by Kara Silver
“Oh! I…hadn’t gotten that far in my plans.” Kennedy tried to slow her thump-thumping pulse. Taking a huge gulp of the caffeine-loaded drink wouldn’t help with that. The loud sucking noise the drinking produced was mortifying.
“So you’re just using me. Trying to weasel details out of me.” The constable didn’t look too distressed about it, and Kennedy laughed. “But the cases…they are baffling,” he continued.
“I think so.” She tried not to look too eager.
“Have you come across lots of similarities between them, in your research?”
“I…” His question seemed to pounce on her, and she sat back, fiddling with the thick plastic straw in her drink. “Yeah. A few, maybe.”
“Yeah. Did you notice—” He shifted, moving back as a small group of people passed in front of their bench and stood, exclaiming and giggling as they pointed over at something.
“Notice…”
“The tattoos.”
Said out loud, like that, by someone else, it dropped like a depth charge into the bustle of the weekday Oxford morning. Her hand shook, rattling the ice in her coffee. “Tattoos? Plural? Janey Harris had a tatt. I noticed it in a picture of her.”
“And Nia, the girl from t’other year.” Chris didn’t seem aware of the effect his words had on her, but Kennedy sat straight, as if pulled up by the roots of her hair. The printout this police officer had given her had one field deleted—there must have been more! Description, appearance, distinguishing features, whatever! “That’s one thing, but I got curious—well, I’m a copper—so I checked and Kelly McGuire and Alesha Bonnet, the next names I looked up, well…”
“Uh-huh?”
“They had tattoos too.” Chris looked down at his feet on the ground.
“Well, tatts, they’re very common. Trendy, I mean.” Kennedy felt as though she were speaking a language other than English, fighting for words, for sense.
“Well, true, and there are trends, fashions or whatever in stuff like that. Just…”
“What?” Kennedy leaned into him. “What, Chris?”
“They all seemed to have the same tattoo! Crazy, or what?” He gave a little laugh and a head shake.
Oh, holy— “Yeah. I mean. no. I…” She caught a glimpse of something grey and immobile beyond the people standing together in front of her. “Have you investigated the tattoo?”
“And how would we go about doing that?” Chris’s usual open smile was back, lighting up his face.
“Well, I… By looking into different tattoo places?”
“No. I’m sorry to say this isn’t exactly a top-priority case and… Kennedy? What… Where…” He rose, to follow her where she pushed her way through the gaggle of people in front of her bench to confront a tall grey statue on a plinth.
“You definitely weren’t here before!” Kennedy gestured from the ‘statue’ to the fountain near it. “I would have seen. Think you’re so clever, don’t you?” she shouted, her head turned up to the air, before craning up to the ‘statue’s’ face. “Well, I don’t. I think you’re making yourself look ridiculous and should stop this right now!”
She gave a shove to the figure and froze in horror when it stumbled from its wooden platform, her hands having pushed at warm, living flesh. Dressed in grey, its face painted to match and a box for coins at its feet, it was now livid.
“The fuck you playing at, you mad bitch?” shouted the human stature performance artist in a Liverpool accent. “You need locking up, you do!”
“Just as well I’m a policeman, then, isn’t it?” said Chris, his smile calming and pleasant, but the look in his eyes when he turned to Kennedy a little wary.
Oh, shit.
“And do you have any idea how mortified I was, when PC Collier came up behind me, his warrant card in hand?” Kennedy railed at Aeth later that evening. They were sitting against a back wall of the—closed, of course—Botanic Garden. Well, Aeth was now lying on his back, tears streaming down his face, his body racked by spasms of laughter, while Kennedy pounded her fists into his chest.
She opened her hands and struck the stone ground under her with her palm. “It’s not funny. Oh.” She’d left a handprint-shaped indentation in the surface. She expected it to dissolve, but it remained. She passed her other hand over it and the stone smoothed itself out, leaving no trace of the indent behind. “Right.”
