Chapter 15: McGonagall Draws a Line She Cannot Enforce

The fire in McGonagall's office had been built up against the cold, but nobody in the room was warm.

Holmes had positioned himself in the chair furthest from the desk — the one with a direct sightline to both the door and the portrait wall — and had his case-book open in his lap in a manner that might have appeared idle to anyone who hadn't spent the previous ten days watching him use apparent idleness as a collection mechanism. He had been in the office for four minutes before McGonagall arrived, which had given him time to note that Dumbledore's portrait was pretending to sleep in a fashion too composed to be accidental, and that someone had recently moved the inkwell on the Headmistress's desk three inches to the left of its permanent ring-mark in the wood and then attempted to move it back without quite succeeding.

McGonagall entered in her teaching robes, which meant she had come directly from a class or had wanted the authority the robes represented, and set a folder of parchment on her desk with the care of someone who needed her hands to be doing something.