ANGELCAKE

Chapter 18 - Click

Elliott's tidy erasure of the potion and Hermione from the incident with Luna and Avery however, now proved a problem with the court believing her surprise evidence. Why hadn't Lovegood mentioned Hermione in her recent testimony? (And there was of course the secondary matter of why, if the extraordinary incident had occurred and it had been reported to a department within the Ministry by both girls, the court had never heard of it from them. It was in the interest of the prosecution's friends at the Department of Magical Complaints to keep the documents buried as well as Lucius's. When questioned why the matter hadn't been pursued, Langeman (realising that he had put his foot in his mouth) explained vehemently that it was down to the fact that Lovegood's statement had been so completely and compellingly contrary to Granger's and that there was no actual evidence that Malfoy had violated the girls personally in any way anyway.

"In fact from what Miss Granger described, it was Avery who actually put his hands on her in a way that one would class as indecent. All the evidence suggested overwhelmingly that Dolohov's mystery curse was the reason for the young Witch's poor health and that Miss Lovegood had either been hit by the same powerful curse without knowing, or had received passive spray, or perhaps a rebound of the curse, when it was directed at Hermione." Langeman went on to point out that while several Death Eaters that night had been accused of actually casting the Killing Curse and other deadly illegal spells, in the reports from children and adults present alike –with the exception of Hermione's claim– Malfoy had otherwise not been accused of any more than threatening to cast deadly curses and roughing some of them up, including wounding Potter slightly in their duel. This was in addition to leading the Death Eater break-in, which of course did put the children in mortal danger and caused millions of Galleons worth of damage – all of which he was being prosecuted for. Langeman noted that they had contacted Miss Granger, asking her to provide further information (which was true but Hermione had been too ill by that time to attend). So it was taken that she had changed her mind about the complaint and the matters were closed and filed. (The complete truth was that various members of the department, including Langeman had received death threats from Death Eaters several days after the break-in. With Malfoy being prosecuted anyway, there seemed to be no justifiable reason to put their lives in jeopardy by coming out with Lovegood and Granger's strangely conflicting statements.)

Langeman claimed that while there was no love lost between his family and the Death Eaters, on a professional level, he had been of the opinion that Hermione was speaking purely on emotion and although it might not have come through in her written statement, it had frequently sounded like she was contradicting herself during the interview. After their own 'exhaustive investigation' – the department had concluded that the only outcome of seeking prosecution for charges that wouldn't stand anyway, would be wasted Galleons at a time when the government could scarcely afford it, most especially as "Malfoy was facing many, much more concrete charges." As to the matter of why the statements hadn't been brought out in the current war trial if at least one member from the Department of Magical Complaints remembered the statements so well: Langeman answered that the prosecution (the task of researching evidence and deciding what was and was not important to bring forward, being THEIR job) had not requested them. And in any case, the statements had unfortunately been mislaid during the extensive repair work carried out after the break-in. This was all in addition to the fact that Miss Lovegood as well as the others had given their stories to the court in the existing war trial and Miss Granger had never come forward to further elaborate her claims, so the issue seemed to be moot. Elliott who had always considered Langeman to be "personally biased against Malfoy, besides being a thicko," was quite impressed.

The court accepted Langeman's explanation and returned to the issue of Hermione's new supportive claim. While the evidence now weighed very heavily in Lucius's favour, there was of course the question as to why both Hermione and Luna's medical reports gave such incongruous accounts if they indeed had the same affliction and why neither of the reports corroborated Hermione's new claim. (They so far had not asked Lucius if he had given the girls the special protection and although he had previously testified to casting non-verbal Encapsulate Charms on three of the children, locking two in a cupboard out of harm's way, and purposely losing the duel to Sirius Black and Harry Potter on the night, he had so far never mentioned Hermione, or the Mercurus.)