Harry had no answer for him.
"You were a wizarding child, born in the wizarding world to wizarding parents and you end up with them? That, to me, says a guardian was involved and a guardian means the Ministry. By the spirit and letter of the law, anyone in our world would have had a better chance at getting you than a muggle couple, even your mother's sister, so that - to me - says abandonment."
"Abandoned." Harry suddenly felt cold. He knew he'd been left, but to have had a guardian and then to be abandoned by them - and left with an aunt and uncle that hated him? Suddenly something clicked and everything he'd gone through on Privet Drive didn't look quite so rosy any more.
"I was named for her father," Harry said bitterly.
"What's that?" Barchoke asked.
"I was named for her father, and she let him lock me in the cupboard under the stairs until I got my Hogwarts letter, refusing to even let me be fed."
The goblin and litigator shared a look.
"Exactly how bad were these people?" Lester asked quietly.
"You don't want to know," Harry said evasively.
Silence reigned for several moments before Lichfield started up again.
"Well, that's the case I'm wanting to make. Barchoke and I both know the only way a goblin like Gropegold got his hands on your account was by guardian consent. With a Ministry writ in hand this guardian could have had preliminary access to your account here, and with what happened to your last Account Manager-"
"What happened to him?" Harry interrupted.
"They say his mind cracked when he heard about your parents' deaths," Barchoke said quickly so as not to prolong things now that Lichfield had them safely past Harry's past treatment. "He may have thought the whole family lost and everything he'd ever worked for simply gone - though I never believed it. Lester's theory now brings the issue back into play."
"-With him out of the way," the Litigator continued, "it would have been easy to find someone willing to look the other way as this guardian drained your inheritance and paid this manager under the table for his trouble. Anyone who was familiar with the Ministry's familial placement priorities at the time could have simply dropped you off on your aunt's doorstep and most people wouldn't have thought twice about it."
"Anyone inside Gringotts," Barchoke explained, "who saw your account active, would have believed it was doing so under normal guardianship practices. I thought so myself, and I knew that your parents had decided to shut things down as much as they could until you came of age. I just thought your guardian simply wanted to grow the account more than simple securities ever could. I just assumed this guardian was keeping you out of sight."
"You may have noticed you're a bit of a celebrity," Lester said dryly.
"And with Gropegold being no stranger to a finely-cut suit, how were we to know he was throwing bad money after good and losing money when everything looked like he was making money? Without an Account-Holder complaint we'd be hard-pressed to look through someone's files-"
"So how much money have I lost?" Harry asked concerned that he had just spent his last twelve galleons on a pair of shoes he couldn't take back.
"Your guess is as good as ours. We won't know that quite some time yet."
"You should still be comfortable," Lichfield said, "just not as comfortable as you should be."
"Define 'comfortable.'" Harry said.
"In relation to what?"
"Having nothing."
"Having nothing?" Lichfield asked, looking over to Barchoke for an answer.
"You're doing good," the goblin beamed, giving him a thumbs-up gesture.
"And compared to what it should be?" Harry prompted.
"You're doing baaad," the goblin sagged and shook his head morosely.
"So how do we find this guardian?" Harry asked shortly.
"What about the transfer orders for today?" the goblin asked Lichfield.
"Axegrind stopped those dead. I've got them here," Lester said, pulling out a file for Barchoke to read. "There may be a few hints but unfortunately they're not going to do us a lot of good. They were signed magically-"
"-So unless we compare this magical signature against the magical signature of every person we've ever done business with we're never going to find them with it," Barchoke finished for him.
"So why don't we do that?" Harry asked, wanting to get a move on things.
"Because we're a bank, we're not the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. We can't violate the privacy of the entire wizarding world just because we want to. We'd find ourselves in Azkaban faster than Sirius Black."
Lester's eyes went wide and Barchoke gained a greenish tint. The goblin mumbled an apology and buried himself in his files, his blush extending from the tip of his nose and the ends of his long ears. Harry thought it best not to ask.
"If you want to get the Ministry involved and take this through an official channel, that's your call," Lichfield said. "Gringotts would prefer to handle this internally for now. Either way, I'm authorized to act as your litigator as an extension of my previous bailiff responsibilities for your family. But I have to say, we take this forward now it's likely never to see the light of day. There are some rather large obstacles in our way that would bury us if this gets brought before the Wizengamot too soon."
"Like?"
"You're too young," the goblin said, his face now back to its normal color.
"Twelve is too young?"
"Twelve is too young," Lester said. "If you were thirteen we could sue for emancipation on the grounds that you're the last of your line. It's on the young side of the scale, but it's been done before. Once that's done we could sue this absentee guardian for the mismanagement of your financial affairs, but there's also problems with that."
"Which are?"
"It takes forever," Barchoke groused.
"And it legitimizes this claim of guardianship," Lichfield explained. "By claiming they were a bad guardian we're still recognizing their status as a guardian. With them recognized as your guardian, even minimally, it immunizes Gringotts from any liability and leaves that guardian and Gropegold as the sole persons responsible for what happened and may end up limiting how much you're able to get back of what they stole from you."
"So if they already wasted all of the money they stole I'm not likely to get anything back," Harry summed up.
.....
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