Saturday was a Hogsmeade open day, and a hooded figure slipped into Honeydukes near the start of the afternoon rush.
His clothes were plain and unremarkable — deliberately so, nothing like the composed Slytherin polish he generally maintained. He moved quietly through the crowd of sweet-buying students, collected the Weasley twins with a look, and the three of them left the main street without drawing particular attention.
The house was two doors down from the Gladrags Wizardwear, wedged between the clothing shop and a small teahouse. It was two storeys with an attic and a basement, and it had been empty long enough that the building had developed the particular look of a place that had given up on itself. Several notices had been nailed to the front door, the top layer of which was a firmly-worded request from the neighbouring shopkeeper to address the state of the facade.
Inside was worse.
The ground floor was dim, the curtains thick with years of accumulated dust. Where sunlight came through the gaps, it illuminated a dense swirl of floating particles. Draco suppressed a cough and made a mental note that the carpet would need to come up entirely.
Mrs. Mason, the current owner, was a silver-haired witch of indeterminate age wearing a hat with a significant tilt to it. When she came downstairs and found three boys waiting for her — clearly students — her expression did not conceal her assessment of the meeting.
Nevertheless, she led them up to the first-floor reception room with the brisk pragmatism of someone who had decided to get it over with.
"Who am I dealing with?" she asked, looking between the twins.
The carpet in the reception room had outlived several previous owners and was not wearing the experience well. Each step raised a small, pungent cloud. Draco positioned himself near the window, where the air was marginally better.
"Me," he said.
Mrs. Mason recalibrated. She had been reading the twins — cheerful, impulsive, the sort who could be managed with a few well-placed compliments and a sense of urgency — and had prepared accordingly. She had not been looking at the smaller boy behind them. She looked at him now.
"I've heard you're planning to move abroad," Draco said, not waiting for her to recover. "Would you consider selling the property outright rather than renting?"
This was not what she had expected. She had not, if she was being honest, expected anyone to make an offer on the building at all.
Her cloudy eyes sharpened. "If the price is right."
"What are you asking?"
"At market value — ten thousand Galleons, at minimum." She said it the way you say something you expect to be the end of the conversation.
Draco looked at her steadily. "That would be a reasonable figure," he said, "if not for the location and the rumours."
"What rumours?"
"The house isn't on the main street, which limits foot traffic significantly. And the Shrieking Shack is close enough that it affects perception of the surrounding properties. As I'm sure you're aware."
Mrs. Mason's expression flickered.
She had prepared for cheerful enthusiasm and naïve questions. This was neither. She looked at the boy's clothes again — plain, worn-in, the hood still partly up — and caught a glimpse of his shoes through the gap in the coffee table. She went still.
She had seen that cut before. Savile Row, or the wizarding equivalent. Her niece's husband had owned a similar pair. They had not been inexpensive.
She revised her approach.
"The haunting is nothing more than a story," she said, more carefully. "The price reflects what comparable properties—"
"How many inquiries have you had this year?" Draco asked.
A pause.
"You're the first serious one," she said.
"Then the price doesn't reflect comparable properties. It reflects what you'd like it to be worth." He tilted his head slightly. "I'm not saying the house has no value. I'm saying the current asking price doesn't account for the renovation costs I'd need to take on, the location disadvantage, or the fact that it's been unlettable for several years. Those are real costs."
Mrs. Mason looked at him for a long moment.
Then she said: "What are you prepared to offer?"
They went back and forth for twenty minutes. Mrs. Mason was experienced, practical, and not above trying a few angles she thought might not be noticed. Draco noticed all of them, and said so clearly enough each time that she stopped trying.
In the end, the house sold for five thousand Galleons.
Both of them left the table satisfied — Mrs. Mason considerably more so than she was letting on, given that the property had been generating nothing but maintenance notices and neighbourhood complaints for three years. Draco had paid half the asking price for a building he knew would appreciate. The confidentiality clauses in the contract were standard and thorough, and Mrs. Mason would be in America within the week in any case.
The paperwork was produced, checked, and signed. Draco verified each document against the next with the ease of someone who had watched this process done correctly several times.
"You may leave whenever you're ready," he said, when everything was in order.
Mrs. Mason gathered her things and went, looking considerably lighter in spirit than she had on arrival.
The Weasley twins, who had not said a word for the better part of half an hour, looked at each other.
"Pay up," George said.
Fred made a disgusted sound and tossed him a Galleon.
"You actually bought it," Fred said, crossing to the window and looking out at the narrow street below. "I thought you were testing the water."
"A Malfoy doesn't test the water," Draco said mildly, tucking the documents into his bag. "We acquire the asset."
"Five thousand Galleons," George said, his eyes moving around the room with an expression that was rapidly shifting from disbelief to something closer to genuine interest. "Just like that."
