When he got home, Remus took out a quill and began to compose a letter to Dumbledore. The Headmaster would undoubtedly want to know what Remus had learnt on Privet Drive. After a couple of lines, however, Remus stopped and put down the quill.
The Dursley boy had claimed that Harry had gone with his captors willingly, and Dumbledore had indicated the same. The one thing that had been abundantly clear from Remus's interviews was that the Muggles had been awful to the boy. Perhaps it was better for Harry wherever he was...
Remus shook his head. Be that as it may, he could not stop looking until he knew for sure that Harry was safe. As for the identity of the kidnappers, it was true that Remus had strongly negative associations with that particular surname, but Blacks weren't that uncommon. It didn't have to be one of Sirius's unsavoury relations; it could have been someone else, even a Muggle.
Not many pureblooded wizards drove cars, after all. There was the fact of the modified memories to consider, but perhaps the Muggles had been working with a wizard? Remus groaned in frustration. He couldn't be sure of anything at the moment, except that Harry Potter was missing and that he loathed Harry Potter's Muggle relatives.
Relatives.
Suddenly something clicked in Remus's mind. Dumbledore had thought that Remus might have kidnapped Harry out of a desire to help him, because Remus had been James's friend. Who else might be willing to do the same thing? James's relatives, of course.
There were no other Potters around that Remus knew of, but James's mum's maiden name had been Dorea Black. She hadn't been close to all of her relatives, as Remus recalled from a few rants he had overheard at James's place, but she had a couple of siblings to whom she was close. When James and Lily got married Sirius had made some comment about how there were more Blacks at James's wedding that there would be at his.
Remus jumped up from the sofa and retrieved his box of Potter photographs from their place on the highest shelf in the storeroom. He brought them back to living room, blew the dust off the cover and opened the box. Just seeing the happy faces smiling up at him brought tears to his eyes.
He took out James and Lily's wedding album and started flipping through it, grumbling at the insolence of Sirius Black, who shamelessly jumped right into the middle of the action in photograph after photograph.
In one photograph stood James, waving, standing alongside a very dignified older gentleman with closely cropped black hair, greying at the temples. The older man slightly resembled Sirius, which caught Remus's attention. He resembled James's mother even more strongly. Remus flipped through a few more, stopping when he saw one with James and Sirius both standing with their arms around the same man.
A few photographs later Remus found one with the man and his wife, a very imposing lady who was indeed wearing some rather impressive jewels. They stood alongside a car, and Remus thought it looked expensive enough, though admittedly he knew very little about such things.
Remus stared at the photographs for over an hour. It felt as though the answers were hovering at the fringes of his mind, just beyond his grasp. He went through the facts again and again. The kidnappers had blended in very well in the Muggle world, which one wouldn't expect of a wizard from an old pureblood family. They drove a car, which was also rare, though not unheard of.
Remus looked back at the photographs and noticed one that seemed particularly strange. James and Sirius were in the middle of a hex war, and the distinguished gentleman had unfortunately found himself caught between them. That, in itself, was nothing unusual for James and Sirius. But something about the man's reaction seemed off. He was shifting back and forth, trying to dodge out of the way, and shielding his face with his arms.
'Why didn't he draw his wand?' Remus wondered aloud. Drawing one's wand was the automatic response of a wizard to almost any situation. Why hadn't the gentleman taken any steps to defend himself?
Remus thought long and hard about the wizard's curious behaviour, but couldn't make any sense of it. The answer finally came to him just before he drifted off to sleep that night. Remus kicked himself for not remembering it sooner. The man wasn't a wizard at all. James's uncle was a Squib.
.....
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