Dustin Long - Icelander

Our Heroine followed Nathan out of the shop and then slammed the door shut behind herself.

“Where to, now?” Nathan asked. “I mean, I still don’t get why we’re checking shops if we’re looking for your dog, but—Hey, isn’t that the car that almost hit you?”

She turned to see that he was correct. Her first instinct was to run away. But then she realized how absurd that instinct was. The car was parked. She could at least write down the license plate number. And why not confront the driver, if he happened to be there? What could he do, shoot her? Still, it took a moment for her feet to move.

A man got out of the car as she and Nathan approached.

“What ho!” he called.

“Hey, that’s my agent,” Nathan said.

It was Philip Leshio, literary agent both to Magnus Valison and Shirley MacGuffin. And apparently Nathan, as well.

“Fuck,” Our Heroine said aloud, perhaps a bit annoyed at having her sense of imminent peril resolve into this particular banality.

“Good to see you arrived all of a piece, Nathan, old boy,” Leshio drawled Oxonian. Our Heroine knew that he lived and worked in New Uruk City. She’d never established whether or not he actually had any connection to Oxford.

“Hey, Phil, I was going to call—”

“Why have you been following me?” Our Heroine asked before Nathan could finish his sentence.

“Hello? What’s this? Following you? Do try to make sense, old thing.” He was shivering against the innards of his thin gray suit, too slim himself to fend the cold from his bones. “I’m simply thrilled to see you, of course, but—”

“You almost hit me with your car. Twice.”

“By Jove, was that you? Both times? Yes, well, I certainly understand how you might have misinterpreted my intentions, and I offer my apologies on that score, but pedestrians do tend to look rather similar when one is attempting to gain control of a hydroplaning motor vehicle. I neglected to fit my tires with chains, you see. But dash all that for now; I have a most urgent matter to discuss with you. It’s to do with Shirley, and that Hamlet project of hers.”

“Hey, we were just talking about—” Nathan began.

“Wait a minute. That’s not a satisfactory answer,” Our Heroine interrupted. “Even if you didn’t mean to almost hit me—twice—I’ve still seen your car almost everywhere I’ve gone today. And I want to know why.”

“Indeed! Well, yes, indeed it must seem rather more than a coincidence… But we’ll just save discussion of it for tonight, shall we?”

“Tonight?”

“Hrothgar’s Mead Hall. Did Angus not get in touch with you? No? Tut-tut. Well, a few of us were contemplating a little whatsit there, tonight, circa eight o’clock. Angus will be on hand, similarly ‘Mutt’ Sanders, as well as an old professorial chum of mine by the name of Lorenz. Likely a few others, too. Nothing formal, just fishing in the void for meaning in all of this, with Shirley, of course, as the vertex of our anglings.”

“Who’s Shirley?” Nathan asked.

“I met Lorenz today,” Our Heroine said. “But who’s this ‘Mutt’ Sanders?”

Leshio grinned maliciously. “What say I just introduce you to him tonight. I can count on you being there?”

“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] With some minor differences of detail, the “case” that follows apparently corresponds to Volume 10 of the Memoirs , Et in Orcadia Ego . 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.