Hermione and the Investigators

Summary: In Alex Mack’s universe – a universe without magic – there is also a Hermione Granger. A teen Hermione who has her own Ron and Harry. A Hermione who will have to deal with their very own He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named…Disclaimers: This is set in the Alex Mack / Terawatt universe (which I have been calling the Teraverse or the AlexVerse), even though Alex will not appear. I don’t own Alex Mack, even if Terawatt is my own creation. And it features my own take on characters developed by J.K. Rowling. Guess what. I don’t own them either! It is also implicitly a crossover with James Bond, which I also have failed to own somehow.Warning: In the words of the ever-helpful Zeviz, ‘This universe has absolutely no magic, but super-science can create some similar results, and biochemicals can cause mutations that create superheroes and supervillains (although that wouldn't become public during this story's timeline). This is also a James Bond crossover, so expect that level of violence.’ If you already hate any of the following: Ron, Hermione, Harry, Ginny, Ron/Hermione, or Harry/Ginny then you need to read this carefully, because this will be from Hermione’s rather more perceptive perspective. And you might find that my characters are subtly different enough from Rowling’s writing that your preconceived notions may not apply. Because this is sort of a prequel for “The Secret Return of Alex Mack”, you do not have to read TSRoAM first, however that story will have universe-building this will not, and that story will make more sense if you read all of “The League of Extraordinary Women” first.Author’s Note: I intend to migrate the HP universe to the AlexVerse and pave over a lot of the plotholes and universe-building fails that many people have accused J.K. Rowling of, due to my setting it in a different universe with different rules of engagement. You might need to read this story and then let me know how well you think I succeeded, or how badly I messed up.Spoilers: Although set in the AlexVerse, there are no Alex Mack spoilers. The story will hint at a number of spoilers throughout the Harry Potter series, but there will be differences.Extra Author's Note: Some characters have the names that HP fans will expect. Some do not. Most of the changes are due to dialogue in "The Secret Return of Alex Mack", after which I was boxed in. I had created the canon names that I then had to use here. So if there are names that annoy you, it's because I just had to get cute with some throwaway lines way back when I had no intention of writing this story. Feel free to hurl heavy objects at my muse Agatha. It is all her fault. But then, it is always her fault.Hermione Granger sat in the middle of the couch with her head down and her hands clasped together so tightly that pressure-welding was a possibility. She had thought she had gotten away with it. She was apparently not sufficiently up on current forensic tools or investigative techniques, because she was about to face a police inspector and a member of the Home Office, if her mum’s lawyer Mister Holloway was correct.She was only eleven. She didn’t want to spend the next thirty years in prison being some large lesbian predator’s ‘girlfriend’. Or whatever they called it. Her parents didn’t let her watch those kinds of television shows, so she was sort of depending on what she had gleaned from Usenet and the Internet.Anyway, prison lesbians probably found prettier girlfriends than buck-toothed know-it-alls with bushy hair they couldn’t control. Her parents were dentists, but her mum was insisting on Hermione waiting until her facial bones had stopped growing before seeing if her two upper central incisors really needed to be fixed. And she had her dad’s curly, bushy hair, which he kept ridiculously short to control it, and yet her parents refused to let her get a brush cut – all right, realistically, a pixie cut or something like that – so her hair wasn’t an uncontrollable mess all the time.Her mother had needed to miss a day in the office because of this, which was going to lead to other penalties, because her mum was very serious about being a dentist and taking care of her patients, even if she was in a joint practice with Dr. Teitelbaum and Dr. Athreya and Dr. Aziz, although Dr. Teitelbaum was on sabbatical in the Middle East this year. Hermione had never caused problems before. She hadn’t missed a day of school in four and a half years, and on days without school when neither of her parents was at home, like the summer hols, Mrs. Wainwright took care of her. Her dad was an oral surgeon and had two surgeries this morning, so he had to go to work, but she could tell how upset he was when he left.It always made her stomach wonky when her parents were upset. She didn’t think they had ever been really upset with her before. Not even when she was five and told them she was not going to be a dentist when she grew up, and instead she was going to become a librarian. She had been convinced that librarian was the best job in the world, because you’d get to sit and read books all day. And they would pay you to do it!Now she knew that librarians didn’t just sit and read books all day. And now she knew there were much better jobs than librarian out there, like software designer and statistician and research chemist and astrophysicist.Everyone said that Hermione Granger was a good child. Mrs. Wainwright, who was a dear. Patrice, the au pair who had taken care of her when she was little. All her teachers, who had always been impressed with how much she knew and how much effort she was willing to put into classes. The parents of the children who were willing to associate with the school know-it-all, even if she helped a few of them with their homework in order to get them to let her hang out with them.None of them knew what Hermione was really capable of. Apparently, a police inspector had figured it