The Drake Detective Agency - Case 16 - Part 3

The History of Us, Part 3


September 1991:

Emily and John stopped short, their gazes fixed on the menacing shape of the gun that Crawley was pointing at them.
“Well now, don’t you just show up in the damnedest places?” the mercenary commented. There was a trace of humour in his voice, but his face was frankly forbidding. The two youngsters slowly raised their hands.
“You do know that you’re being lied to, don’t you?” Emily asked, staying as calm as possible. If she could somehow convince Crawley that Gassman was double-crossing them, she and John might just be able to make it out of the museum unscathed.
Crawley looked around quickly, and then he waggled his gun to invite Emily to expand on her theme.
“That intelligence agent… Gassman… We overheard him talking on the phone. He doesn’t intend on returning all of the stolen files. He wants to sell some of them…”
Crawley was about to say something, but was interrupted by the sound of footsteps coming from the back corridor. Emily glanced over her shoulder, to see the tall and bulky form of Ogilvie emerging from the darkness. She looked back at Crawley, and her eyebrows rose slightly as he gave her a barely noticeable nod.
“You made it back here then,” rumbled Ogilvie, drawing a pistol. “Who’s the boy?”
“Unless I miss my guess, he’s the getaway driver who almost ran me down on the road,” Crawley replied casually, walking forward to his two newly-acquired captives. As Ogilvie kept them covered, he frisked them both.
“You two are in a lot of trouble, you know that don’t you?” he enquired, finally satisfied that neither of them were armed.
Emily glanced at John, wondering what he had done with the micro-fiche. A quick search wouldn’t have revealed it, but Emily was still worried about these men getting their hands on it. The information that it carried was too dangerous for it to be allowed to fall into their possession.
“The others are in the back. The Prof is busy spilling his guts to Gassman right now,” Ogilvie informed his captain, as he stepped forward, and grasped Emily and John by an arm each. He was none too gentle about it.
“Come on; let’s get these two in the back.”

The present:

Molly was thinking hard. Her mother’s story was beginning to fill in a lot of gaps, but there was one question that just wouldn’t go away. She waited until her mother paused in her tale, and then spoke up.
“Why didn’t dad ever say that he’d been involved in something like this? He never told me anything, even when he was trying to tell me not to get too involved in the cases we solved…”
All eyes turned on Molly’s mother. She smiled faintly, a fingertip tracing a circle around the rim of her cup, half lost in her memories.
“It was your dad who convinced me to give up the amateur detective thing, Molly. He wasn’t happy when you started, but he never wanted to stop you doing what you thought was the right thing. But he wasn’t going to start encouraging you, and I suppose he thought that telling you that he’d been involved in something like this might do just that…”
Molly nodded. Her father had never seemed the adventurous type, and she had been aware that he’d quietly disapproved of her snooping with her friends. Her mother’s explanation made a lot of sense.
“So, did Crawley… err… Kreep… well, whoever… did he believe what you told him about Gassman?” asked Gina. “I’ve always thought he was a few cards short of a deck, but he doesn’t seem stupid…”
Emily fixed Gina with a look, and frowned slightly.
“He isn’t stupid at all, and he’s playing with more cards than you might think. I’ve no idea what the fancy dress thing is about, but behind it all, he’s dangerous, and he’s playing his own game by his own rules. Never forget that…”

September 1991:

By the time that Crawley and Ogilvie had marched the two hapless youngsters back into the room where they had found the illicit shipment, Professor Ballard had indeed been spilling his guts. Gassman and Major McBride were standing in the centre of the room, whilst the professor was standing against the wall. Baird was keeping him covered with a sawn-off shotgun.
“Alright! I admit that I might have had my suspicions! But you have to understand… Professor Collins is a brilliant scholar! I never dreamed that he’d be mixed up in something like this!”
Gassman lit a cigarette, blithely ignoring the no smoking signs that were prominently displayed on just about every wall of the building.
“So, you suspected something, but you just ignored the fact that shipments were arriving and leaving, containing extra items that had nothing to do with the museum?”
Ballard Swallowed hard. His gaze was riveted on the two barrels of the shotgun. But he glanced up as Emily and John were pushed into the room, seemingly glad of a distraction.
“It wasn’t just me… ask her! She signed off on everything!”
McBride turned his head to regard Emily.
“I have asked her. She’s a researcher… an office girl. She had absolutely no reason to suspect anything. And from what we’ve been told, she simply followed the instructions that you gave her. You, however, were in a position of responsibility in this museum…”
“And now he’s passing the buck to a teenage girl!” spat Baird. “I’ve seen more guts in a veggie sausage! Can I plot ‘im, skipper?”
Ballard actually whimpered aloud as the squat, bearlike Scotsman raised the shotgun.
McBride shook his head, and motioned the man to stand down.
“Much as I’m tempted, Mister Baird, we’ll need him in the event that this leads to a prosecution. Cuff him to the radiator.”

