Sirius's Incarceration, A Reconsideration

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

All these years, I’ve accepted Sirius’s summary incarceration without a whisper of protest, or indeed much thought. After all, indefinitely imprisoning (without even a show trial) enemy combatants, or enemies of the people, is merely what any self-respecting tyrant, or war leader with aspirations to dictatorship, does. Hitler and Stalin had their camps, George Bush his Guantanamo… Heck, even Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War! Desperate times require desperate measures.

But on reflection, I smell… well, not a rat.

We already knew about the rat, and his contribution to the mess.

I smell something worse than that.



That the Ministry should be guilty of grossly violating Black’s civil rights? That they should hold a supposed Death Eater, enemy of the State, indefinitely under conditions of torture without trial or appeal? Fine, no problem, that sort of thing happens all the time in real life.

Moreover, Jo showed us that it happened all the time, under multiple Ministries, in the Wizarding World. It happened, in fact, whenever the public panicked enough to support extreme measures and the Ministry wanted to be seen as taking a firm line to stop the terrorists. Fudge sent Hagrid to Azkaban when the children of Hogwarts were being threatened by an unidentified monster, Scrimgeour’s regime incarcerated Stan Shunpike. Sirius told Harry that that Crouch had thrown other supposed Death Eaters into Azkaban without a trial besides himself. (He didn’t tell Harry that he’d been an enthusiastic supporter of that measure until he fell a victim to it. Musta slipped his mind, like.)

So I have no problem crediting that Crouch would throw the notorious Sirius Black into Azkaban without a trial, or that the Prophet and the public should support his doing so.

But the indications were that Crouch also threw Black into Azkaban without an interrogation. Which really does require an explanation.

*

What does the general Wizarding public, as exemplified by the Prophet, Stan and Ern, know about Black and his notorious exploits as of the opening of PoA?

“He murdered thirteen people… with one curse? ”…

“Black was a big supporter of You-Know-‘Oo….

“Anyway, when little ‘Arry Potter got the better of You-Know-‘Oo… all You-Know-‘Oo’s supporters was tracked down. wasn’t they, Ern? Most of ‘em knew it was all over, wiv You-Know-Oo gone, and they came quiet. But not Sirius Black. I ‘eard he thought ‘e’d be second-in-command once You-Know-‘Oo ‘ad taken over.

“Anyway, they cornered Black in the middle of a street full of Muggles and Black took out ‘is wand and ‘e blasted ‘alf the street apart, an’ a wizard got it, an’ so did a dozen Muggles what got in the way. ‘Orrible, eh? And you know what Black did then?”

....” Laughed,” said Stan. “Jus’ stood there an’ laughed. An’ when reinforcements from the Ministry of Magic got there, ‘e went wiv ‘em quiet as anyfink, still laughin’ ‘is ‘ead off. ‘Cos ‘e’s mad, inee, Ern. Inee mad?”


What the Ministry, as exemplified by the current Minister for Magic (at the time a Junior Minister in the Department of Magical Catastrophes) knew in addition to what Stan and Ern knew was that, prior to murdering a former friend as his last act as a free man, Black had betrayed two other friends to their deaths at Voldemort’s wand.

Why had he done this? The Ministry knew that too.

Fudge explained that Black had long been a supporter of You-Know-Who, spying on Dumbledore’s Order for his true master, and he “was tired of his double-agent role, he was ready to declare his support openly for You-Know-Who, and he seems to have planned this for the moment of the Potters’ death. But, as well all know, You-Know-Who met his downfall in little Harry Potter. Powers gone, horribly weakened, he fled. And this left Black in a very nasty position indeed. His master had fallen at the very moment when he, Black, had shown his true colors as a traitor. He had no choice but to run for it…. “

Madam Rosmerta said with some satisfaction, “But he didn’t manage to disappear, did he? The Ministry of Magic caught up with him next day!”

“Alas, if only we had,” said Fudge bitterly. “It was not us… little Peter Pettigrew—another of the Potters’ friends. Maddened by grief, no doubt, and knowing that Black had been the Potters’ Secret-Keeper, he went after Black himself…. “

“Nobody but trained Hit Wizards from the Magical Law Enforcement Squad would have stood a chance against Black once he was cornered….”

