Mole was reading correspondence when Rowan knocked on Friday morning. She waved him in without looking up, finished the letter she was on, set it aside, and folded her hands.
"Mr. Ashcroft. I was going to summon you today if you hadn't come on your own. Sit down."
He sat. The office looked the same as it had in first year. Portraits of former headmasters dozed in their frames along the walls. A brass telescope stood by the window. The desk was buried in parchment.
"The Department of Magical Law Enforcement sent an investigator to your shop over the summer," Mole said. "An Officer Singer. Professor Weasley informed me of the details. I gather the investigation was not what you'd hoped."
"She spent three hours in the shop, took some notes, and classified the case as inconclusive due to insufficient evidence. The attackers left nothing behind."
"They left you behind," Mole said. "You were there. You saw their faces, heard their voices, watched them cast. That's evidence, Mr. Ashcroft, even if Officer Singer didn't think to ask for it in a form she could use."
She stood and crossed to a cabinet behind her desk. Inside, on a shelf between a stack of old ledgers and a jar of something that moved, sat a shallow stone basin carved with runes around its rim. She carried it to the desk and set it between them.
"This is the school Pensieve. I've used it twice in my tenure, both times to resolve disputes between students who couldn't agree on what happened. It allows the extraction and viewing of memories in their complete, unedited form." She looked at him. "I'm offering it to you now. Extract what you remember of the attack. Officer Singer may have closed her investigation, but a set of Pensieve memories delivered to her desk gives her something she can't ignore."
Rowan looked at the basin. The runes around its rim were old, the carving style predating anything Fenwick had shown them. The surface of the stone was polished smooth from use. He'd read about Pensieves in Moonstone's advanced text, the theory of externalising memory through wand contact at the temple, but he'd never had access to one.
She produced a set of small glass vials from a drawer. "These are for storage and transport. Seal them properly and they'll keep indefinitely."
Rowan drew his wand. He thought about the attack. The anti-Apparation ward settling over the building. Clara's voice, barely a whisper, identifying what it was. The five figures crossing the square. The way they moved, weight centred, wand arms loose.
He placed his wand to his temple and pulled.
The sensation was cold and strange, like drawing a thread through the inside of his skull. A silver filament came with the wand tip, shimmering, and he lowered it into the first vial. Mole sealed it with a tap of her wand.
He extracted three more. The first exchange of spells. The moment Athena struck the attacker's face. The word that dropped the ward and pulled every body from the room.
The last one was harder. Clara on the floor. The Cruciatus. He had to hold the wand steady while his mind replayed the sound she'd made, and his hand shook, and the memory came out ragged at the edges.
Mole sealed it without comment. She lined the four vials on her desk and looked at them for a moment.
"I'll have these sent to Officer Singer by school owl this afternoon, along with a letter from me on Hogwarts letterhead requesting the case be reopened. The letter will note that a student under my care was subjected to an organised attack by multiple adult wizards using dark magic, and that the DMLE's initial investigation failed to collect available evidence." She met his eyes. "A Headmistress's letter carries weight. Even with the DMLE."
"Thank you, Headmistress."
"Don't thank me. You should have had this option weeks ago. The fact that nobody offered it is its own kind of failure." She began returning the Pensieve to its cabinet. "Is there anything else?"
Rowan hesitated. The vault was on his mind but whatever was stopping him from telling Iris last night would stop him here too. He could feel it, the closed door in his throat, ready to slam shut if he tried.
"No, Headmistress. Thank you."
He left the office and descended the spiral staircase. The vials were on their way to Singer. Whether anything came of it was another question, but at least the evidence existed now, outside his head, in a form that couldn't be dismissed.
The cursed vault had been on his mind all week.
Peeves had said that Rowan had been walking past it for years. The fifth floor was where he went to Ancient Runes with Fenwick, where the Charms corridor connected to the main staircase, where he cut through on his way to the library three times a week.
That night he pulled out the journal from first year, the one where he'd catalogued his Christmas explorations of the castle. Dungeon corridors and their contents. Tower staircases and secret passages. And one entry with a sketch of archaic runes surrounding a warded door deep beneath the castle that he'd never been able to open. He'd noted the feel of it, the sense of old magic pressing outward from behind stone. He remembered that sensation clearly. If the vault door felt anything like the dungeon door, he'd recognise it.