Read Online Blood Never Dies by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles - Free Book Online

BLANKET’S, CURTAIN’S ! it announced possessively), a pet shop, a baker’s of the sort that specializes in white loaves and the sort of cakes that look home-made without being in any way tempting, and next door to that, Blues ’n’ Tattoos.
    The man in the tattoo parlour looked just the way you’d expect someone called Honest John to look, if you lived in an ideal world that had never known the cold breath of irony. He was tallish, solid, middle-aged, with a pleasantly unremarkable face, kind eyes and thick, healthy hair beginning to go grey. The main room of his shop was plain but clean, with lino on the floor, chairs around the wall, and a rack of magazines. It could have been a dentist’s waiting room except that the posters featured not the horrors of tooth neglect but the several thousand designs you could choose to have permanently pounded into your pink and cringing flesh.
    There was a desk at the end opposite the door, and a doorway behind and to its right, leading, Atherton supposed, to the torture chamber beyond. It was curtained with those multicoloured plastic strips. Wouldn’t a decent, solid, soundproofed door have been better, he wondered, to deaden the cries of the afflicted?
    The man behind the desk stood up when Atherton came in and surveyed him with a friendly and professional eye. ‘Hello! What can I do for you?’
    ‘Are you Honest John?’ Atherton asked.
    ‘That’s what they call me. You’ve come at a good time – very quiet today. Don’t look so worried! I’ve been doing this twenty-five years and I haven’t lost a customer yet.’
    ‘Oh, I haven’t come for a tattoo,’ Atherton said, unable to disguise a shudder – largely because he wasn’t trying.
    Honest John gave the sort of reassuring smile that could have brought dead puppies to life. ‘What’s up? Afraid of needles?’
    ‘You use
needles
? I thought they were kissed on by soft-eyed Tahitian maidens.’
    ‘You’re a card, you are,’ said Honest John. ‘What
can
I do for you, then?’
    Atherton produced his brief and introduced himself. Honest John’s smile faded slightly, but he gave the impression of a man with no shadows on his conscience. ‘I hope nobody’s complained,’ he said. ‘I’m very careful about hygiene and I don’t do minors, faces, or anything obscene.’
    ‘It’s nothing like that,’ Atherton said. ‘Someone suggested you might be able to identify this tattoo – that it might be your work, or if not, that you might know whose it was.’
    Honest John took the photograph of the tiger and looked at it for a long time without speaking, his face unreadable.
    ‘Do you recognize it?’ Atherton prompted.
    ‘It’s one of my designs, all right,’ he answered neutrally.
    ‘And this one?’ He passed over the dragon. ‘We have reason to believe they were done fairly recently.’
    ‘Both done on the same person?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Well, they’re definitely mine.’ He looked at Atherton with an anxious probing stare, trying to fillet out the nature of the trouble heading his way.
    ‘Do you remember doing them?’
    ‘Funny enough, I do, though it was a while ago. Coupla months, at least. Let me think. Was it – just after Easter, maybe? No, just before Easter, because we were quiet. Get a lot of kids in during the school holidays.’
    Three months ago, then, Atherton thought. ‘Tell me about it,’ he said, pulling up one of the waiting-room chairs to the desk and sitting down expectantly. Honest John sat resignedly on the other side and placed his hands on the desk top, the gesture of a man prepared to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Atherton had seen the same gesture many times in the interview room back at the station, but on this occasion he suspected it was genuine.
    ‘It was quiet, like today,’ said Honest John, whose real name, he told Atherton, was John Johnson. ‘Beginning part of the week’s always quiet. I’ve thought about closing Monday and