You’re our voice in the Ministry, Gornuk had said. Not strictly true, Dirk would argue, as he was the lowest level employee in the admittedly small Goblin Liaison Office but he was the one who spoke the best Gobbledegook and understood goblin culture better than the rest. Try the vampire. He might be easier to get through to than the wizards. Gornuk always talked about wizards like they were dirt, like Dirk wasn’t the person he was talking to.

If he was being honest to himself, Dirk had been putting off taking the goblin’s advice and seeking out the one magical creature on the Wizengamot. He had never been big on the idea of vampires but that was okay because they weren’t real. Except then in his second year of Hogwarts he had found that that they were real and Dirk might as well have been punched in the stomach. He knew his mental image of them like Bram Stoker’s Dracula was probably not accurate and yet when they had faced boggarts in his third year Defence Against the Dark Arts class, his had manifested as Christopher Lee in full Dracula get-up, complete with blood running down his chin.

So, Dirk wasn’t looking forward to the prospect of speaking to Aleksey Talinov, but enough days had passed since the goblins had presented the idea they wanted taken to the Wizengamot and Dirk was at a loss for how else to make that known. “Excuse me,” he said, carefully keeping a distance from the vampire as he addressed him. Sometimes he might use this as an opportunity to practise his Russian but his nerves were too high and for some reason the only word that had stuck in his mind was солнечно. It’s sunny. Very helpful, he thought drily. “Mr Talinov?” he asked. “Um. I’m Dirk Cresswell. Goblin Liaison Office? I had some questions about the Wizengamot.”