“Well, if Angus is going to be there—”
“Smashing. I must be popping off, now, but I’ll see you later,” he started back toward his car. “Oh, and Nathan… Hadn’t you better be popping off, as well?” He tapped his watch as he climbed into the driver’s seat. “The panel begins in half an hour.” With that, he closed the car door and pulled away from the curb.
“Oh, shit, he’s right,” Nathan said, pulling a cell phone from the pocket of his jeans and glancing at the face. “I totally lost track of time.”
“I guess you’d better be going, then,” Our Heroine said.
“Yeah, but look, it was really nice to meet you. And I’m really sorry my agent almost hit you with his car. Good luck finding your dog, though, and maybe I’ll see you later, okay?”
“Maybe,” she replied. But she wasn’t thinking about Nathan or Garm or even Hubert at that point. She was more concerned about Angus.
Our Heroine first met Angus O’Malvins during one of her mother’s final cases:[23] the search for Magnus Valison. He had disappeared in a rather unspectacular fashion. At first everyone just assumed that he’d gone off to research some new novel or visit friends abroad, and that he’d simply forgotten to tell anybody where he was going. But then a few weeks went by, and nary a postcard was received. So—rather than alert the police—Emily decided to investigate.
Our Heroine helped her search Valison’s house. She was sixteen at the time, but skinny enough—despite her height—that squirming through cat-doors posed her little problem. Once within, however, the two of them encountered another obstacle: the complete lack of anything mysterious.
To all appearances, Valison had gone on vacation. Tacked to his message board was a note in his handwriting that read, “Call Emily about watering my plants!” On his desk, they found a confirmation number for a flight to London, and next to it the address of a local pet hotel for his Siamese. He had taken his bags with him, as well. Everything appeared to be in order. Perhaps too orderly, in fact, and Emily wasn’t convinced.
So she and Our Heroine rummaged through the entire house, from his bathroom cabinets to the garbage bins in his basement. Yet still the only even semi-interesting scrap they came across was a torn-up envelope that had been mailed about a month earlier from an address in Kirkwall, capital city of the Orcadian Archipelago. Of course, neither Our Heroine nor her mother could think of anything significant or sinister about the Orkneys (at least with regard to Valison), but—arrogantly faithful in the power of her own intuition—Emily thought this scrap enough to go on, and she bought plane tickets for the entire family plus Prescott to leave that night.
She had to tell Ymirson that a group of primitive Norsemen had been discovered living in isolation on one of the remoter islands in order to get him to go, and he tried to turn the plane around himself when he found out the truth. But by the time they reached Kirkwall, he had resigned himself to helping her.
The address from the envelope led them to a small house near St. Magnus’s Cathedral, and it was there that they found Angus.
“Why, hullo thair, and whae are ye?”
After brief introductions, he explained that, yes, he and Valison had known each other in their days at Trinity, where, in fact, they’d become fast friends after independently ascertaining that they were anagrammatical twins. But Angus had left Cambridge after graduation to become a customs clerk up here in the islands, and he hadn’t seen Valison since their days in university; he’d come to Kirkwall, after all, primarily to indulge his hermitic bent and focus on his poetry.
“Well, what was it, then, that prompted you to contact him last month and summon him here?” Emily wanted to know.
But the fact that Valison might be in town was as much a surprise to Angus as was the scrap of envelope bearing his own address that Emily promptly produced, especially considering the fact that Angus had never once written Valison a letter. Emily took this as a promising sign; it deepened her conviction that there really was a mystery in need of solving. Jon Ymirson only snorted.
Of course, Angus said, he’d be glad to offer up any help that he could, and Emily considered this sufficient invitation to transform his little house into her base of operations. Our Heroine got to sleep on the living room floor.
Several days passed without a lead. Eventually, though, Emily managed to stumble across a needlessly baroque smuggling scheme being run out of a small haberdashery in Stromness, the other big town of the island. Someone was trying to replace the local megaliths with concrete replicas and move the originals up to Norway. He might have succeeded, too, if his henchmen hadn’t been quite so inept. At least he was wily enough to not get captured, himself.
Between keeping an eye on accident-prone Prescott and escaping from drunken Norwegians, Our Heroine grew rather fond of Angus. The entire family did (excluding Jon Ymirson, of course, who believed that Angus had designs on Emily). Prescott was just impressed by the man’s ability to pull coins out of people’s ears, but Our Heroine even opened up enough to let him read some samples of her own early forays into the realm of fiction. It was with considerable trepidation, then, that she first began to suspect him of involvement in the smuggling ring.
Eventually, to her great relief, the mastermind behind the plot wound up being one of Surt’s former lieutenants of crime, who also happened to have been a lower-classman from Valison and Angus’s upper-classman days. He’d apparently held something of a grudge over the years for all of the sophomoric abuse that he’d suffered at their hands, and his extended plan had been to frame the two of them for stealing the megaliths, thus achieving his revenge while at the same time providing the police with a scapegoat for his crime. It had been he who’d summoned Valison to the Orkneys, and he’d also abducted him soon after his arrival. Emily’s intuition had once again wound up proving true.
Angus had been called away to Glasgow to pray at the side of his dying mother before the family even figured out where Valison was being held, but not before he had been cleared of suspicion in Our Heroine’s eyes. Their parting was a tearful one on both sides, and the two of them had never quite lost touch with each other. In later years, she’d even introduced him to Shirley MacGuffin, who came to regard the man as something of a mentor, though she rarely had the temerity to let him read any of her writing. But he’d liked her too much to offer useful criticism, anyway.
Our Heroine followed Vico Road west, farther from Main Street and the stations of Bean Day and back in the direction of her home. She needed a place to sit and think things through logically. It was impressive, she mused, that Angus had managed to hear about Shirley’s death and make it all the way to New Crúiskeen from the Orkneys in less than two days. And he had helped Shirley somehow with her Hamlet project while she was in Denmark, so—Never mind. She looked forward to seeing him tonight. It had been too long. And, besides, it was best to focus on other things for now, anyway.
If, for instance, there really was some connection between Hubert’s disappearance and Shirley’s death, as she was beginning to suspect—Well, she didn’t need to investigate it, but at least she could put together all the pieces that she had. No more distractions.
At least the clear streets away from Main were boring enough to repel all but the most intrepid of tourists. Of course, the most intrepid were the ones whom she should have been trying hardest to avoid, and as she neared the end of Vico, a crowd of people in Refurserkir costumes turned the corner. Their fox-fur shirts made them seem more high-fashion than stealthy, but she had to admit that they looked surprisingly like the real thing.
23
With some minor differences of detail, the “case” that follows apparently corresponds to Volume 10 of the