had succeeded.
"Dawlish was far too careless," Crouch Junior said, in that flat, untroubled voice. "He assumed that placing me under the Imperius Curse would make everything safe. He had no idea I could throw off the Imperius even when my own father cast it. My master's man had no warning—he was struck down before he could react."
Every gaze in the room turned as one toward Fudge.
Fudge's face had gone crimson—a red to rival the Weasleys' hair—and deep inside, he was cursing with a vehemence he would never speak aloud.
Useless. The Aurors of the Ministry of Magic, and they couldn't keep hold of a prisoner who'd had no ability to resist. The Ministry's incompetence was now laid bare before everyone in the room, without a shred of cover left.
However thick his skin, he dearly wished the floor would open and swallow him whole.
It was Dumbledore who broke the silence at the critical moment:
"Tell us—when you were reunited with Voldemort, what did he ask you to do?"
"He said that he had allies now, but that it was not enough—nowhere near enough," said Crouch Junior. His eyes took on a feverish shine, his voice saturated with worship. "He asked me if I was willing to risk everything for him—of course I was! To serve him, to prove my loyalty to him—that is my dream, my greatest desire.
"He told me he needed a trusted agent inside Hogwarts. This person was to monitor Harry Potter and ensure he would successfully take hold of the Triwizard Cup. As it happened, his ally had learned that Moody would be replacing my father as a judge of the Triwizard Tournament, so we fixed our sights on him."
"Why Moody?" Bagman couldn't stop himself from interjecting. "I'm a judge too—why didn't you come after me?"
Harry looked at Bagman in genuine surprise. Why would anyone want to be targeted?
Did this man have some sort of peculiar taste?
"Because Moody was less likely to arouse suspicion than you," Crouch Junior replied, his tone as even as if he were discussing the weather.
"You once stood trial before the Wizengamot. Any irregularity in your behavior would have drawn scrutiny. Moody, on the other hand—everyone knows he has sworn undying enmity toward my master. No one would ever imagine he could be my master's agent. Besides, he is famously ill-tempered and reckless. No one with any sense would want to provoke such a man."
Bagman's feelings at this were exceedingly complicated.
On one hand, he bristled at being dismissed by the enemy. On the other, he felt a private, guilty surge of relief that they had passed over him. Just from what Professor McGonagall had described earlier, the real Moody had been through considerable suffering.
Crouch Junior's next words confirmed it.
"Smith and I did it together. We prepared the Polyjuice Potion in advance, then broke into Moody's home.
"He put up a fight—Moody is no easy target; the struggle was fierce and loud—but we were not weak either. I had spent some time recovering at my father's house and had regained my full strength, and Smith's abilities turned out to be considerably greater than we had expected. In the end, even Moody couldn't hold out against two opponents.
"We overpowered him and shoved him into the hidden compartment of his own trunk, then pulled several hairs from his head to add to the Potion. I drank it, took on his form, and removed his wooden leg and magical eye.
"It wasn't long before Arthur Weasley arrived to look into a Muggle complaint about the noise. By then I was ready. I'd set the rubbish bins spinning round the garden, and when he asked about it, I told him I'd heard someone break into the yard, which had caused the commotion. He believed me without question."
Fudge stared.
Would the Ministry never, ever manage to hold itself together?
"After that, I packed up Moody's clothing and his Dark Detector equipment, loaded him into the trunk along with it all, and set off for Hogwarts.
"I had placed him under the Imperius Curse—but I hadn't killed him, because I needed to question him. I had to understand his past, his habits, in order to imitate him convincingly.
"The Ministry people were easy enough to manage—one and all, dull and slow. But that student, Holmes—he was something else entirely. I had to maintain twelve times my normal vigilance just to handle him. One slip and I would have been exposed.
"Fortunately, he didn't know Moody particularly well, and I was careful to avoid too much contact with him. So I was never found out."
By now, the color of Fudge's face had become indistinguishable from the bottom of a cooking pot.
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