In the end, Harry still hadn't managed to find out where exactly Malfoy had hidden himself.
He couldn't afford to linger there much longer trying to work it out, because Filch, having evidently finished his lunch, was already limping back this way.
"Oh, my precious darling, whatever are you doing asleep out here in this draughty corridor—you'll catch a chill!"
Spotting Mrs. Norris stretched out comfortably in a patch of thin sunlight further along the corridor, Filch quickened his hobbling pace considerably.
He gathered her up carefully into his arms and, right there in front of Harry nuzzled his own bulging, red-veined nose affectionately against the fur beneath her whiskers before wandering off toward his office, humming some cheerful, tuneless little melody under his breath as he went.
The students down in the Great Hall were beginning to come out and disperse toward their afternoon classes as well, and Harry knew he had to shed the Invisibility Cloak before the stairwell traffic grew too thick to risk removing it unseen.
All through the remainder of the afternoon including Professor McGonagall's Transfiguration class—Harry's mind kept drifting back, again and again, to where exactly Malfoy might have vanished to, and what he'd been doing.
The lesson passed in something of a blur around the persistent question.
"I think that's quite enough, Harry—"
During the evening run after dinner, Hermione was clearly starting to lose patience with Harry's endless, circling speculation.
"I genuinely think you'd do better to put your energy into your actual schoolwork instead. I trust you haven't forgotten this is our O.W.L. year, and the professors are hardly going to grant extensions for time spent theorising about Malfoy's corridor habits."
"But if a Death Eater has genuinely infiltrated Hogwarts—"
Harry was rather stunned that Hermione seemed so unmoved by the whole of what he was suggesting.
"That's nothing but a guess, Harry."
Hermione said, slightly out of breath from the pace of the jog.
"I don't think Malfoy could possibly get up to anything harmful to the school, not right under Professor Watson's nose, of all people. Think about who we're talking about here."
Harry glanced over toward Ron, hoping for at least a little backup in the argument, but Ron didn't seem to be listening at all—he was watching a scattering of students out on the distant lawn practising their flying on broomsticks as he ran.
Biting his lip, Harry swallowed down the rising frustration and said nothing further on the subject.
Over the next two days of that first week back at school, Harry kept his eyes fixed on Malfoy whenever he got the chance, watching closely for anything even faintly suspicious in the way he carried himself through the corridors and the Great Hall.
It had become practically an obsession by this point.
Even Harry himself couldn't quite explain why he cared so intensely about proving the theory correct.
Perhaps it was simply that he couldn't stand the feeling of losing—Malfoy had, after all, caught him tailing him back in Diagon Alley and some stubborn part of him wanted very badly to prove he was fully of figuring out exactly what Malfoy was scheming.
But unfortunately, across those two full days of careful watching, Malfoy's behaviour remained stubbornly, disappointingly ordinary at least everywhere Harry could actually manage to observe him.
Friday morning, the moment Harry and Ron came down the stairs into the Great Hall for breakfast, they were both brought up short by the changes already made to the place.
The four House tables, which had never once changed in configuration in anyone's living memory at Hogwarts, had suddenly been joined by an entirely fifth table, wedged in tightly right between the Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw sections which meant the usual aisles between all the tables had grown narrower.
Harry stood there blinking at the rearranged Hall for a few seconds before the reason finally came back to him properly: this evening, the academic exchange delegation Professor Watson had described was due to arrive at Hogwarts.
If Harry remembered the details correctly from that conversation at the Leaky Cauldron, Professor Watson had said the delegation would be made up of all sorts of magical beings possessing human-level intelligence.
Even Dobby, Harry recalled, along with Kreacher—that ancient, muttering relic who served the Black family and Freodom, would apparently be taking part in the whole arrangement.
Just imagining a delegation of such a motley, wildly mismatched collection of different magical individuals all sitting together at that new fifth table in the Great Hall of Hogwarts, sharing an actual meal alongside the ordinary students, was, frankly, a rather amusing image to hold in his head for a moment.
Though Hermione, no doubt, was going to be run off her feet managing the whole affair, since something—Harry felt fairly confident predicting, was bound to go at least a little wrong.
After a moment's pause taking in the rearranged Hall, Harry and Ron made their way over toward the Gryffindor table to find their usual seats.
"How are you feeling this morning, Hermione?"
Harry pulled out the chair beside her, and after picking through the available breakfast options laid out before him, speared a sausage with his silver fork and shoved it directly into his mouth.
"Absolutely dreadful!"
Hermione's face was hidden behind a raised copy of the Daily Prophet, so Harry and Ron couldn't properly see her expression from where they sat but hearing the raw feeling in her voice as she said it gave Harry an uneasy twitch.
"I thought you'd be looking forward to it, Hermione?"
"Looking forward to it?"
Hermione's face emerged sharply from behind the newspaper, glaring furiously at Harry across the table.
Harry realised, from the sheer intensity of the look, that they weren't talking about the same subject at all, and his eyes shifted quickly to the paper clutched in her hands.
"Oh—no, I meant—what, has something bad happened? What's in the paper?"
"Look at this!"
Without saying anything further, Hermione simply thrust the newspaper across the table into his hands, while she herself turned, visibly troubled, to watch the staff table further up the Hall where several professors wore the same grave, ashen expressions as they read through their own copies.
Harry took the paper from her. One glance was all it took for his own face to darken completely.
