Sagres stood before the silent mansion. Instead of using the doorbell, he raised his hand and knocked several times on the heavy wooden door.
The knocking echoed with unusual clarity through the empty corridor.
After a brief silence, the sound of a door chain sliding came from inside, and the door opened a crack.
Barty Crouch himself appeared behind it.
He looked even more haggard than he had at Hogwarts, with sunken eyes and dishevelled hair, but his gaze burned with an almost paranoid vigilance and madness.
The moment Barty Crouch saw that the person standing outside was an unfamiliar Hogwarts professor whose sudden appearance was clearly unexpected, extreme astonishment flashed across his face before being replaced by ruthless determination.
He did not even ask a question.
The wand hidden behind the door suddenly thrust through the gap, and a dazzling green light shot straight toward Sagres's heart.
The attack was swift and vicious, filled with murderous intent.
But Sagres moved even faster. Or rather, he had already anticipated it.
He merely shifted slightly to the side, calmly avoiding the green light that was almost upon him.
Then, with a casual flick of his wand, the door that had been opened a crack slammed shut, snapping Barty Crouch's wand in two.
Sagres's expression did not change. He pointed his wand at the closed wooden door.
"Alohomora!"
With a soft click, the door swung open.
Barty Crouch's body lay on the threshold. He had stabbed himself in the throat with his broken wand. Blood pooled across the floor, and his eyes remained wide open. He was clearly dead.
Sagres calmly stepped over the threshold, raised his wand, and cast the Full Body-Bind Curse on the corpse as an extra precaution. He then closed the door behind him and began carefully examining the house.
Everything in the living room was neatly arranged. Two teacups of noticeably different styles rested casually on the coffee table, and one still contained faint traces of potion residue at the bottom.
Two coats of distinctly different sizes hung from the coat rack. The larger one bore the emblem of the Ministry of Magic, while the smaller one carried a strong smell of sweat.
Sagres went upstairs and found further clues in one of the bedrooms.
A powerful concealment charm had been cast over the room. Inside, it was relatively untidy, with wrinkled sheets and a faint lingering smell of potion in the air.
Sagres also noticed several winding marks across the dusty floor, as though something had crawled over it.
After confirming that no one else was present, he turned and returned downstairs to the living room, stopping beside Barty Crouch's body.
"Suicide... Imperius Curse?" Sagres murmured.
He crouched beside the corpse, extended his wand, and pointed it at Crouch's cold forehead.
A faint wisp of black mist curled around the tip of his wand.
ŴĤĮŜƤẸŘŜ ỖƑ ŤĤẸ ĎẸÃĎ.
It was a forbidden branch of the Dark Arts, capable of temporarily binding fragments of the soul of someone who had only recently died and allowing brief, vague communication. The answers it produced were usually extremely limited.
Sagres's voice was low and chilling.
"Are you a follower of Voldemort?"
An invisible ripple seemed to pass through the air, and Crouch's stiff body twitched almost imperceptibly.
An extremely faint voice sounded directly in Sagres's mind.
"No."
Sagres's gaze sharpened slightly.
He continued.
"Are you my enemy?"
"No."
Another negative answer.
Having ruled out those two possibilities, Sagres moved on to another question.
"Were you controlled by Voldemort or a Death Eater using the Imperius Curse?"
"Yes..."
The response from the soul fragment carried intense humiliation and pain, confirming Sagres's suspicion.
So had Voldemort ordered him to bring Harry into the competition?
Sagres asked directly, "Did you put Harry Potter's name into the Goblet of Fire?"
"No!"
The answer was still negative.
Not him?
Sagres recalled what Harry and his two friends had said about the name that appeared in Snape's potion storeroom on the Marauder's Map, as well as the likely reason for it.
"Did you steal potion ingredients from Snape's storeroom to brew Polyjuice Potion?"
This time, Whispers of the Dead conveyed only blank confusion and silence.
Sagres frowned.
No answer usually meant that the soul being questioned knew nothing about the matter.
That was strange. If Crouch had been controlled into stealing the ingredients, then his soul should still have been aware of it, unless he had not been the one who did it at all.
Sagres changed his approach.
"Have you ever been inside Snape's potion storeroom before the competition?"
"No!"
This answer was firm.
Sagres narrowed his eyes.
The clues contradicted each other.
The Marauder's Map could not be wrong. It had clearly shown the name "Barty Crouch" inside Snape's potion storeroom.
If the person who had gone there to steal the ingredients was not this Barty Crouch, then there could only be one explanation.
There was another person named Barty Crouch.
Someone who had officially been declared dead long ago.
Barty Crouch Sr.'s son.
Sagres's voice grew even lower as he voiced the astonishing possibility.
"Your son, Barty Crouch Jr., isn't dead?"
"Yes..."
The confirmation from the soul fragment carried a complicated mixture of disgust and responsibility.
Just as this crucial piece of information was confirmed, the magic sustaining Whispers of the Dead seemed to reach its limit.
The wisp of black mist fluctuated violently. The final trace of vitality in Crouch's body vanished completely, and the soul fragment could no longer maintain its form. It dispersed like smoke beneath Sagres's wand.
The connection was severed.
Sagres slowly lowered his wand and stood, his expression grim.
All the clues pointed to an astonishing conclusion.
Barty Crouch Jr. was alive, and he was very likely the person who had infiltrated Hogwarts and placed Harry's name into the Goblet of Fire.
He had most likely been using Polyjuice Potion to disguise himself as someone else, which would explain why he had gone to Snape's storeroom to steal potion ingredients.
It seemed that Barty Crouch Sr., the Ministry of Magic official renowned for his impartiality, had once found a way to rescue his son from Azkaban and even arranged a substitute to take his place.
Yet in the end, he had still died because of Voldemort's scheme.
It was a tragically ironic end.
So was Barty Crouch Jr. still at Hogwarts?
Who had he been impersonating with Polyjuice Potion?
Did he have accomplices?
And that snake... what role did it play in the entire plan?
Sagres looked around the deathly silent mansion.
There were no more answers to be found here.
He needed to return to Hogwarts immediately.
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