[And then, Fudge finally descended from hearsay to eyewitness testimony:]

“ I—I will never forget it. I still dream about it sometimes. A crater in the middle of the street, so deep it had cracked the sewer below. Bodies everywhere. Muggles screaming. And Black standing there laughing, with what was left of Pettigrew in front of him…. a heap of bloodstained robes and a few—a few fragments—“

“… Black was taken away by twenty members of the Magical Law Enforcement Squad…. Black’s been in Azkaban ever since.”

Now, how is it that the Ministry knew so much about Black’s motivations and betrayals, though they did not choose to publicize all of their information to the public?

Well, we readers know that too. The crime made known to the public was attested to by “A street full of eyewitnesses.” The worse crime, the one for which Sirius really was condemned to death by torture without a trial and which established him as You-Know-‘Oo’s fanatic supporter rather than a random maniac, was attested to by one man: “I myself gave evidence to the Ministry that Sirius had been the Potters’ Secret-Keeper.”

*

Now, it seems possible that Hagrid was tossed into Azkaban without being stringently questioned, as well as without being given a trial. And perhaps Stan as well.

We don’t know this for sure—neither of them, we believe, in fact knew anything of interest, so the only thing that might have been revealed by questioning was their probable innocence, in which the Ministry had no interest. They could not, we believe, have said anything that would change the Ministry’s actions.

Well, not quite true; in Hagrid’s case, a stringent interrogation would have established his guilt—if not of this offense, of multiple other counts of harboring dangerous monsters that endangered the children of Hogwarts. At least if Harry’s schooldays are representative: every single year, there was at least one incident of someone being threatened, attacked, or injured by one of Hagrid’s monsters (Norberta, the Acromantulae, Buckbeak, the skrewts (manticores), Grawpy, the Acromantulae again…), The only way the monster rampage in PoA differs from Hagrid’s norm was that someone was deliberately playing it up to terrorize students and the public. Interrogating Hagrid could establish at most that he was innocent of that. And perhaps that he didn’t know of any monsters he’d bred or introduced that could Petrify students, as opposed to merely slaughtering them.

In Hagrid’s case, however, there were probably any number of Hogwarts graduates who attested to the probability of his guilt: that as an adult he continued to breed and foster monsters and could not be brought to believe that his little darlings were dangerous to humans. Moreover, Hagrid, being half-giant, was probably immune or resistant to many of the normal means of hostile interrogation. So the Ministry might well have started interrogating him, given it up as a bad job, and still believed Hagrid guilty of breeding and releasing the monster which someone else had exploited to cause panic.

Or, they didn’t interrogate him at all. Because if they had, the half-giant would have stayed in Azkaban for the crimes he did commit, rather than being released when cleared of the one he did not.

*

But it’s one thing for the Ministry to skip interrogating Hagrid or Stan.

Neither was ever accused, or could conceivably have been suspected, of being Voldemort’s chief lieutenant, the Death Eater who stood as Riddle’s second-in-command.

Stan and Hagrid are both too stupid to be suspected of being in Riddle’s (or anyone’s) confidence; Or to be involved except as catspaws in any clever plot.

Now, we know of course that the Dark Lord actually had no second-in-command, Tom was interested neither in sharing power, nor in an orderly succession should he be killed. Tom had no true lieutenants, only transitory favorites who were no more in his true confidence than Moaning Myrtle. And Dumbledore seems to have deduced this (perhaps judging his best student by himself). But the Ministry might well have assumed otherwise. If so, the Death Eater so devious and cunning he’d managed to infiltrate Dumbledore’s organization and fool everyone who knew him, including Dumbledore himself, into thinking him a fanatic opponent of the Death Eaters; the man so powerful (and evil) he could kill thirteen with a single spell; the man who’d established a reputation at school for being unusually bright, talented, creative, and lawless; the last scion of the Blacks, heir to both their fortune and their Dark Arts collection; and finally, the man who’d enabled Voldemort to neutralize the only serious threat to his rise, might well seem a reasonable candidate for Voldemort’s highest favor.


I can see Sirius not volunteering any information when he was captured—especially after spending some time in the custody of Dementors, reliving his worst memory: James gleefully chortling at Sirius’s clever plan to lead Voldemort by the nose on a wild goose chase after Sirius while Peter hunkered down and kept the Secret…. Sirius truly did betray James and Lily to their deaths, though he’d never intended that outcome. And, as others have argued before (see footnote below if you’ve missed it), I think Sirius was guilty of casting the spell that killed those Muggles (and which he’d thought at the time had killed Wormtail), so he wouldn’t protest his innocence of that.