"The renovation will cost more than the house did," Draco said, "which is why we should talk about it now."
He had done his calculations over several evenings. The basement for storage. The ground floor for selling, with the frontage cleared and the windows replaced. The first floor for product development — somewhere with ventilation, which was currently a distant ambition. Staff rooms, eventually. The attic he intended to keep for his own use.
"The attic," he said. "I'd like to keep that for myself."
"Fine by us," George said, without hesitation.
"I'll send Dobby to start the preliminary work." He snapped his fingers.
Dobby appeared with a crack. He was wearing a Christmas tea-towel, a Father Christmas hat several sizes too large that had been decorated with candy canes — a gift Draco had given him without thinking, and which Dobby had immediately incorporated into his self-presentation. He looked delighted to be summoned.
"Stay here," Draco told him. "Help with the renovation. Work with Fred and George."
"Yes, little master!" Dobby said, already looking at the carpet with the focused expression of a professional confronting an interesting problem.
"Our mum has always wanted a house-elf," Fred said, watching Dobby begin a systematic inspection of the floor. "She'll be devastated when she finds out."
"She won't find out," George said, glancing at Draco's expression.
The mail-order business could continue alongside the shop, they agreed — students could only visit Hogsmeade once a month, but orders could come in any time. No reason to close one in favour of the other.
"Filch is going to hate us even more," Fred said, with pleasure.
"He won't know what he's confiscating," Draco said. "The Skiving Snackboxes don't look like what they are. And Filch—" He paused.
He had overheard this the previous year, when Hermione had mentioned it in the library. He was aware, in retrospect, that he had been paying close attention to her conversations for longer than was entirely casual.
"Filch can't identify potions ingredients," he said. "He's a Squib."
"We know," George said, dismissively. "We found out last year."
"We sent him a Kwikspell enrolment form," Fred added, with satisfaction. "Lesson one: take your wand—"
"We were going to send him more," George said, "but we've been busy."
"He's a bit preoccupied at the moment anyway," Draco said.
He did not pursue it. Mrs. Norris was still petrified, and Filch's grief over the cat was a complication that did not need to be made worse.
Then Dobby touched the curtains.
A Doxy launched itself out of the folds with an outraged buzz. It was small, black-furred, and possessed of the particular furious energy of a creature that has been sleeping undisturbed for some time and has taken this interruption personally. Its double row of needle-sharp teeth were bared, its wings beating loudly.
"Careful, little master!" Dobby cried.
Draco, mid-sentence, flicked his wand without looking directly at it. The Doxy hit the opposite wall and slid, unconscious, into a fold of the carpet.
George watched this with raised eyebrows.
"Don't throw it away — the venom's useful," Fred said, scrambling forward and depositing it into a cloth bag. He looked at the curtains. They were moving. "How many do you think are in there?"
"All of them," Draco said, with great certainty.
"Dobby!" Fred called. "Any Doxy-repellent in your stores?"
"Dobby will find some!" the elf said, already preparing to Disapparate. "Buy plenty? Yes? There are many more in the curtains — Dobby can feel them!"
"Buy plenty," Draco confirmed, and tossed him a bag of coins. Dobby vanished with a crack.
"Right," said George, staring at the curtains. "We'll need to fumigate before we can do anything else."
"Replace the curtains, the carpet, and the furniture," Draco said. He was already on the stairs. He had a very low tolerance for the particular combination of dust, Doxy infestation, and aged soft furnishings this room was offering. "Everything goes."
"Agreed," Fred said cheerfully, poking at the curtains with his wand from a safe distance.
Draco paused at the top of the stairs.
"One more thing." He looked back at the twins. "On the Marauder's Map — did you ever notice a name appearing near Ron? Peter Pettigrew?"
Fred's expression shifted slightly. "Yeah, we've seen that. Old Peter. He's been dead for years."
"We thought Ron might have a ghost," George said, with a fraternal indifference that Draco found remarkable. "He doesn't seem troubled by it, so we haven't mentioned it."
"You saw a dead man's name appearing beside your brother on a map," Draco said, "and you didn't mention it."
"The map's old," Fred said, with the tone of someone offering a perfectly reasonable explanation. "Could be a glitch."
"We did check," George added. "Went into his dorm in the middle of the night to have a look. Nothing there but Ron snoring and talking in his sleep."
Draco looked at them both for a moment.
"I'd keep an eye on it," he said.
"Sure," said Fred.
Draco descended the stairs, stepped out onto the street, and breathed in the cold Hogsmeade air.
Behind him, through the open door, he could already hear the twins discussing Doxy-catching techniques with the enthusiasm of people who have just discovered an unexpected source of potion ingredients.
He walked back toward the castle, thinking about Peter Pettigrew and the map, and about a small, old rat that had been living in the Weasley household for twelve years.