His Little Helper

[carolynwhite2]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "Talisman" <talisman22457 at y...> 
wrote:
> 
> Another feral thought skittered through my cranium this morning, in 
> that twilight between sleep and waking.

Hours of sleep:

Nature needs five,
Custom takes seven,
Laziness takes nine,
And wickedness eleven.
> 
How that works out transatlantic is anyone's guess.

**********
Whatever, I'm working on about three hours sleep average at the 
moment, so mucho apologies for not responding to your wonderful 
postings this last week.

Probably, this has all been explained by now, but:

> I had already decided that the locket Hx is tucked up in Kreature's 
> bed.  
> 
> It now also occurs to me that Kreature was Regulus' assistant in 
> retrieving it.  
> 

What I just don't get is why anyone thinks Regulus is up to 
retrieving the locket in the first place, and re-creating/inventing a 
very complex potion, then leaving everything shipshape and tidy so no 
one notices he's been there.

Of course the initials are suggestive, but is this more misdirection? 
The relevant exchange on the Mugglenet interview was:

********
MA:We've come up with Regulus Black. 
JKR: Have you now?
MA: Uh-oh.[Laughter.] 
JKR: Well, I think that would be, um, a fine guess.
I was really hoping someone would ask me about R.A.B....There are 
things you will deduce on further readings, I think — well you two 
definitely will, for sure — that, yeah, I was really hoping that 
R.A.B. would come out. 
MA: was Regulus the one who was murdered by Voldemort —
JKR: Well Sirius said he wouldn't have been because he wasn't 
important enough, remember?
MA: But that doesn't have to be true, if [R.A.B.] is writing 
Voldemort a personal note.
JKR: That doesn't necessarily show that Voldemort killed him, 
personally, but Sirius himself suspected that Regulus got in a little 
too deep. Like Draco. He was attracted to it, but the reality of what 
it meant was way too much to handle.
*********

Firstly, as has already been pointed out I think, Voldemort doesn't 
seem to know his locket is missing, so he has no big reason to kill 
Regulus apart from Reg wimping out of being a DE. And, surely, if 
Voldemort had read that note, he wouldn't have left it there for the 
next person to find? What would have been the point, except 
humiliation for him?

Secondly, JKR herself draws a parallel with Draco, and this seems 
obvious to me too. Draco wasn't up to the job at 16, and it seems 
startlingly unlikely that a 16-17 year old Regulus was either. Think 
about it. For almost the entire series we have had dinned into our 
heads that only Voldemort and Harry have had skills that come close 
to DD's, and it wiped DD out dealing with the potion and the Inferi.

Thirdly, the person who did do it could only have found the cave if 
they knew something of young Tom Riddle's past, and as DD has pointed 
out, very, very few people do. I could accept that they took Regulus 
along as an underage assistant, and possibly made him drink the 
potion and that's why he both ran away and subsequently died, but not 
that he organised the expedition.

So why would the perpetrator leave Regulus' initials on the note? The 
only conclusion is that they are not his initials, but perhaps 
another member of the Black family. What exactly happened to Sirius' 
and Regulus' father, for instance? He'd be the right age to have gone 
to school with Riddle. 

Carolyn
Also wondering what exactly Sluggy did on those two days he took 
Felix Felicis, when he was 24 and 57.