Remus Lupin

Off to Manchester with Molly to find Anita Williams. We've papers and polyjuice and the rest -- wish us luck. (And vomit-free traveling.)

That didn't go well.

Anita was at Manchester, same camp as the Divyesh Shah's family, so we'd used the buttons to let the Shahs know we were coming, and we brought a letter for them from Divyesh. We thought they could introduce us to the Williams parents, let them know we were trustworthy and so on.

Instead, they were utterly frantic when we arrived, because the Black Wands were on site. Worse, they were pretty certain people were on to Anita. They had already spoken with the Williams, to let them know we might be coming, and had them hiding, after a fashion (you can't properly hide at a muggle camp but you can be somewhere that it'll take longer to find you).

The Williamses thrust the baby into Molly's arms the moment they laid eyes on us and told us to do whatever we had to do to keep her safe. We modified their memories to suggest that the baby had been kidnapped by people who took her by force -- we're hoping that'll put the Black Wands on the wrong track, at least, and keep the parents safe. We had to apparate out -- with the Black Wands on our trail, covering our tracks with a death certificate was simply not an option.

If we can keep in touch with the Shahs, it may eventually be possible to undo the modification and give the Williams parents the rings and portrait.

This was the best solution we could think of. We thought about trying to take the parents with us, but it would have required apparating back for one of them and we didn't think we'd have time. (We might have. We did have time to modify their memory and not just obliviate them both, but to give them a cover story that we hoped would keep them safe. But it was a near thing.)