“And left.” Aeth swung to sit, pointing at her hands. “One to make…one to unmake? Hmm.” With no word of warning, he clasped them, palms together, in between his. Kennedy wanted to wriggle against the feeling—or perhaps into it; she wasn’t sure—but didn’t struggle. Instead she let Aeth point her hands down with his bracketing them until their fingertips touched the obdurate stone—and pierced through it.
It was cold, of course, but not unduly so, and felt like earth, if anything. It was so very odd, seeing half her hands buried in cement, or concrete, or whatever it was. Aeth pulled his hands free and, alone, hers felt colder. He nodded, and she copied him, slipping her hands from the stone.
“I see. Not bad. Now let’s try releasing that metal sword that’s been trapped in a stone block in the castle dungeon for, oh, several millennia,” he said, rising to his knees.
“No!” Kennedy gasped, huge-eyed at what she’d just done, and what he said. “There’s really a sword in a stone? Where? Could… And you’re totally joking, aren’t you? Bit more herma humour, yeah?” She glared. “Well, laugh this one off, stone boy. I’m gonna hit all the tattoo parlours this city has, see if anyone can tell me anything about that mark.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“I didn’t suppose you would. But I’m going, with or without you.”
She raised a warning finger at him, trying not to reveal the thrill that shot through her when he replied, “This weekend, then. It’s a date.”
20
“Are you all right to walk a fair bit?” Kennedy asked Aeth. It was Saturday morning and she’d met him just outside the main gate.
It was something she’d been thinking about. He’d said all rock was connected, and that he moved through stone, if she understood correctly, which was highly doubtful. He’d also said he communicated through stone, and she knew that was damn well true. She’d forced him to promise not to mess around like that again. Who knew hermai caved in if prodded by a hard forefinger?
“Fine. Or we could take my car? Although parking is a bitch in this city.” He stopped when she did and put his hand under her chin to close her gaping mouth for her. “Oh, and why are you talking out of the side of your mouth at me, and covering your mouth with your hand?”
“Why? Because I already have a rep as a weirdo. And…I don’t know if other people can see or hear you,” she admitted, when he waited, eyebrow raised. She sort of expected him to laugh at her again, but he didn’t.
“That’s fair enough, I suppose.”
“Can they?”
He shrugged. “People see what they want to see. They always have, and I suppose they always will.”
“Huh.” Kennedy was silent for a few minutes. “So, this car you mentioned. I’m imagining something more like Fred Flintstone’s than, say, Knight Rider. If you know what those are. Fred—”
“I do watch TV. And see movies.”
“Oh.” And, of course she was bursting with questions. Just the way he liked it, so he could be all enigmatic and slanted-grey-eyed about it. Refusing to give him the satisfaction, Kennedy busied herself checking she had her drawings with her. Or not her doodles of Aeth, in human and statue form, all angled eyes and cheekbones and eyebrows and eyelashes. No, her rendition of the demon mark, copied from the tattoo she’d seen on Janey and, later, on Nia…and her own birthmark.
She didn’t like having evidence like that lying around and wished she could have them in electronic form, like her case notes. Well, she didn’t exactly have a graphic tablet, so… “The tattoo place is in Jericho, through the centre of the town and across, the bit
around the canal,” she informed Aeth, feeling silly a second after. “Sorry. You must know the city better than anyone else here.”
He didn’t reply. Oh. Maybe there were hermai older than him? Or senior to him? Perhaps he was a trainee, with a supervisor! And she…was his first case. Not that reassuring.
“You haven’t been out and about much, have you?” came after a few minutes. As usual Aeth didn’t make it a question. “Because you’re gawking like a tourist.” And even more as usual, he didn’t bother to hide the insult.
“Anyone would stare here!” Kennedy protested, indicating the pretty rows of terraced houses in sweet pastel colours. On the long main street, the number of different bars, cafes and restaurants amazed her. ‘“Independent. Not chains’. Oh, nothing.” She shook her head. “Just something someone said the other day. I think the tattoo place must be farther down.”
