Marion Lane and the Midnight Murder

by T. A. Willberg

  She shook her head, reawakening her senses. She resealed the vial and slipped it into her pocket. The effects of the mist faded, slowly but certainly. She checked her watch. Time to go.

  She stumbled back through the tunnel and into the lair beneath the break room in what felt like a daze. She gripped the sides of the ladder and pulled herself up, then slipped through the gap in the wall and pressed the same brick she had used to open it. The wall slid closed behind her.

  But it was too late.

  “Well, well, isn’t this interesting?”

  16

  THE GRAY EAGLE

  Marion turned to face Kenny Hugo, dressed as usual in bright, dazzling attire, his aftershave a cloud hovering around him.

  He gripped her by the shoulders, his eyes focused on the wall through which she’d just emerged.

  “Let go!” She pulled from his grip and stepped back, hugging her handbag to her chest.

  Kenny’s eyes darted from the wall now seemingly solid, to Marion and back again. She watched as his bewilderment transformed into understanding. He settled his gaze on the bag in Marion’s clutches. “I think you better come with me.”

  Marion sidestepped him and made for the door. “Actually, I have somewhere else to be, if you don’t mind.”

  “I do mind, as it happens.” He gripped her again by the shoulders, forcing her to a halt. “You’re not going anywhere until you tell me what you’re doing here and—” he glanced again at the wall from which she’d appeared “—where you came from?”

  She tried again to escape his grasp, but this only made him grip her tighter.

  “Where did you come from?” he repeated, now through gritted teeth.

  There were footsteps and voices outside the corridor. Marion could have sworn one of them belonged to Mr. Nicholas.

  She began to scramble and squirm, a blind panic rising inside her. It was bad enough that this fool had seen her here, but things would get desperately worse if Nancy or Nicholas stepped through the door. “Goddammit, let me go!”

  “Listen here, missy. I’m giving you one last chance. Tell me what you’re doing here or I’m delivering you straight to Nancy.”

  Marion would very much have liked to kick Kenny Hugo in the shins and be on her way, but she was running out of time. She didn’t know if she could trust this strange man; in fact, she was sure she couldn’t. But it was useless trying to escape, or pretend he hadn’t just seen her stepping out from a hole in the wall.

  “I was looking for something,” she said quickly. “I’ll tell you what—” she took a breath, the first in a while “—but not now. I need to get back to my training session before anyone notices I’m not there.”

  He laughed. She wasn’t sure why. “And where’s this training session taking place?”

  “The field office. Now please, I really have to get going.”

  “Fine,” he said. “But I’ll be waiting for you outside, and I’m warning you, if you try to get away I’ll—”

  “Yes, I heard you the first time. Now out of the damn way!” She shoved past him, and this time he let her. She shot back up the tributary and into the Grand Corridor, thankfully bumping into no one and reaching the field office less than fifteen minutes later.

  She collected herself before stepping into the foyer and through the door she and Bill were supposed to have entered together. Hopefully Bill had done as promised and disarmed the traps beyond because she didn’t have time to check. She dashed through and up a small staircase, along a corridor and into a bedroom without pausing.

  “Finally!” Bill panted, stepping out from behind the bedroom wardrobe. “I’ve had to disarm the corridor trip wires five times!”

  “Sorry,” Marion puffed. “Bit of a delay. The Time Lighter in the common room, was that you?”

  Bill smiled.

  “You’re brilliant, you know that?”

  He smiled again as he adjusted a dial on a small clock that hung above the exit. “Did you find anything?”

  “Yes. A lot.” She showed him the crystal vial and the strange fluid inside, filled with dots of silvery light.

  “What the hell is that?”

  But Marion couldn’t answer then. She waited for the dial to click three times. She and Bill both knew exactly how this particular trap worked, and as the third click came, they stepped quickly to the left. A long metal pole shot out from the center of the exit door.

  “I’ll explain later. Someone saw me, by the way.”

  “What?” Bill’s panic was evident.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll sort it out.” She handed him the vial. “I think this is the answer to everything, so look after it. Keep it on you in case he searches me. And...don’t open it.”

  “He? Who’s he?”

  “The person who saw me!”

  Bill looked irritated but obliged. He and Marion opened the exit door and stepped through at last.

  “Good evening,” Rakes said as they exited. “What took you so long?”

  “Sorry,” Marion said. “We took a few wrong turns.”

  They followed Rakes back around to the front of the house. “Zero marks for that dismal performance, Lane, Hobb,” she said, noting it down on her clipboard. “It’s really not that hard, you know. And haven’t you both been through that door before? I frankly expected more from you two.”

  Marion and Bill apologized and blamed their delay on nerves. Rakes didn’t look at all convinced but allowed them to leave without further interrogation.

  As Marion and the others stepped into the corridor outside the foyer, Kenny appeared around the corner.

  Marion leaned into Bill. “Don’t show anyone the vial and meet me at my room tonight after dinner.”

  “All right, missy,” Kenny said as he caught sight of Marion. “Time you and I had a little chat.”