So I don’t see Sirius protesting his arrest or demanding to see his lawyer. I can see him being so sunk in grief and depression—the rage that had fueled his search for Wormtail being spent—that he refused to make any voluntary disclosure to the Aurors.

But if the Ministry truly believed Black to be, not merely a Death Eater, but one of You-Know-Who’s favorites, You-Know-Who’s slated second-in-command, they would never have consigned him to Azkaban without first wringing him dry of information. They wouldn’t have waited for him to volunteer the information that he was innocent of supporting the Dark Lord, and of betraying the Potters voluntarily—they’d have forced him to tell them everything he knew.

They might not have believed any of his story without confirmation, any more than Snape believed the bit he overheard. But the Ministry, and Dumbledore, should at least have heard Sirius’s defense. Along with everything he could tell them (nothing) about the Death Eaters.

And they had not.

It’s not just that no one, not Fumbles nor Crouch, ever sniffed about for a rat. They didn’t even register Sirius as a dog Animagus. They knew nothing.

And they should have interrogated him until they knew everything, whether or not they believed it.

Not thrown him into Azkaban (where exposure to Dementors eventually left most people so broken mentally they were unable to form complete sentences) with all his secrets unmined.


*

So. Why on earth should Barty Crouch have been willing to toss into the black hole that was Azkaban, not the supposed Dark wizard Sirius Black, but all of Sirius Black’s secrets?

The only plausible (Watsonian) explanation is that someone leaned on him, quite hard, to do so, and could make it well worth Barty’s while. We know Barty cut deals in how he treated Death Eaters—he did so with Karkaroff.

So, Cui Bono? Who benefited from Sirius’s enforced silence?

Well, Peter, of course. And we know Peter did indeed do all he could to get Sirius arrested for mass murder, betraying the Potters, and being the worst sort of Death Eater.

Peter (or an accomplice, thank you Swythyv) might even have Confunded or Imperiused Sirius into making a confession.

But that could hardly be expected to stand up to the kind of torture that could break the Memory Charm, and if the Ministry really thought that Sirius had been Voldemort’s right hand man, caught the day after Voldemort’s fall while they are just starting the clean up of the Death Eater organization, they’d be highly motivated to do EVERYTHING they could to get Sirius to sing.

So any false confession should eventually have been retracted (and Sirius broken), even if Sirius’s eventual denial of true guilt were not believed.

So it has to be the case that Sirius never was properly interrogated. And there’s no obvious way that Peter (or Bad Company) could have influenced the Ministry’s inexplicable decision not to question Sirius.

A decision inexplicable, at least, if the Ministry did indeed believe themselves to have captured in Sirius Black the Dark Lord’s second-in-command, uniquely privy to the Dark Lord’s plans and secrets.

Or even someone high up in the Death Eater organization, well positioned to know his fellows.

Or, perhaps, an actual Death Eater at all.

(Or at least, an actual Death Eater who was easy game, utterly unprotected by the WW’s web of nepotism. One disowned by his influential family, whose only allies had been in the political group he’d just betrayed. No one powerful would object to how the Ministry chose to treat Sirius, since he’d first alienated his family, then betrayed Dumbledore and all his supposed friends.)

*

But suppose Barty had been told by an unimpeachable source that what they’d captured was a high-profile, very visible, wannabe? Someone who could be presented to the public (and swallowed) as a villain second only to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named himself, but who was in actuality a pathetic incompetent?

Because the DMLE had a real PR problem at the beginning of November 1981, didn’t it? All their efforts to stop You-Know-Who and his followers had been ineffective, and instead a baby in nappies had done their job for them!

And Barty’s popularity with the public depended on his being tough on the Dark Wizards threatening them. He really needed, ASAP, either to catch up with Voldemort and finish Harry’s job, or to trumpet his triumph in neutralizing the second-most-terrifying Dark Wizard.

Like that homicidal maniac who, when cornered, murdered thirteen people with a single spell—and then laughed.

Well, stop and compare this to real life mass murder. Or accidental manslaughter.

There’s a certain grandeur of evil to the terrorist who sets out to murder thirteen innocents. Or even the hit man who takes out his target at the calculated expense of thirteen other lives.