Emily couldn’t help herself, as she watched the assistant curator being bullied across the room to where the old-fashioned metal radiator was fixed to the wall, beneath the small window.
“What about Professor Collins? If he’s involved in all of this… he’s out of the country at the moment…”
McBride and Gassman turned their attention toward her.
“We’ll take care of that,” Gassman replied. “Meantime, we have to decide what to do about you and your friend there. You were told to stay put, were you not? Why do I get the feeling that you are the kind of girl who touched the stove even after you’d been told it was hot?”
Emily reddened slightly. There was a patronising tone to Gassman’s voice. It was obvious that he regarded her as nothing more than a naughty girl, a nuisance who should be dealt with quickly.
She opened her mouth to say something as a retort, but a glance at Crawley stopped her short. Letting Gassman realise that she had overheard his phone conversation would more than likely seal her fate there and then. So she swallowed her pride, and stayed quiet.
“When did you open these boxes, Miss Forrest?” McBride asked, poking at one of them with his walking stick.
Emily didn’t know quite what to say. She certainly didn’t want to admit that she and John had gained any real knowledge about the contents of the extra box.
John came to her rescue.
“We got here before you,” he stated quietly. “Emily wanted to know if what you’d told her was true or not, so she accessed the computer in the office, and printed off a list of the shipment.”
Gassman fixed the young man with a penetrating, thoughtful look. McBride simply nodded.
“Very astute, young man. And then you came in here to check the boxes?”
John shrugged.
“Yes… That was when we found that there was an extra box in the shipment.”
“That should save some time!” Ogilvie grinned, prodding the boy in the back with his pistol. “So which one is the unlisted box?”
John sighed, as if unhappy about cooperating. He pointed across the room.
“It’s that one… the small one over there. Emily realised that it wasn’t anything to do with the shipment as soon as we opened it…”
“Everything else had Victorian stuff in it,” Emily added quickly. It was the obvious choice.”
Gassman started toward the box. But Crawley had obviously taken what Emily had told him on board, and got there first, scooping the cardboard box up in his arms.
“We’d better take this somewhere safe then… You know, make sure that nothing happens to any of the contents…”
He shot Gassman a look as he did so. The bespectacled intelligence agent opened his mouth to reply, but then stopped himself. It was apparent that somehow, Crawley had suspected that Gassman had designs on the contents of the illicit part of the shipment. And it didn’t seem likely that McBride would allow himself or his men to get mixed up in any further shenanigans. For now, Gassman had to content himself with a rather venomous stare at both the mercenary captain, and the teenage redhead who had somehow thrown a spanner in the works.
“A capital idea,” McBride commented dryly. The older man was obviously fairly quick on the uptake himself. “We’ll keep the box under guard until its contents can be returned to its rightful place.”
“So what about these three?” Ogilvie asked, nodding toward Emily, John, and the hapless Professor Ballard.
Crawley grinned. Emily didn’t like the look of that grin at all. He reached into his jacket pocket, and pulled out some keys, which he tossed to the big man.
“Go and bring the van around. I’ll deal with them. We’ll stash them out of the way for a while… Keep the good Professor on ice until we need him, and teach these two a little lesson about doing what they’re told…”

The Present:

“Wow… you did it, didn’t you? You foiled that Gassman guy! No wonder he’s been stalking Molly… You really stitched him up over that shipment!”
Alex was grinning at Molly’s mother. She had to admit, it was a true moment of amateur detective work winning out over the bad guys.
Emily smiled, with a touch of pride.
“Well, I don’t think he ever got his hands on that box… so yes, we stitched him up. But I doubt he’s been following Molly because of that…”
“Why then?” Molly asked. Wounded pride wouldn’t explain what Gassman was stalking her for. The man didn’t seem to be the type.
Emily sighed.
“It was something that Crawley said to me, not long ago. The night that Jemma was abducted by that Raphael boy. He came to the house. He must have been watching us for ages, because he knew about the locket…”
“What locket?” Molly asked, frowning.
“The locket that I gave you… The one that belonged to your dad… That’s what I meant when I said that Crawley was playing his own game.”
Molly glanced downward. The locket in question was around her neck. It always was. Since her father had died, and she’d been given it, she had almost never taken it off. She put her hand on it slowly. It was a clasp – locket, with a picture of her parents, holding her between them when she’d been perhaps two or three years old. And then, a moment of realisation hit her, and her big green eyes widened.
“The micro-fiche!”
Her mother nodded, and Alex and Gina turned to stare at their friend.
“Oh my god… You’ve been walking around with a top-secret piece of microfilm!” Gina gasped, almost bouncing up and down with excitement.
“We didn’t know who to trust with it,” explained Emily. “And your dad didn’t want to destroy it. He was an optimist, Molly. He thought that the day would come when it would be safe for the world to know what those people had risked to try and make the world a safer place…”
“And if Kreep figured out that you still had it, Gassman probably figured it out too…” Alex muttered.
“Yes… although I doubt that he knows where it is exactly. But Crawley must have worked it out somehow. The thing I can’t understand though, is why he hasn’t tried taking it for himself…” Emily replied. “He seems content to let us keep it…”
“I think I know why,” Molly muttered. “He sent me and Sara Philips to rescue that girl. I wondered why he didn’t just do the job himself. It had nothing to do with keeping himself out of it… He wanted Gassman to work out who I was!”
“But why?” Gina asked. “Wouldn’t that just give Gassman a chance to track you and the locket down?”
Alex gasped, staring at Molly.
“Damn right it would! He wanted Gassman to do just that… focus on trying to get that micro-fiche… focus on Molly…”
Molly nodded grimly. “Gassman wants the micro-fiche… And Kreep wants Gassman. Out in the open, so he can settle a score with him…”
The four women lapsed into silence for a while, looking at each other. Finally, Gina put their collective thoughts into a voice.
“Playing with a full deck… and with a few extra aces up his sleeve…”

September 1991:

“There we go… comfy, are we?”
Emily glared at Crawley. She was far from comfortable.
Ogilvie had gone to fetch the van, and in the meantime, McBride and Gassman had departed. McBride had taken the box that had contained the stolen documents, which Gassman was still eyeing like a starving man eyeing a buffet table. Baird had gone with them, leading Professor Ballard. He had been uncuffed from the radiator, but was almost certainly still in deep water, and looked far from happy about his future prospects.
Crawley had remained behind, keeping Emily and John at gunpoint.
“I made a few calls before I came to the museum,” he announced. “I got a good rundown about your little exploits as a detective, missy…”
Emily shrugged. “You’ll know that I don’t give up easily then!”
Crawley nodded, and grinned at her.
“And now I know that, I have some advice for you. If I ever find you snooping about in my business again, you’ll regret it. I’ll put the fear of god into you. We aren’t your local bunch of conmen or burglars, Emily Forrest…”
Leaving Emily to mull that over, Crawley had lapsed into silence until Ogilvie had returned.
“Keep them covered. I’m going to see what we have laying around here…”