She couldn’t help feeling she was on holiday, almost, once the huge cream or beige-stone university buildings gave way completely to quirky stores and businesses, and with people of all ages, not just students on the streets. The imaginative names of the vintage fashion shops and second-hand bookshops made her smile.
“Kennedy.” Aeth swung in front of her as they reached their destination. “Please tell me you didn’t book yourself an appointment as a cover.”
“What? Pay someone to stick needles in me? No!” She shuddered.
“Good. Because the thought…”
“What?” The look on his face was difficult to interpret. Well, actually, when wasn’t it? But was that…concern?
“Of having to look at the latest in hipster street creds in the form of body art, like a pair of scissors that’s also a crane, or a paper aeroplane with its trail saying wanderlust, perhaps written as two words…” It was his turn to shudder.
“I might now, after that.” She gazed at the hand-painted board swinging like an old inn sign. Inkwell. A bit too arch, for her taste, but… “Come on. And let me do the talking, all right?”
She didn’t know if he’d come in, but he did, perhaps not trusting her. Onside, it was hard to tell who worked there and who was just lounging about drinking tea on the mismatched chairs, flicking through magazines or holding designs onto their bodies and peering into mirrors.
“Hello!” Kennedy grabbed a woman who glanced her way, some sort of gun in hand. “I called earlier, about a piece I’m working on? Resurgence in body art?” She refused to catch Aeth’s eye. And it wasn’t all untrue. That theme did touch on content for one of her essays, one of the several piling up, that she was also refusing to make eye contact with. “Just wondering what sort of designs people are asking for more and more?” She pulled out a notebook and looked around. Maybe the pattern books, or whatever they were called, were spread around on the distressed tables and stools or shoved into the coal scuttles or planters the place abounded in.
“Designs?” The woman looked a little withering. “I do words. Phrases and quotations.” She raised her sleeve to show what looked like old-fashioned typewriting on her inner forearm.
“I beg to differ,” Kennedy read. “Nice. “Oh, there’s more.” She read each one out loud, ignoring Aeth’s mutters that some exhortations reminded him of sportswear adverts.
“Pooh,” called across a bearded man, seating a smaller-bearded man at a pastel-hued spindly legged table in front of one of the jumble of house-clearance mirrors.
“Indeed,” Aeth agreed.
“Is popular,” the guy finished. “Come and look at Tarquin’s Pooh art.”
“I’m not sure I want… Oh. As in Winnie the Pooh, quotes from. That makes more sense.” Kennedy bent to read Tarquin’s exposed back. “The things that make me different are the things that make me. And what’s that one? How do you spell love? You don’t spell it…you feel it. So what’s today’s?” She glanced at the open book on the table, frowning at the circle and line floating above the words. “Nobody can be uncheered with a balloon. Yes, I see it now. You must really love the book.”
“Haven’t read it,” Tarquin mumbled, wincing as his body artist wiped antiseptic over his back, then straightening his face when several spectators flocked around.
“So, things like tribal markings or ethnographic designs wouldn’t…” Kennedy swivelled to find the woman. She was now sitting on a three-legged stool, working on someone who was drinking fruit-smelling tea.
“Oh, I believe that sort of thing was popular in the nineties? Like with grunge?” The woman added here after the words We’re all mad. “Did you decide on the Tenniel or the Rackham Alice for the illustration?” she asked her client. “The illustrator’s coming in later.”
“Well, thanks!” Kennedy couldn’t wait to get away from the gleeful buzzing and ferreting away of the needle gun thing and the whole performance art aspect of it. “Did you know?” she accused Aeth outside. “That the place wouldn’t help? That its’s so, well…”
“Twee? With tatts being the new ribbon bracelets?”
“Okay, so we try a different place. I only chose that as it came up first in a search.” Kennedy fiddled with her phone. “Fine. Place number two it is. This way.”
‘“If you don't know where you are going, any road can take you there,”’ Aeth muttered.
“And that’s enough Pooh from you for one day,” Kennedy warned him. Despite herself, she laughed. He had the driest sense of humour of anyone she’d ever met, and was witty with it, pointing out landmarks and sights as they walked.
