As soon as Darrow recounted the events that led him to the Ministry, Ben started scribbling vigorously mentally making another note to duplicate these and send these to the Department of Mysteries afterward in case they'd been told something differently (it happened in cases, no matter how sure people were that they'd gotten their facts straight. Timelines on cases like these mattered down to the second.

The detail about the knife – included with some of the preliminary notes in the file – was especially odd and let them know that the chest had some sort of affect on things that attempted to penetrate it. Did that mean that there was some sort of protective spell around it? Or was the chest merely imbibed with something? Ben relaxed his stance and kept scrawling until Darrow was done.

"Mmm," he mused. "Good that no one touched it after that happened." He paused to scribble a few more notes before he posed his next question. "And aside from your knife that touched it, did you attempt to prise it open using any other method?" Ben asked, flipping through the file again to see if there were any notes on that particular detail. It seemed there weren't, but he wanted to ask for more clarification.

---