out, though. And that was not good.It wasn’t as if Mister Herstein hadn’t deserved every bit of it.It was probably a very bad sign for her future psychological health that she still wasn’t feeling tons of remorse.Mr. Holloway let the policemen in. “Jean, Hermione, this is Inspector Merrill of the Yard and Mister Tremain from the Home Office.”Her mum looked at the men and said to the inspector, “I simply do not see why someone from the Ministry needs to be at this meeting, and why your P.C. is not.”Mr. Holloway agreed, “That is a point we are going to need to discuss when the time comes.”Hermione’s mum nervously settled the men in chairs opposite the couch. The inspector glared at Hermione, while the other man just nodded her way. Hermione was terrified. But she had learned several things from watching the telly. First and foremost, do not incriminate yourself. Second, do not say ‘you can’t prove it’ because only the guilty people ever said that on the shows she had watched. Third, policemen glared at people like that to make them confess, and she really needed not to confess to any illegal activities.She had learned a number of other things from scouring the internet, but she was hoping not to use any of that.The inspector looked at her mum and started out, “Mrs. Granger-”“Doctor Granger,” Her mum insisted firmly. “Mrs. Granger is my mother-in-law.”Well played, mum!The inspector frowned, “Granger. We are here to discuss what your daughter Hermeeown Jean Granger-”Hermione couldn’t resist. “Hermione. My name is pronounced her-MY-oh-nee.”The inspector refused to be rattled twice in a row. “-did between January 18 and May 7. The charges could include unlawful entry, interfering in a police investigation, concealment of evidence, assault occasioning actual bodily harm… and murder.”Her mum just about burst into tears. “You cannot be serious! Not my Hermione! She’s a good girl. This is insane!” She looked at Mr. Holloway and demanded, “Roger! Do something!”Mr. Holloway calmly said, “I am doing something, Jean. I am listening calmly to the policeman as he ruins his own case, and I am trying to assess what is really going on.”The inspector glared hard at Hermione. “Would you like to say anything, Hermione?”She noticed that he hadn’t read her rights to her, or anything like that. She knew something was up. She tried to sound calm. “I think you must have confused me with some other Hermione Granger, someone who sounds like some sort of sociopath.”The other man frowned at the inspector, “Here now, Ted. Let’s calm down. I’m sure Miss Granger is a rational, common-sense girl who would be happy to help us.”And it dawned on her. It really was just like on the telly. This was ‘good cop, bad cop’. She hadn’t thought real policemen did that. It seemed so blatant on television, and these men were a lot more subtle. It was unfortunate for them that she was good at induction.Mister Tremain smiled at her. “Now I’m sure you have plenty of explanations for all of this, and we can get everything all sorted out.”Mister Holloway quickly interjected, “Hermione, as your family’s solicitor, it would be remiss of me not to point out that you do not have to say anything.”Mister Tremain smiled at him, “But wouldn’t that make her look quite guilty? We wouldn’t want that?”And why not? Surely people from the Home Office didn’t show up on your doorstep every day just to protect you from standard police investigations. No, there was something interesting going on, and she wanted to know what.Inspector Merrill flipped open his notepad and leafed through a series of pages. “Miss Granger, did you not argue with a police constable when you were interviewed on the 18th of January?”She knew where they were headed, so she was careful. “Is this that awful mess when they started looking for Jenny? Am I in trouble for telling that quite rude policeman he was being dense? I’m really sorry I said that.”Her mum scowled, “Surely you can’t think she was involved in that horrid mess! Jennifer was one of Hermione’s closest friends! And everyone knows Jennifer was…”Her mum didn’t want to say it. Ten year old Jennifer Anne Carter, one of the few real friends that Hermione had ever managed to make, went missing. She was found the next week, having been violated and brutalised and murdered, and then tossed into the woods like someone’s empty beer bottle.Hermione tried to sound calm. “I do remember some of that. The police officer was being particularly stupid about several points I wanted to make, and persisted in assuming that Jenny had run away. She most definitely had not, and if she had been considering it, I would have talked her out of it. She was having the standard arguments with her older sister. It was just like everyone else’s problems with siblings, which I have only seen from the outside, but I feel that gives me a certain perspective that some of my friends lack.”She would have given anything to have been wrong about that. If only Jenny really had run away, and could have come back home in a couple days. If only…The inspector read some more. “After the body was found, you were quite persistent in trying to learn details of the investigation and trying to advance certain theories of your own.”She really had stuck her head in the noose, hadn’t she? She fudged, “But that was only because the P.C. who interviewed me seemed so extraordinarily incompetent. Like the men on the telly who end up having to call in Scotland Yard or Sherlock Holmes or Dr. Gideon Fell. I was worried that no one would solve the crime. I did look up the National Crime Statistics to find out what the solution rate was on this type of crime, and the numbers were quite disheartening when the arrest isn’t made within forty-eight hours.”Actually, she had been trying to solve the crime herself. And she had. She had figured out who had done it, and how he had done it, and that he might have committed some other rape-murders of young girls over the past decade or so, and what