The following morning's edition of Wizarding Weekly carried a full retraction under Rita Skeeter's own byline. The previous reporting was acknowledged as inaccurate. The characterisation of the relationship between assistant professor Kevin Croft and student Hermione Granger had been based on insufficient evidence and was formally withdrawn.
Harry read it twice across the breakfast table and decided he didn't need to know how it had been arranged. Kevin looked slightly more compliant than usual. Hermione was sitting with the specific posture of someone who had recently won something. He left it at that.
The third task was announced with ceremony: a maze, constructed on the Quidditch pitch, with the Triwizard Cup at its centre. Obstacles, magical creatures, enchantments throughout. First champion to the Cup won. Date: late June.
The Quidditch pitch without Quidditch was strange. The stands were there but empty, the goalposts still visible above the enormous hedge walls that had appeared over the past several weeks, packed tight and rising four metres, a permanent fog hanging over the interior. The four champions stood at the entrance for the official preview and looked at it.
"No climbing the hedges," Dumbledore said, looking specifically at Kevin.
Kevin, who had been about to raise his hand, lowered it and looked dissatisfied.
Dumbledore's expression carried no surprise whatsoever.
Hagrid sent a message asking Harry and Kevin to meet him for a walk in the Forbidden Forest. Ron and Hermione were already at the hut when they arrived.
Spring had reached the forest's edges — lighter than winter, the mist diffusing the morning sun rather than swallowing it entirely. Hagrid walked with the comfortable authority of someone who had spent thirty years treating these woods as a backyard.
He was nostalgic and cheerful, rambling through old memories. First year felt like yesterday and like a lifetime ago simultaneously. The nervous girl triple-checking her spells on the train. The boy who'd dealt with Quirrell using a crowbar and then asked if he'd been doing it wrong.
Harry laughed at that. Kevin noted the story had improved with telling.
They'd been walking twenty minutes, loose and easy, when Harry stopped.
"What's that?"
Something at the base of a tree, slightly off the path. They approached.
Bartemius Crouch Senior. Face down in the leaf litter, dressed in clothing that had been outdoors for several days. Kevin knelt and pressed two fingers to his throat.
Warm. Recently gone.
He stood. Looked into the trees. The fog between the trunks was thick and very still. The birds had stopped.
He cast a wide-radius Reveal Charm — the kind that rattled Disillusionment spells and flushed anything under an Invisibility Cloak within thirty metres.
Leaves moved. Nothing else.
"Something was here very recently," he said, quietly enough for Harry only.
Harry's wand was already out.
"Back to the castle." Hagrid had put himself in front of the group, one enormous arm extended. "All of you. Right now. We tell Dumbledore."
Nobody argued. The body was still warm, and whatever had been in the trees was still somewhere close. They moved.
Hagrid wrapped Bartemius Crouch in conjured cloth with careful hands and levitated him. They walked back fast and said nothing.
Fudge arrived within the hour with a cluster of Ministry officials.
He stood in Hagrid's hut, looked at Bartemius Crouch Senior, and his face went through a sequence of expressions that settled into the look of a man calculating the political cost of something rather than the human one.
Barty Crouch Senior — head of the Department of International Magical Cooperation, a man with more enemies than most politicians accumulated in a lifetime — was dead in the Forbidden Forest during the final month of the Triwizard Tournament, with international delegations present and the press watching everything.
Dumbledore argued, with controlled and precise fury, that this was exactly the kind of event that required transparency. The school was not safe. People were being targeted. Information needed to be shared.
Fudge called it a targeted attack on a man with a long list of enemies, assured Dumbledore there would be a thorough investigation, and left.
Dumbledore's expression after the door closed was one Kevin stored carefully.
"Kevin. Harry. My office."
---
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