And that was exactly what he had done. This explained why Emily now found herself with her hands securely bound behind her back, her crossed wrists wrapped in packing tape, more of which had been used to bind her legs at the ankles, and above and below her knees. A packet of cleaning cloths had been produced, and two of them now occupied her mouth. These had been sealed in with several strips of tape.
She’d known what was coming, because she’d had no choice but to stand and watch John get exactly the same treatment, whilst Ogilvie had kept them covered with his pistol.
Having tied and gagged them both, the two men had carried them out of the rear of the museum, and into the back of the waiting van. Things had come full circle… it was the same van that Emily had been dragged into the night before.
There had followed an extended drive, designed to make sure that the two of them lost all track of where they were. For all Emily knew, their captors had driven them back and forth across town a few times. But by the time that the back doors had been opened once more, it was fairly obvious that they were a pretty long way from home.
They had been dumped unceremoniously on the floor of the van, and their attempts to try and free themselves had come to nothing. It wasn’t at all easy to try and focus on freeing yourself from being bound with packing tape whilst being jolted around and rolling to and fro in the back of a moving van, and both Emily and John were rather sore, tired and frustrated by the time that their journey had come to an end.
They had fetched up at what appeared to be a derelict hospital, set on spacious and overgrown grounds, and seemingly a long way from anywhere useful. Not that Emily got a good view of the place. Picked up and thrown rather carelessly over Ogilvie’s broad shoulder, her only clear view was of the weed-strewn gravel path that she was being carried along, which left her feeling a little sea-sick. But after a pause and the sound of a door being forced open, her view changed to that of a dusty and dirty tiled floor. They were inside one of the old hospital buildings.
Their journey didn’t last much longer. Crawley and Ogilvie obviously weren’t too bothered about where they were going to leave their two bound captives, and when they finally set Emily and John down on the floor again, it was in what had obviously once been a hospital ward, complete with rusting beds, dirty plastic divider curtains, and discarded hospital paraphernalia. The place was deathly quiet, and somewhat eerie, even in the light that came in through the twisted and broken blinds that had been pulled down over the windows.

Setting their hapless captives down in sitting positions, the two men stopped for a moment.
“What do we do with them now?” Ogilvie rumbled, his hand hovering near his belt, where he had tucked his pistol. Emily paled. Surely they hadn’t gone to all this trouble if they were simply going to shoot them…
Crawley gave the two of them a long, thoughtful look. And then he shrugged, and turned away.
“We leave them here. They didn’t do anything but get in the way. And by the time they manage to get out of here, we’ll be long gone. Assuming,” he added with a grin, “That they get out of here at all!”
Ogilvie nodded with a grunt, and walked out of the ward. Crawley paused in the doorway, and looked back at Emily and John.
“Remember what I said, Emily Forrest. Find a better way of spending your time. The detective game isn’t for you. It leads to nasty things happening…”
And with that, he was gone. Emily listened to the sounds of booted feet echoing away down the corridor, and finally heard the sound of the door to the outside world being slammed shut.

They didn’t move for some time. Not because they were afraid to, but simply because after their ordeal, they were simply too tired. But the need to get free was overpowering, and after a while, they resumed their struggling. But Crawley had been very liberal with his use of the tape, and they weren’t going to get free simply by struggling.
Emily suddenly realised that her Swiss Army knife was still tucked in her boot, and started to try and fish it out. But with her wrists crossed and tightly taped up, she simply couldn’t get her fingers to it, nor could she manage to work the zipper on the side of her boot. So instead, she nudged John with her feet to get his attention.
“Mphay!”
John looked up from his own, equally futile struggle.
“Mph?”
Emily tapped her right boot on the floor enthusiastically, and nodded toward it.
“Phere’ph uh naphh n’ m’ hbooh…”
John stared at her uncomprehendingly. Apparently, gag-talk was not something he was fluent with.
“Hwah?”
“Phere’ph uh naphh n’ m’ hbooh! Thry n’ geh ihph!”
John seemed to get the idea, and shuffled around so that he could get his hands to Emily’s boot. But then, to her frustration, he began trying to pick at the ends of the tape that bound her ankles.
“Noph! ‘nphide! ‘nphide m’ hbooh!”
John paused, staring at her again. But he recognised the attempt to say the word ‘inside’, and after shuffling around a little more, his questing fingers found the zipper. It wasn’t much easier for him than it had been for Emily, but eventually he managed to get the zipper to work, and unzipped it enough that by pushing his fingers down the inside of the boot, he could get it to continue unzipping by itself.
Which left Emily with a bit of a problem. She was ticklish. Very ticklish. And the sensation of John’s fingers wriggling away at the side of her leg as he tried to find the knife was sheer torture for her, especially as she had to try and stay still. John glanced back, and saw that her face was bright red. He immediately came to the wrong conclusion, which was that she was blushing, and his face reddened in turn.
“Phorree…”
Emily simply shook her head. It was pointless trying to explain whilst her mouth was packed with cloth and sealed over with packing tape. She just focused on trying to stay as still as possible.
Eventually, she was rewarded, as John’s fingers closed over the Swiss Army knife, and a look of realisation came over his face. He pulled the snug little module out of Emily’s boot, and with some effort, managed to get it open.
And the rest was simply a case of being very careful.