his modus operandi had to be, and that there was no solid evidence connecting him to any of the crimes. But the inspector knew that already, and was trying to bully her so Mr. Tremain could step in and be the ‘good cop’ and get her to incriminate herself, even though they had very deliberately not read from the little card with her rights on it that police read on all the police shows. And that meant… something unusual. She just had yet to figure it all out.She didn’t think they were going to give her the time to do so. She just reminded herself that she was extraordinarily good on tests, particularly tests with time pressures.The policeman kept going, trying to get her to say something untoward. He virtually accused her of breaking into the police files in the police station. She hadn’t, although she had explored the computers of several police officers. It was hardly her fault that the police station had really poor computer security and a quite nice internet connection to link them with other police forces around Britain. He did accuse her of unlawful entry into Mr. Herstein’s home and office. And he revealed that they had an embarrassingly good idea of what she had done.“What exactly are you accusing my daughter of doing?” her mum fumed.Mister Holloway smiled, “They seem to be ensuring that anything any of us say cannot be used in evidence, and that most of their evidence would not be accepted in court.”The inspector glared at Hermione as he answered her mum. “Have you ever seen the movie ‘Gaslight’?”“Why yes, we watched the old black and white version with Hermione not that long ago, and…” Her mother choked as she realised what was being suggested.The inspector lifted a small evidence bag out of his blazer. It held one of her speakers. The one she thought she must have lost on the way home when she was cleaning up after herself. Blast! She tried to look at it as if it were something interesting, instead of something incriminating. “Is that some sort of transponder? May I see it?”He stared down at Hermione and tried to terrify her by sheer force of will. “Your daughter decided to ‘gaslight’ Oliver Harold Herstein and make him kill himself. She was remarkably successful. On his death we finally gained legal admittance to his house, and we found evidence that Jennifer Anne Carter had been in his basement and had bled there, although that evidence could have been planted just as easily as this speaker and similar equipment was slipped into his house.”Her mum stared at her in shock. Hermione tried to sound calm, even if she was not. “Are you crazy? How could someone like me break into houses? Or do that ‘gaslight’ technique, because that movie clearly required extensive help from someone on the inside, and more than one person was involved.”Her mum looked utterly relieved to have Hermione say that. She would have to remember that her mum knew her a little too well, and wouldn’t forget about any of this.It wasn’t as if Hermione had been given a choice. The police had no DNA evidence and no forensic evidence. She had induced from those clues that Jenny’s killer had plenty of experience in doing this kind of horror. That let her narrow down the possibilities by searching the police computer databases for unsolved rape-murders with similar patterns of behaviours. Then she had checked who in the area could have been involved in any of the other crimes.Mister Herstein’s name had virtually leapt off the screen at her. The man worked in the candy shop over near the school. He was extremely friendly with all the children, but more so with girls of a certain age. He had potentially lived in or near three other communities over the past thirteen years, all of which had a similar crime committed. Hermione had left anonymous tips about him and the candy shop, but the police had been unable to come up with enough hard evidence to search his house. The man lived next door to Mister Prentiss, a rather ruthless local solicitor who lived for the opportunity to sue any government agency or business with deep enough pockets, and Mister Herstein had already hired Mr. Prentiss to represent him.Hermione had needed to make a duplicate housekey, so she could easily get in and out of the place. That hadn’t been all that hard, when Mr. Herstein was still being too attentive to girls her age at the store. It wasn’t her fault that adequate detail on the techniques of key duplication could be found on the internet with a modicum of study; she had just made sure that she hadn’t used her personal computer for the searches, and that the searches could not be traced back to any computer connected to her in any way. Once she had imprints of his house and office keys, making duplicates wasn’t that hard. Then she had needed to acquire or build all her mikes and speakers and transmitters and receivers and servo systems, so she could make him think he was being haunted by the ghost of Jenny, and the ghosts of all the other girls he had raped and killed. That had required her to gain electronic access to the computer of the forensic psychologist the local police had used, so she could find out about the personality type involved and its weaknesses, and then she had needed to perform a study of some books on the psychology of serial killers. She was aiming for a public confession. She hadn’t expected he would hang himself. That was quite nasty and horrifying, and was probably the reason she had missed that damning piece of evidence.Not that she was going to say so. But she was guilty of a number of crimes, and Inspector Merrill damn well knew it. As did Mr. Tremain. But they wanted something else from her. She just couldn’t figure out what.She tried, “I know I was really mad that the police weren’t doing a good job, and I really miss Jenny, but I just don’t get how that means I murdered some creepy old guy.”So Inspector Merrill pushed harder. A lot harder. Until it was time for Mr. Tremain to play his part. “Now inspector, I