Inked Dragons

A Missed Opportunity

Although Rita Skeeter had the scoop of the week carefully hidden away in her lime-green handbag, unfortunately for her, she inadvertently missed the scoop of the decade. The missed opportunity was all because she failed to look properly when she was in the Muggle all-night Luchino Caffe on Tottenham Court Road. And when she left, she still failed to look again—rather a shortcoming for a journalist—for if she had just paused momentarily on the dark pavement and glanced back into the brightly lit café and at the famous wizard she'd just talked to, she would have seen the other man in café shift positions. She would have immediately recognised the pale man in the beanie and with the tattoos as he looked up with a sly smile on his aristocratic face.

Of course, she might have also realised that she had just been played like a pawn on a chessboard; so easily manipulated and so disposable in the strategic long game. She might even have been worried and perhaps gone on to play her part a little more cautiously. However, none of that happened and instead, she rushed away into the night with vague thoughts of Harry Potter doing naked yoga and grand imaginings of bringing down Arum Twarmer after uncovering some scandalous controversy that was deserving of weeks on the front page with her own name against every single headline. She imagined being the favoured journalist of the Prophet again, after all, she knew could sniff out a headliner from a hundred paces and scandal sells papers. She imagined her investigative work being worthy of many notable prizes at the Wizarding Journalism Awards and her becoming sought after and headhunted. She set her vision on America—imagining breaking into the American market and becoming the number one journalist for Wizarding World...

She decided her dreams were in the bag for everyone knew Arum Twarmer's life was shrouded in controversy and scandal, he just managed to always get away with it. She just needed the story that would make everyone finally sit up and take notice.

Rita's inflated ideas were bolstered by the fact that she'd been at Hogwarts with Arum and considered him a lazy, arrogant and snooty bastard and a bully from back then. Not much had changed, as far as Rita could see. Back at school, he'd been a rather flamboyant boy with a scruff of straw-yellow straight hair that had a tendency to offensively stick out at all angles and a loud pompous voice that made him sound like he'd not just been born with a silver spoon in his mouth but like there were several plums lodged in there too. He was one of those people who liked to end sentences with 'what? Or 'hey?', as if turning everything into a sentence for you to silently agree with. He'd aged into a rotund man who clearly drank too much fine wine and always wore ill-fitting scruffy robes that seemed to declare he had no respect for anyone or anything, despite his position in life. His hair hadn't changed one iota, it just looked like he cut it himself these days, and his voice was exactly the same but just seemed to spew out more lies and arrogance. Especially as he seemed to move from one wife to the next and had lost count of how many illegitimate children he had. Yet, it didn't matter how many times he was caught in his office with his pants down and a secretary on her knees, people seemed to fall over themselves to worship him. Rita wasn't sure why people seemed to love him. They called him eccentric. They seemed blind to his faults and called him clever because he'd studied The Classics at some posh Muggle university after Hogwarts and because he could speak Latin or something. She simply thought he was a bumbling embarrassment to British Wizarding politics.

It didn't help Arum's case that he had snubbed Rita when Rita had had a bit of a crush on him in her fifth year; Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned and all that. A slow plan of painful vengeance was all that was on Rita Skeeter's mind as she left the café and she couldn't quite let go of that enchantingly nasty aspect of her character.

What Rita Skeeter should have been focusing on was the fact that there had been two men in the café that night; one sitting directly behind Harry Potter, writing something in a notebook and probably listening in to every word that was spoken between her and the famous wizard.