But now imagine some road-rage bozo whipping out a gun to shoot someone who’d just cut him off… and accidentally hitting instead a gasoline tanker truck, causing a fiery crash that killed a dozen passing motorists.

It would still be splashed all over the news, he’d still be a criminal and a murderer—but there’d be no grandeur to his evil at all. He’d be just an incompetent with bad aim, and his victims’ fates due more to bad luck, theirs and his.

He’d be featured in the Darwin Awards, not the Rogue’s Gallery.

Back to Sirius. And to Stan Shunpike. Whose capture was trumpeted to the public as a triumph over the Death Eaters, though we’re invited to believe Scrimgeour knew quite well that Stan was really only a loudmouth wannabe. Or maybe even just a loudmouth.

Back, further, to the question of who, besides Peter, wanted Sirius, one, firmly out of the way.

(To give someone undisputed access to baby Potter.)

But who also wanted Sirius, two, shut up. Preferably permanently.

Because if the Aurors started interrogating Sirius (or indeed, any Order member) with the no-holds-barred approach they were allowed with suspected Death Eaters… well, they would not (in Sirius’s case) find out any Death Eater secrets.

But they would obtain the Order’s. Albus’s.

Like, for an instance, the identities of who in the ORDER had infiltrated the Ministry. Sirius knew which of Crouch’s underlings were violating their oaths of office by taking Dumbledore’s orders instead of the Ministry’s. Crouch’s.

Barty Crouch, Senior, doesn’t like insubordination. Much less deliberate betrayal. Does he?

He released Karkaroff (an outsider, note, who’d owed no loyalty to the Ministry when he joined Voldemort) for giving him Rookwood, and what Rookwood could tell him of the Death Eaters’ network of connections in the Ministry.

He’d have really, really, liked to get the Order’s. And he’d probably have regarded their members equally as traitors, if not as immediate a threat.

But whatever Barty wanted, there was something he needed. Needed quite desperately and immediately.

A high profile capture of the worst sort of Death Eater to present to the public and the Prophet as his Department’s triumph over Evil.

If Sirius Black were an incompetent who’d betrayed his best friend through vainglory and overconfidence, lashed out in guilt-fueled rage when accused of having done so deliberately, and accidentally triggered a Muggle gas explosion that killed thirteen people….


Well. Cleaning up after the murder of a wizard no one cared about which had accidentally killed some Muggles too would do the DMLE’s image no good at all.


Spin. It’s all about spin.

The Junior Ministers in the Department of Magical Catastrophes (not DMLE) who were sent to investigate that blast found, remember, “A crater in the middle of the street, so deep it had cracked the sewer below. Bodies everywhere. Muggles screaming. And Black standing there laughing…”

And, “A street full of eyewitnesses swore they saw Sirius murder Pettigrew.”

Or, saw him point a stick at Pettigrew, make a light come out of the stick, and then everything exploded and all those people were dead and injured.

And so Fudge and his other Junior Minister(s) thought they were dealing with, not another magical catastrophe, but another Death Eater attack, obviously by a fanatic supporter crazed by You-Know-Who’s loss.

They called for twenty Hit Wizards as backup.

So that’s the story they’ll be telling, if anyone asks. And everyone will ask.

All Barty needed to do, really, was to confirm the Junior Ministers’ panicked misapprehensions. Rather than scornfully expose the DOMC call for DMLE backup (rather than extra Obliviators and medics—probably in that order, given the WW) as the rabbitty overreaction it was.

And surely among those twenty Hit Wizards Barty dispatched in response to the Junior Ministers’ frantic call was the single most experienced Dark Wizard Catcher in Barty’s whole department, right?

Moody.

Whom Severus Snape in GoF clearly believed to be such an extremely accomplished Legilimens that even he, superb Occlumens that he was, found it prudent to avoid meeting Moody’s eyes.

Why can no one but an Occlumens succeed in lying to a good Legilimens?

Because the Legilimens can otherwise read “those feelings and memories that contradict the lie.”

Well, Sirius wasn’t trying to lie to anyone when the Aurors took him into custody. He wasn’t saying anything.

But a skilled Legilimens, looking into his eyes, would easily have read “feelings and memories that contradicted” the interpretation Fudge and the Junior Ministers had placed on the disaster.

Horror at the carnage. Crushing guilt and grief. The fading homicidal fury at Peter. And enraged, despairing black laughter at how he’d caught himself in his own net.