  * * *

  Reluctantly, Marion followed Kenny to the residence quarters, room thirty-one. He unlocked the door and ushered her inside. The room looked as if it’d been ransacked by an intruder. Clothes and books were strewn across the floor, gadgets across the bed, cigarette butts and a half-empty whiskey glass lay on the bedside table. The only thing that had any order was a shelf above the washbasin, where a vast collection of male grooming supplies were assembled in a neat row—oils, waxes, creams, cologne.

  “Sit,” he said, gesturing to an armchair while he ripped off his shirt, threw it on the floor and bent over the basin to wash his face.

  Marion watched him, his back bent over the basin, taut muscles rippling beneath his skin. He straightened, dried his face, ran some wax through his hair, then turned around. She looked away as he picked a new shirt and pulled it on.

  He settled on the edge of the bed, lit the oil lamp on his side table, then a cigarette. His eyes blazed with intensity. “Okay, Lane. I’ll go first.” He drew on his cigarette. “As you must know, Nancy hired me two weeks ago. She said she needed an outsider to have a look at an investigation they were struggling with at the agency. I know Frank, too, by the way. He and I met when he came to New York to help our agency with a case that involved a British citizen. It was a few years back and the details are unimportant. When I arrived here, Nancy said that while she’d induct me, as it were, she wasn’t going to be able to provide me with full disclosure on the case, just the essential details. All she said was that there’d been a murder, one of her employees, and that the circumstances surrounding the case had become complicated. She gave me a summary of what had happened and that Frank had been framed for the murder—”

  “Framed?” A pool of cold sweat formed on Marion’s forehead.

  Kenny smiled. “So you do know, I thought so.”

  Marion gritted her teeth. She’d been so shocked by Kenny Hugo’s choice of words she’d forgotten to pretend that she, like the rest of the agency, didn’t know Frank was the one the
High Council had recently accused of White’s murder.

  “I’ve heard a rumor,” she lied. A plausible explanation at least.

  “And do you think he did it?”

  “Of course I don’t.”

  Kenny nodded, apparently satisfied. “Good. Neither does Nancy, which is why she hired me to find an alternative suspect. Thing is, it hasn’t been the kind of investigation I’m used to. I haven’t been given free rein, haven’t really been given much of anything.” He exhaled. “It’s been all very hush-hush. I think she’s afraid that if anyone knows what I’m really here for, it’ll hinder the investigation.”

  Marion didn’t say so, but she had a different theory as to why Nancy wasn’t flooding Kenny with case details. It wasn’t that she was protecting the fragility of the case, she was protecting the agency itself. If Kenny Hugo turned over one too many stones in his quest to find an alternative suspect, Nancy and the agency might find themselves in more trouble than they were already.

  “And what has any of this got to do with me?”

  Kenny exhaled a plume of smoke and threw back the entirety of his whiskey. “Please, Lane. It’s obvious you know more than you should. I won’t ask how. Frankly, I’m not interested in office politics.” He paused for a moment, perhaps considering if it were a good idea for him to say anything further.

  Marion was tense. It was obvious now that if she wanted to continue with the investigation, she would need Kenny to trust her. And to some degree, she was going to have to trust him. She nodded, then began to explain about the camera in Frank’s office and how she’d witnessed the High Council trial.

  Kenny looked less shocked than she’d expected him to be at the revelation. Perhaps after everything he’d seen and heard at the agency since his arrival, this was the least surprising. He played with the cigarette between his lips as he absorbed this new information. The muscles in Marion’s face began to twitch as she waited for him to speak.

  Eventually he seemed to arrive at a decision. “All right,” he said, more to himself. He stubbed out his cigarette. “So where is it, then? The map, Lane. I know you have it.” He got up and took a step toward her.

  Her stomach lurched. Her heart thumped. “I have no idea what—”

  “Bullshit! I’ve been watching everyone. I know you and your little friend Hobb are in on this together, and I know you have the map.”

  She said nothing.

  “Let me put it to you like this. Either you give me the map and I’ll forget what I saw in the break room, and all the other things you’ve just told me, or you don’t and I take you straight to Nancy while we search your room.”

  “You have no idea what you’re getting involved in,” Marion snapped. “It’s more complicated than Nancy will have you believe.”

  Kenny sighed, pushing his fingers through his perfectly styled locks. “What is the problem here? You don’t trust me? You don’t trust Nancy? Don’t be a fool, Lane. Nancy is on Frank’s side.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “She hired me to clear his name!”

  “It sounds more like she hired you to be her courier. You said it yourself, you have no idea what you’re doing in this investigation. Or why.”

  “Nancy knew about the camera.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Kenny inhaled impatiently. “In the lock room. Nancy knew right away when White was murdered that she’d be able to know who did it just by analyzing the footage from the camera above the lock room gate. She removed the footage just hours after the murder and had a look. Alone.

  “Of course, what she saw wasn’t what she expected. She confronted Frank in private. They were both in a panic. Nancy never believed Frank was guilty, not for a second, but there he was entering the lock room after White and running out just minutes later. Blood literally on his hands. That’s when she called me. She explained the situation and we discussed all the possibilities. I asked if there was any way the camera could have been manipulated, or someone could have slipped past without it registering. She said there was a possibility of the latter, though she thought it unlikely.