On the front page sat a photograph of a bridge in London.
The wizarding photograph played out, over and over in an endless, horrifying loop, the collapse of a bridge of considerable size and span—the steel support cables strung between its two banks snapping one after another, the entire iron structure of the bridge itself was buckling under its weight and crashing down into the dark waters of the Thames below, while the cars still crossing the bridge tumbled into the water one after another.
The caption printed beneath the image told Harry, the death toll from the disaster.
Two hundred and seventy-six Muggles had died in the catastrophe outright, according to the reporting—including forty Muggle schoolchildren who had been aboard a school bus crossing the bridge.
The river's surface in the photograph, whipped into chaotic waves by the impact, still showed the faint, desperate shapes of people thrashing against the current—even through the photograph, Harry could feel their despair pressing against him.
"Death Eaters."
Ron, too, looked genuinely shaken by the horror in the image, murmuring the single word aloud, his face had gone pale.
"Who else would it be!"
Harry said through gritted teeth, the paper was trembling slightly in his own grip.
Plenty of other students scattered throughout the Hall were reading their own copies of the same front page by now, and every single one of them felt some version of the same pang of grief at the sheer, senseless brutality of the event.
As more and more students walked in for breakfast and the news spread from table to table in low murmurs, a pall of misery settled slowly, heavily over the entire Great Hall.
Over the course of the summer, the sprawling, chaotic battle that had broken out in Diagon Alley had ultimately ended in a clear victory for the Ministry of Magic. The Dark Lord's forces had suffered a severe blow in the fighting.
Some Death Eaters had been killed on the spot; others had been dragged off to prison.
As for the supporters Voldemort and his minions had gathered from all corners of the wizarding world, most of them having taken heavy, demoralising losses in that single engagement had simply turned their backs on Voldemort's cause and abandoned him.
The general state of law and order across the British wizarding world had improved enormously as a result of that single, decisive victory.
At the Ministry's regular press conferences, and in every subsequent report the Daily Prophet now ran, Voldemort was no longer referred to by the old, fearful evasion of "You-Know-Who" —the paper had begun using his actual name directly.
On top of all that, Professor Watson, who had spearheaded the victory at Diagon Alley, had gone on to forcefully negotiate the so-called "Plaza Accord" with a great many pureblood families, an agreement aimed at restoring prosperity to trade and industry across the British wizarding world.
All of this accumulated good news had led a great many ordinary people to mistakenly believe that the war had begun to recede. That Voldemort's remaining strength had already crumbled to pieces in the aftermath of one lost battle. That the worst, surely, was now behind them.
But this horrific atrocity happening in London—in the Muggle world, of all places, where the victims couldn't even begin to comprehend what had actually been done to them landed like a heavy punch to that entire comfortable narrative, shattering every one of those unrealistic hopes in a single morning.
Voldemort, it was now brutally clear, had not given up on sowing terror and slaughter. If anything, the defeat at Diagon Alley had only stoked his existing savagery further, made him crueller still in response.
"Isn't there anything that can be done to stop the Death Eaters from going on hurting Muggles like this?"
Forcing down his own rising fury with effort, Harry finished reading through the full article.
Hermione said nothing in response.
Muggles, who didn't even know magic properly existed as a real force in the world, were simply too fragile when caught off guard by a wizard's assault—they had, quite literally, no way to defend themselves at all against something they couldn't perceive coming.
"Is there any way to prevent this sort of thing happening again, Bryan? Albus?"
At the very moment Harry was voicing his own question down at the Gryffindor table, over at the staff table, Professor McGonagall—her face filled with anguish turned to ask the same question of the two men nearest her.
The two men named fell silent at the question, exactly as Hermione had a moment before.
Guarding against Death Eater attacks on Muggles?
It was, in genuine practice, an incredibly difficult thing to accomplish with any real reliability.
Muggles were scattered across a vast, largely undifferentiated expanse of land throughout Britain, and it was far too easy for Death Eaters, operating from the concealing shadows of anonymity, to engineer some act of terror.
The Ministry simply didn't possess anything close to the manpower required to guarantee flawless, comprehensive protection across the entire country.
Granted, the Ministry could monitor, in general terms, whether magic had recently been used in a given geographic area, and could theoretically target its limited surveillance resources accordingly based on that detection.
But it had no reliable way of actually determining whether any particular instance of detected magic was aimed at harming Muggles, or was simply an ordinary wizard going about some entirely mundane piece of business nearby.
They could hardly justify rushing Aurors out to investigate every single time the Ministry's detection wards flagged a spell being cast anywhere near Muggle territory, even with ten times the Ministry's current staffing levels, there still wouldn't be enough trained people available to properly chase down every flagged instance across the whole country.
As for the alternative approach—using planted spies to learn of Voldemort's specific terror plots in advance, before they could be carried out?
That was certainly possible in principle. But any such approach risked exposing the spy involved to a horrific fate if discovered, and besides all that, Voldemort typically assigned separate tasks to different Death Eaters working individually, forbidding them from communicating with one another about the specifics of any given operation.
"It's not possible to guard against the Death Eaters' evil completely—"
After a long, considering moment of silence at the staff table, Bryan sighed faintly.
"If one were willing to pay an enormous price for it, though, a limited degree of prevention could be managed. Along with, at the very least, getting proper aid to injured Muggles as quickly as possible whenever an attack does occur."
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