Sirius might have gotten off with a light sentence just for killing Peter, given the public feeling about Death Eaters and the depths of Peter’s betrayal. But egregiously violating the Statute of Secrecy in the worst possible manner, and killing a dozen Muggles as well…?

And did he even deserve to get off lightly, when it was his own fault that James was dead, his bright idea that had killed the Potters…?

It’s wildly unlikely that what Moody read in Sirius’s eyes would have added up to Sirius being innocent. But he could easily have seen enough to assure him that Sirius, though guilty of murder and betrayal, was no Death Eater.

Not admissible in court, I’m sure. But indicative to his superior—to both of his superiors—of what would come out if Sirius were interrogated and admissible evidence gathered to be presented in a trial.

So Albus, on getting Mad-Eye’s Patronus, at once Flooed to Barty and presented him with a deal: lock up Sirius without an interrogation and leave MY secrets alone. Black knew no others, and I want to protect my own. If you do, I’ll provide testimony that will convince the Ministry and the public that Sirius Black was a loyal Death Eater, and that will feed Fudge’s story that Black was a lunatic Dark wizard who deliberately murdered all those people. Your department will look good for catching such a dangerous wizard; in fact, I can help you make it look like Black was one of Lord Voldemort’s most important supporters. And in return, you don’t try for any of the secrets of my Order.

Deal?

Of course, it was a little hard on Sirius, being tarred falsely as a Death Eater. But after all, he wouldn’t receive any punishment he hadn’t truly earned. Life in Azkaban is life in Azkaban, whether he’d earned the sentence for supporting You-Know-Who or for grossly violating Secrecy, murdering a wizard, and accidentally killing a dozen Muggles.

It was also a little hard on the Blacks, having their name so blackened by their last scion. But I doubt Albus would have cried over destroying the reputation of his political enemies

*

Note that Moody, in this scenario, would have had to go along with throwing Sirius to the wolves.

But then Moody, unlike Sirius, does obey orders (and suggestions) he doesn’t like.

And I can’t imagine that Mr. Constant Vigilance had ever had a terribly high opinion of such loose cannons as the Marauders. Sirius fought bravely against You-Know-Who, true. But the boy also caused his friends’ deaths and the deaths of multiple innocent bystanders. As Aberforth put it, brains like that, you might as well be a Death Eater, son.

Mind, Moody’s participation as the preliminary Legilimens would be neat, but not essential. All that’s really necessary is that Albus be notified of Sirius’s capture and what the Catastrophes people thought had happened, before Barty’s interrogation team could pull Peter’s role from Sirius. Just from knowing Sirius, and having heard Hagrid’s report of his encounter, Albus would guess that Sirius had betrayed the Potters inadvertently and was not a voluntary Death Eater. So it could have been Frank who alerted Albus that Sirius had been captured as the Order’s DE traitor, and the Order’s Auror need not have been on the team that apprehended Black, just quickly aware. Because if Barty’s crime scene team

But I like the idea of Moody being the one to legilimize Sirius and discard him.

So I did examine OotP to see how Sirius and Mad-Eye interacted. And they didn’t. Moody avoided Sirius as much as he could. Like Snape and Dumbledore, he apparently never stayed for dinner after Order meetings or stopped by to help with the cleaning. When Mrs. Weasley wanted him to use his magic eye to confirm that it was a Boggart making the writing desk rattle, she couldn’t induce Moody to come and do so until she finally invited him to the party to celebrate Ron making Prefect. While there Moody talked with Weasleys and with Harry, but never so much as greeted his titular host. Sirius finally approached him to see the photo Moody’s showing Harry, but Mad-Eye never approached Sirius. Similarly, when Harry was at Grimmauld over Christmas, Mad-Eye talked to Molly when playing escort to the children, but never to Sirius. Not proof that Moody avoided Sirius because of a guilty conscience, of course, but definitely an indication that the two men were less than close.




Footnote:

For those who weren’t around for earlier discussions of the problems with the story Sirius crafted for Harry’s tender ears, that Peter was wholly and uniquely responsible for the carnage that fateful day and that Sirius was a complete innocent who was framed, here’s a quick overview. Here’s Black’s version of what happened (PoA 19):

“He [Scabbers]’s got a toe missing,” said Black.

“Of course,” Lupin breathed. “So simple… so brilliant… he cut it off himself!”

