Private message to Barty

[alt_antonin]

You've seen Snape's screed, I'm assuming.

I wonder whether I could persuade them I'd seen the light and be welcomed into their folds the way he apparently has. They'd have to be stupid to trust anything I said, but with a little bit of setup I could feed them some useful information to show my bona fides, and they do rather seem inclined to take the most charitable interpretation possible for motives.

Mind you, then I'd have to decide what to do with any information I found, and I am more tempted to sit back and watch things burn; 'what is truth', said jesting Pilate, and washed his hands.

Comments

[alt_crouch_jr]

Are you lacking for work these days?

I'm not.

Have been running down buggering dead ends all damned day. The best that can be said is that it generated a veritable storm of informers wishing to report... every bloody thing you can think of: Snape-faced boggarts in the cupboard; their mother's lodger, who's got a scornful attitude and a habit of dropping French phrases into every other sentence; their neighbours' familiar which they've mistaken for an outlaw hiding in the shed or the cellar or the attic; the hermit who's lived forty years in a hovel in the woods, but they're sure it's really Snape. Or maybe it's Macnair. Or Black.

Dammit. Travers, again.

I'll let you know if we catch anything, but I shouldn't stay up expecting anything, if I were you.

[alt_antonin]

My apologies, lapushka, I fell asleep before you wrote.

Good luck with your wild goose chase, but we both well know you aren't going to find Snape through tips sent in by the paranoid; he's smarter than that. And we've already established that he has Polyjuice available. (In fact, I would not put it past him to be one of the people who has called in one of the tips; that would suit his sense of humour.)

Although that reminds me: I was going to make another set of visits to the licensed growers of fluxweed and doublecheck their records again. (Unless you've done so within the last month, of course.) I've been through every possible place in Hogwarts that could be used to grow it, at least twice, but nothing; whatever Sprout was diverting, it wasn't that.

At any rate. I have a few ideas for information-gathering; how closely is Monitoring keeping an eye on us, these days? If you have a chance today, let Hopkirk and Pennifold know that any suspicious messages coming from me are in service to such a goal.