It was a long walk. The hospital was a long way from town, and even in daylight, no-one seemed inclined to give the two teenagers a ride. But at least it was a nice day.
“So,” John began after a long time spent walking in silence. “What do we do when we get back to town? Tell the police?”
Emily thought about this. It was tempting, but in the end she decided against it.
“They’d never believe it if we told them.”
John nodded, and made a face.
“So that’s it? We let them get away with it? What about that Professor? And the curator of the museum?”
“Somehow, I have the feeling that I’m not going to be seeing either of them any time soon,” Emily murmured. “Apart from maybe seeing their pictures on the news when they get arrested. Besides,” she brightened up with a smile, “Look at it this way. We’re alive, we’re in one piece, and they didn’t get their hands on that micro-fiche. I don’t know about you, but I’m putting this one in the win column!”
John nodded. The logic of that had an appeal.
“Sooo… after we get back. What then?”
Emily tossed her long red hair back. She knew exactly what he meant, but she wasn’t going to just leap into his arms.
“Well, I’m going to have a bath, something to eat, and a lot of sleep…”
John looked down slightly. Emily thought that it was rather adorable, the way that he was either too shy, or too much of a gentleman to push the issue.
“And then this evening, you are going to come over to pick me up… and we’ll see where we go from there!”

Emily was right. Professor Ballard did not return to the museum. After supposedly helping the police with their enquiries, he took early retirement.

Professor Collins didn’t return to the museum either. In fact, he didn’t return to the UK at all, until he was finally picked up by Interpol, attempting to leave Europe for more exotic climes, most likely somewhere with no extradition treaties with Britain. His trial was a muted affair, barely mentioned in the press.

Emily continued her research job at the museum, until she finally decided to go to university, and then into teaching. She also finally decided that playing at amateur detective was not for her, and focused on having a somewhat more ordinary life. One which included seeing an awful lot more of John Drake. The two of them were barely ever apart after that.

They didn’t see Major McBride again, and had no idea what became of the man. Not that they did any asking. As far as the two of them were concerned, that was in the past, and if they never saw or heard of McBride or his crew again, it would be far too soon.

Besides, they had other things to think about. Careers, for one. Getting married in 1994, for another. And then, a year later, they had a baby girl to take up their time. A baby girl called Molly.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

The Present:

Molly sat in her bedroom. In one hand, she was holding the locket that her father had given her. In the other, she held a photograph, a picture of her and her parents on holiday in Portugal a few years back, in happier and less hectic times.
It was funny, she thought to herself. You think that you know people, and then they surprise you like this.
Plus, there were some nice coincidences. Her mother had been an amateur detective, just like she was. Her mother had met the guy who turned out to be the love of her life whilst getting mixed up in a dangerous case, and Molly had met Steffi whilst doing something very similar. She didn’t know if she and Steffi would be together in another twenty years time, but it was a nice idea…
Less pleasant was the realisation that whilst she had inherited so many great things from her parents, she had apparently inherited their old enemies. Kreep was out there somewhere, and so was Gassman. And if they were out there, might not McBride be out there somewhere too, pulling the strings from the shadows in his old age?
She wondered what she was going to do with the locket, and its contents.
She wondered if her home was being watched by unseen eyes at that very moment.
But Molly being Molly, she shook that off, and started wondering what her friends were up to, and what was going to be for dinner.
She put the locket back around her neck, and put the photograph on the shelf next to her computer.

The past was done. It was time for the here and now.

The End.