“Just before he transformed,” said Black. “When I cornered him, he yelled for the whole street to hear that I’d betrayed Lily and James. Then, before I could curse him, he blew apart the street with the wand behind his back, killed everyone within twenty feet of himself—and sped down into the sewer with the other rats….”

Um. Let’s get this straight. Black had just “cornered” Pettigrew. That means, from his perspective, he’d been chasing the rat, closing in, was ready to move in for the kill…..

and stopped. To suck his thumb? To insert it up his arse?

While Peter, first, yelled that deliberately misleading accusation. Second, blew apart the street with the wand behind his back, killing everyone within twenty feet of himself. While, third, shielding himself completely from the effects of the blast—from a shockwave and perhaps a fireball. Then, fourth, cut off his own finger (toe) and left it (with his bloody robes) in an incriminating huddle in front of Sirius. Fifth, transformed into a rat and sixth, escaped into the sewer.

All while Sirius stood there and did nothing. Watched Peter commit mass murder, watched him transform and escape, and knew when Fudge and his partner Apparated in that Peter had just succeeded in framing Sirius for both the betrayal of the Potters and the mass murder here. And said nothing to try to clear himself, letting Wormtail to escape scot-free while Padfoot took the fall for him.

Now, if an enemy I had cornered and sworn to kill did all that under my eyes, this first part of this narrative would, alas, be at least marginally credible. I have slow reflexes. I’ve never been trained either to duel or to battle And I tend to freeze in emergencies, afterwards overanalyzing what I should have done at the time.

This is a good description of Sirius Black?

No, I didn’t think so.

Moreover, this all happened in front of a whole street full of witnesses. Muggles, sure, likely to be discounted by those supremacist wizards, and moreover each likely to be frantically busy re-organizing hir memories into something that made sense. But not incapable of registering what they saw.

If someone, or several someones, witnessed a flash of light emanating from a stick held by the taller black-haired man and apparently causing an explosion, then that’s what they saw, regardless of whether a given witness could come up with a convincing interpretation of what s/he’d seen.

Conversely, the street full of witness may have seen a flash emanate from behind the small man’s back, or (with a favorable angle) from a stick the small man was holding behind his back

At least some of the Muggle survivors must have been in position to tell whether the flash of light that caused the fatal blast emanated from Black’s wand (or direction), or Pettigrew’s (or from behind Pettigrew’s back).

Fudge entertained no doubt that what his witnesses had just seen was Sirius murdering Peter and all those people, not Sirius standing there with his mouth agape while Peter did it all and vanished. Even though that story from Muggle witnesses—this funny-dressed guy pointed a stick, something happened, and then the funny guy just vanished—is the USUAL story Magic Catastrophes hears. Fudge is used to sorting out confused Muggle witnesses who tell that story, even if the disappearing funny guy usually Disapparates rather than transforms into a small, overlooked animal.

And then there’s Priori Incantatum. Nobody thought to perform that on Black’s wand, to see WTH it was he cast to commit mass murder?

So the explanation (I think first offered by Jodel) of what actually happened was: the witnesses thought the blast was a gas explosion because it was. Planned by Peter, but triggered by Sirius. Peter positioned himself near Sirius’s flat to catch Padfoot returning from his rat-hunt. He hid near a gas main he’d cracked or petrol tank he’d breached, something like that, and yelled his accusation when he spotted Sirius. Sirius reacted predictably with his favorite lethal spell, an Incendio, and ignited the gas. All Peter needed to do was shield, and then transform and disappear while Sirius and the witnesses were dazed. Leaving behind his robes and a finger (previously severed).

Sirius thought then and for years that he HAD killed Peter—and that he’d killed those Muggles as well in passing. That’s why he went quietly with the Aurors, and never tried to escape—he thought his revenge was accomplished.. Until he saw that picture of Wormtail frisking about on Ron’s shoulder…..

Comments

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

But Snape does specifically avoid Moody's eyes, neh? And really, why waste great mental and magical effort if the same result could be attained by merely avoiding eye-contact?

Plus, Sev's furious at Barty's insinuation that he's both rifling Snape's rooms and Legilimizing Snape illegally with Albus's tacit permission, because Albus doesn't really trust Severus as much as he's claimed.

In which case partly what he's hiding from "Alastor" is why he's earned Albus's trust.