“That’s Kenny. Isn’t he cute as anything? All that leather! I met him on the ferry, and he’s helping me find the you-know-what.”
“That’s nice,” I said, but my tone betrayed me.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” she said. “You think I’d cut you out of the deal. But I’m going to show you what I found, and when Kenny gets here, he’ll confirm that I made it very clear to him that you are to be a part of this, that we’d split it three ways, and that our number one priority, well, maybe number two, has been to find you. We asked for you at all the hotels in Kirkwall and Stromness, believe me. Oh, there he is. Kenny, we’re over here!”
Kenny was there all right, all six-foot-something of him, with dark curly hair and lovely deep blue eyes, and a physique that was indeed rather impressive in all that leather. He was, as Willow had already pointed out, cute as anything.
“Hello,” he said to me, before leaning over to peck Willow on the cheek.
“This is Lara,” Willow said, before he could say anything else.
“Lara!” he exclaimed. “Wow! Brilliant! Nice to meet you. I’m Kenny. How did you find each other?”
“She found me,” Willow said, going on to explain in some detail that I’d seen them both and where. Alarms bells were ringing here. It might be that she really wanted Kenny to know all about it, or that she was trying to make sure he knew so he wouldn’t say anything she didn’t want me to hear.
“Brilliant!” he repeated. “Willow thought, she was afraid you know, you’d be headed back home by now.”
Oh, please, I thought again.
“Actually, why aren’t you heading back by now?” Willow said. I pointed to the newspaper sitting in front of her, tapping the article about Percy’s demise.
She scanned it for a moment. “Lara! How awful!” She leapt up and threw her arms around me as Kenny grabbed the paper to see what we were talking about. “Omigod,” she kept saying over and over. “I didn’t even see your name until right this minute. This is just too horrible. First Trevor, and now this complete stranger. How unlucky can you get?”
That was a good question, even if Percy had hardly been a complete stranger, a fact I decided I was not going to mention. She would hardly put the name Magnus Budge and Percy together. Even I was having trouble with that.
“I guess that’s why you didn’t e-mail me that you were staying over,” she said. I bit my tongue, and, instead of clawing her eyes out, just gave her a baleful glance. “Did you not get mine?” she said.
“Strangely enough I didn’t, no.”
“No wonder you’re looking at me like that. Did you check your e-mails?”
“I did.” I had, too, every day in Glasgow, at the airport before I left, and in the only Internet cafe I could find, in Kirkwall, when I took Percy back with his ruined bicycle. There had been no e-mail from Willow.
“Technology,” she said. “Great when it works, and a real pain when it doesn’t.” I said nothing.
“This is a terrible tragedy,” Kenny said solemnly, pointing to the newspaper. “But we’ve got something to take your mind off it. Now that you’re here, we can turn all of our attention to our, um, project.”
“He means finding the you-know-what,” Willow said. She and Kenny exchanged glances.
“Exactly,” he said.
“You two had better order something to eat, to keep up your strength,” she said. “The fish and chips are excellent.” She was right about that. I enjoyed my meal very much despite their tiresome attempts to persuade me that they’d spent their every waking moment looking for me. Soon I was driving down the highway behind the motorcycle, this time traveling at a pace I could match. I had no idea what Willow wanted to show me, but what else did I have to do until the expertise that normally resided outwith Orkney did its thing?
Willow and Kenny were staying at a pleasant bed-and-breakfast place in Deerness. They had separate rooms, they assured me, as if I cared, but it seemed rather a technicality given they shared a bathroom in one of those arrangements where there is a door from each room into the bathroom. We gathered in Willow’s room.
“Ready?” she exclaimed, placing in front of me a rather odd object. It was a long piece of cloth, rather scroll-like in appearance with a primitive but unusual drawing on it. There was a central panel on which was depicted, from the top, an animal, probably a camel, then a castle, a zigzag design, a head with mouth and eyes open, an image that made me feel a bit queasy, and, at the bottom, a bowl-shaped object of some kind. Down the sides were twiglike figures, and along the bottom some wavy lines in an irregular pattern.
“I found it hidden in the suitcase that Trevor had packed for his getaway,” she said. “It was under the lining. I almost gave the bag and its contents all away to a charity, but there was this long thread that didn’t look right in the lining, and I opened it up and there it was. Trevor couldn’t sew to save his life.” I thought that was maybe an unfortunate choice of phrase, but I suppose if she could drink Skullsplitter beer without a qualm, she was well over Trevor. I’m sure the delectable Kenny was helping with this transition a lot.
“I wasn’t sure what I had, other than it looked like a map, but Trevor’s ticket, the around-the-world ticket that I believe I have mentioned I paid for, had a first stop in Orkney. I am just guessing, of course, but I’m willing to bet he found this in that writing thing that you are so keen on finding. You did tell me that you thought the desk came from either Glasgow or Orkney, did you not? So I figure there is no money, but there is a treasure somewhere, and Trevor was heading off to find it. Or maybe, I suppose, it’s possible he already did, but then where is it? I flew to Edinburgh, took the bus to Scrabster and then the ferry, hoping, assuming, I’d be able to find you here. Fortuitously, I met Kenny on the boat. He knows all about this kind of thing, don’t you, Kenny?”
“A little,” he said. “I’m studying Scottish history in Edinburgh. My thesis is on Viking Scotland with particular reference to Orkney. That’s why I could decipher the runes around the side here. Stop me if you know all this, Lara, but Orkney was an important part of the Viking world. It was settled by the Norwegians, Norse in other words, probably some time in the ninth century. The Vikings jarls or ”earls“ were very powerful men, some of whom extended their territories into northern Scotland, Caithness, and Sutherland, and even beyond. We know about this period from archaeology, but also from something called the Orkneyinga Saga which is the story of the earls of Orkney. It is probably part history, part myth, but useful just the same. I think we’re really on to something, that there is a real Viking treasure to be found. I don’t know if you’ve been to Maeshowe, Lara, but if so you’ll know there are many Viking runes there, which we can actually read. The alphabet is called futhark for its first six letters, th counting as one.”
“Isn’t the word futhark cute?” Willow said. “The things you learn.”
“Some of the runes found in Maeshowe refer to well-hidden treasure in the tomb,” Kenny said. Thanks to Percy, I already knew that. “Treasure for the Vikings, I have to tell you, almost invariably means gold and silver. But Viking treasure wasn’t found in Maeshowe. Maybe it’s somewhere else. I’m thinking that these swirls along the bottom are actually a map of the shoreline where the treasure was buried.”
I was suddenly very depressed. A treasure map, of all things, a map to buried Viking jewelry or something. I mean, how tiresome! Should I point out the obvious to them? I decided I would, even if it felt like too much of an effort. “What would a camel be doing in Orkney in Viking times?” I asked. “Or any other time for that matter?” If Orkney had a zoo I hadn’t seen it yet.