  “Anyway, we weren’t getting anywhere with that line of thinking, so Nancy decided to focus her attention somewhere else. Motives. Why would someone want White dead? Yeah, White was a snitch, but she’d been that way for nearly nine years and it hadn’t got her killed. So what changed? That’s when Nancy brought up the idea of the map. She said she suspected there was a connection between a previous employee’s disappearance and the map and, somehow, both are linked to the murder. You see, Nancy believes the employee who disappeared had gone looking for something he never should have known about. She didn’t tell me all the details, only that she’d recently come to suspect this employee had found out about a highly guarded agency secret from an old map she’d once thought only existed in myth.” He paused, as if waiting for confirmation.

  Marion tried to keep her body language neutral.

  Maybe it worked, because Kenny went on regardless. “As I said, she didn’t go into the details, but she seemed pretty certain White’s killer was likely to have had the map at some point. So of course I was tasked with tracking it down. But we were running out of time. Nancy knew that Nicholas was determined to solve the case. He’d been scouring the lock room for clues, every day for hours at a time. Nancy couldn’t stop him, or remove the camera, because it would seem too suspicious. But she knew he’d find it eventually. And, as you now know,” he added with an air of exhaustion, “that’s exactly what happened. Nancy’s only choice was to hold a trial, though she knew the evidence against Frank was insurmountable. Her last option was to make use of the only loophole she had left and provide Frank with an extension period. Like I said, Nancy is on Frank’s side. And so am I.”

  Marion considered this. Certainly, she believed that Nancy thought Frank was innocent, but did that necessarily mean she’d go to any lengths to clear his name? She wondered what Nancy would do if, by revealing the real killer’s identity, she’d be forced to reveal the fact that something sinister—something that appeared to have to do with chemical warfare—existed right beneath their feet?

  “Fine,” she said, at last coming to the realization that as much as she’d have preferred to, she couldn’t clear Frank’s name on her own.

  “Fine, you’ll give me the map?”

  “I told you, I don’t know anything about a map.” A lie, of course. The map was still in her bedroom. “I do have something more interesting, however. And I’ll show you what it is.” It was a gamble. If Kenny couldn’t be trusted, she was about to destroy Frank’s last chance at retribution.

  “Well, go on, then,” Kenny said as he smoothed a flick of wayward hair back into place.

  Marion got up. “I don’t have it with me now.”

  “Blazes, Lane. Are you serious?”

  “Meet me in my room tonight and I’ll show you. And don’t tell anyone anything yet.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me—”

  “If what I show you reaches the wrong ears,” she went on unperturbed, “it’ll either get us killed or fired. You included. And then there’ll be no one to clear Frank’s name.”

  Kenny lit a second cigarette and began to pace. “Listen here, Lane. You’re not the one calling the shots. I saw you crawling from that gap in the wall, and I’m pretty sure I can go and see what’s down there myself.”

  “Oh, really? I’d like to see you try. It’s snared. Do you know how to disarm trip wires? Do you know how to use any of the gadgets we use here? You need me.”

  Kenny contemplated her, examined her. Marion was the one with everything to lose. Did he really need her? Could she really play that card? She looked around the room, properly for the first time, and noticed a pile of Professor Bal’s gadgets strewn haphazardly over the small single bed in the corner. A coil of Twister Rope had wrapped itself around a pi
llow, and a pile of screws and springs—the innards of a microdot camera—lay beside it. Two Workshop manuals were spread open on the side table, several pens and notepads accompanying them.

  Marion sat on the edge of the bed and, in silence, began to reassemble the camera.

  “What are you doing with that?” Kenny asked, somewhat unnerved.

  “Demonstrating my point.” She slipped a reel of film into place and secured the camera’s backing. She handed it to him, now fully functional. “As I said. You need me.”

  Kenny smiled. He looked genuinely impressed and, just for a moment and by just a fraction, the tightness in Marion’s chest eased.

  “How do you know all this stuff? Haven’t you just been working here for three months?”

  “Four,” she corrected him. “And most of it I’ve spent with Professor Bal in Gadgetry.”

  “Okay, listen, Lane. I’ll play it your way for now. Lucky for you, Nancy is away at the moment—”

  “What?” The churning ache in her stomach was back. “What do you mean she’s away?”

  “Just for a few days. She had to consult with a colleague or something. My point is, I’m going to have to tell her when she returns...” He trailed off, something about his responsibilities as a detective. Marion had stopped listening. What could Nancy possibly have to do that was more important, more pressing, than finding the real murderer?

  “Hey, Lane.” Kenny snapped his fingers in her face. “Did you hear what I said?”

  She gazed at him absently.

  “I’m going to tell Nancy whatever I need to as soon as she’s back. You understand?”

  Marion didn’t reply. She looked at her watch. She was due in the library in five minutes, and if she didn’t show up and behave as if everything was normal, she’d blow it all. “I have to go.”

  Kenny opened his mouth in protest. Marion spoke before he had a chance.

  “Meet me in my room in the residence quarters, number twenty-six. Tonight after dinner. Come alone, and for Christ’s sake, don’t tell anyone where you’re going.”