“Bet you remember when this really was a fire station,” she commented a few minutes later as they approached the old brick building, now some sort of social space or arts centre, from what she could discern via peering at the gallery and studios inside.
“And before,” he replied, looking around. “Is this what they call cutting edge?”
“Bleeding edge,” Kennedy corrected. “Techtoo?” she enquired of someone who looked like he knew what he was doing. “Oh, Techtoo.” She got it when she saw the gleaming white and stainless-steel studio. The technicians in the start-up space seemed to gleam white too and looked askance when she couldn’t sign in on their software for her appointment, with not having one, then at her piece of paper with its hand-drawn sketches.
“I’ll have to render it for modelling.” One lab-coated tech guy held out a hand for it, starting a new file on his CAD program with the other.
“Oh, I don’t want it!” Kennedy said. “I’m a bit nervous about people coming near with me needles, you see.”
She was forced to listen to their spiel about computer-guided microperforations and human error being eliminated before she got the information she’d come for, that her design matched none of their files, meaning they hadn’t done it. And would hardly be likely to, the tech man sniffed—they didn’t get much demand for heavy metal. Or was it Goth?
“So, where does?” Kennedy almost shouted.
“There’s a place on Cowley Road. All retro or ironic or something,” she was informed.
“Taxi!” Kennedy called, outside, waving madly as one swept up George Street. Aeth hesitated, his feet planted firmly on the pavement, so she had to pull him in after her.
“Just deal with it for a few minutes,” she instructed him. She wasn’t sure where the road was, guessing it connected to the suburb of Cowley, and had no idea how far along it the tattoo place might be, but doubted it could be too long a journey.
The cab left the centre and headed into East Oxford, along a sprawling street, jarring and discordant with the sights and sounds of ethnic supermarkets and cafes with world music spilling out. “Multicultural. Meaning, a higher ratio of takeaway kebab places,” she muttered, feeling a pang of home. She loved food like that.
“Ink God We Trust?” she queried five minutes later, squinting through the cab’s window at the name painted above the shop front at the far from twee or cutting-edge parlour. The shop looked raw and edgy, spit and sawdust. Kennedy caught the hard beat of music from within and the hairs at the
base of her neck lifted.
Aeth was already out of the cab, clutching the open door, his head hanging down to his feet. Kennedy shrugged. If he had to crawl out of a taxi and throw up in the gutter, he’d be far from the first in a university town.
“One sec,” she said to the driver and fished around for cash.
“Here? Miss, you sure you wanna stop here?”
Kennedy caught the man’s eyes in the mirror before he looked away.
“Why…not?” she settled for.
“It’s…not the best part of town.”
Like a cartoon stick of dynamite, she felt her fuse lighting and burning. “Why don’t you say what you really mean? Why doesn’t anyone say what they really mean in this effing place?”
“Lady, I…just meant this place…doesn’t attract the best types. You know whadd I’m sayin’?”
“Not really.” Kennedy flinched as the loud jangle of a bell split the late-morning air. “But I think I’m about to find out.”
The bell clanged again and the frame shook as the shop door thudded closed behind the man exiting and stopping dead in the street.
“What the fuck?” The very much non-greeting was uttered in a voice as deep as Aeth’s, and a lot more menacing.
Her birthmark flared, burning and itching, making her want to claw the skin from her body. Obeying some instinct she hadn’t known she possessed, Kennedy took the coward’s route and squashed herself down to the taxi’s floor, ducking her head below the edge of the window, knowing she had to do anything to avoid being seen. She didn’t know who this was, but his power beat at her.
21
Whoever—or whatever, Kennedy amended—he was, he was tall. Very tall. Slim in denim jeans and jacket, he had black hair to his shoulders, and when he ripped off dark glasses to stare at Aeth through night-dark eyes, a piercing glinted in his eyebrow. He didn’t move, but his stillness held coiled-spring power. Kennedy didn’t think he knew Aeth, but he gave him a slow once-over, seeming to recognise him, or something in him.