really don’t think it would benefit anyone to try and prosecute an eleven year old girl for the murder of a pedophile who raped and murdered a young girl. Even if it would ruin Hermione’s life, and ruin her parents’ practices, and seriously harm this town. No, I think it might be better if Hermione just went to a public school in Scotland that I know of.”What? This was their big plan? She frowned, “A regular school? Not an asylum or a prison or something with a name like St. Brutus’ Secure School For Incorrigible Girls?”Her mum absolutely didn’t understand. But Mr. Holloway did. That was when she realised that Mr. Holloway was in on it too. So this was something big. Suborning an attorney and involving representatives of the government? That was much bigger than one police case.Mr. Tremain gave her a warm smile. She figured he was a really good actor. “No dear, this is a serious school. Harworts School, founded in 1547. Normally, only select children of the nobility attend. It’s a full seven-year school, with only about forty or fifty new students per year.”She needed time to think, so she stalled, “I was expecting to go to mum’s old school in autumn.” They had talked about it, and they had filled out all the forms, but she had been accepted at several other public schools. With her grades and extracurriculars, she had been accepted at every school she had applied to, including the Shrewsbury School.Her mum wasn’t fast enough on the uptake, though. And Mr. Tremain spotted that. Hermione was quite sure the inspector did as well, but he concealed it a lot better.But forty children a year? Sprigs of the nobility? Why hadn’t she heard about Harworts before, if it was real? She needed time to research the place and to think this through. But if they really did realise just what she had been doing since Jenny’s death, they might be expecting her to use the internet or Usenet to find out about Harworts, so they could simply place a fake website on the internet and then try to ensure that her efforts would lead her right into their trap. She would have to check mirror sites and search engines all over the world to ensure that the website pages were real, and had been in place for some time, and hadn’t been altered for this purpose.If Mr. Tremain really was from the Ministry and they were suborning Mr. Holloway and they were ruining their own case against her, then this had to be much larger than one dead rapist. It had to be…She speculated aloud, “It sounds really fascinating, but – despite what you think I did – I don’t really want to lose my secondary school years being trained to be a government assassin.”Her mum gasped in horror.Tremain blinked. He actually blinked. He wasn’t expecting that. “No, no, we don’t do that. That would be highly illegal and immoral and in clear contravention of a host of U.N. accords. However, we do find children with a spectacular upside and give them a top-notch education, along with additional training so that they can become the best they can be.”Her mum looked scared. “Wh-what do you really want with my Hermione?”He sat back carefully and said, “Data analyst. Investigative specialist. Computer security expert.”In other words, spy or counter-intelligence agent or cyberwarfare threat. Possibly agent handler, or intelligence analyst, or something similar. Her guess about assassins might even be correct. She needed to get some books on this out of the library.Her mum looked as if she was about to burst into tears. So Hermione said, “Those sound quite interesting, but I would need to know a great deal more before I agreed. How do the school numbers look on GCSEs and A-levels? Do they help with UCAS? Do they allow university-level coursework alongside or in place of the standard curriculum? What languages do they offer? Are students allowed to advance faster than their year in specific courses, say, mathematics and computer science and the hard sciences? Do they allow or maybe even help with on-line courses? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the teaching staff? What percentage of applicants gets offers from Oxbridge? I would have quite a lot of concerns.”Her mum hissed, “Hermione! You cannot be serious! They want to train you to be some sort of government… person!”Frankly, she was a lot more worried about the other children at the school, given why she was being selected. She really did not want to end up sitting beside the next Ian Brady and Myra Hindley for seven years. She really did not want to find out that the government already had the next Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, and was training them to be better killers. On the other hand, someone needed to find out and do something about it.She told her mum, “I think we should talk to someone from the school, and then decide.”Her mum waffled, “I… I don’t know about this. It all seems so… wrong.”It was her own fault. She had been a conscientious, law-abiding citizen her whole life, and the one time when she finally was forced to step over the line, then this happened. She was not going to step across that line ever again. She was not going to let her parents’ lives be ruined. “Why don’t we talk to the headmaster or whomever, and see?”“Your father is going to be so disappointed!”Mr. Tremain looked at Hermione instead of her mother and said, “I believe the deputy headmistress can be here either tomorrow or Saturday.”Her mum automatically answered, “Saturday. Derek has a busy day tomorrow.”Hermione didn’t say anything else, but she had a mental image of Nancy Wake showing up and announcing she was the deputy headmistress.A/N: All non-Potterverse names are either characters invented just for the story, or else real people. If you have no idea who Nancy Wake was, you really should read her biography, because she was an astounding WWII spy, and the Gestapo’s most wanted person. If you don’t know Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, you should look up the Moors Murders.